Are You Old Enough To Remember?

Question

Comments

For Skip....Link for Mr P.K.Wrigley.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_K._Wrigley

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I remember those radio shows, too.  And that reminded me that I even remember when there was NO TV.

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Thanks Kristina

Some of those radio shows were a real hoot and the sound affects...

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Going to the local movie theatre and having someone dressed up (usually as a cowboy) come out and throw lollies (hard candy) to the audience during intermission.

Going to the local movie theatre and the entire audience standing as the National Anthem was payed while Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II seated on her horse with a flag waving behind her was shown on the screen before the start of the movie.

Being seated in the stalls on the ground floor of the local movie theatre and having older kids (the ones with some money, usually) sitting above we peasants and throwing fantales or jaffas down on out heads.

Being seated in the more forward of the ground floor seats at the local movie theatre and having people behind us either throwing jaffas and fantales over our heads, or rolling jaffas down the aisle just for the noise it made.

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And being made to learn God Save The Queen on the fife at school for Parade in the morning. 

I still hate Jaffas...too many struck the back of my head.

Love the memories though.

Cheers Melanie

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Charming and entertaining, Melanie.  For those of us just seeing the end of this thread (or this part of it), would you remind us when and where that all took place?  Thanks.

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I'm an Australian, so .. Australia.

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I've thought we were about the same age.  I'm 68.  Born in Ohio and grew up in California.  I remember nearly everything on the list.  There were televisions when I was young, but we did not get one right away.  I remember listening to Gunsmoke on the radio on Saturday nights, and maybe Jack Benny.  Our first television was a small screen in a large cabinet, and only black and white.  My grandparents got a color television long before we did.

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My first colour tv was in 1975 .. and a HUGE beast it was, too.  But a really good one.  It was still working in 1998.

I remember Lassie on the telly (and Rin Tin Tin!) .. but programming didn't start until about 4:30 in the afternoon (children's hour, locally produced .. news was local with an affiliate feed from the capital city) .. and closed down to the test pattern about 10 or 10:30 pm.  Right before the test pattern, it was Queen Elizabeth with the anthem (which just happened to be God Save the Queen back then, not Advance Australia Fair (which isn't a true anthem)).

We were luckier than some for telly .. we got one commercial station and the government ABC.  Later it was three commercial stations plus the ABC. 

I only know about those Coca-Cola-shaped wax bottles because I've had them given to me, plus I'm pretty sure Cracker Barrel sells them.

The soft-drink dispenser for the glass bottles . . . the one I remember was water based, with metal bars (like a "cattle grid" of the kind they use in some banks and other places to herd people the one way).  You'd slide your choice to the end, ready for the coin drop, then pull it out.  They were always cold.  Kind of like the ones here, but I can't see any bars on these.

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I remember all of them except 8 and 10. Those were the days. I was very small and my parents bought me a rocking chair with S&H green stamps. I rocked on it. I played in the army and in the navy with it. I blasted off on a rocket ship to a far away planet and I was the alien haha. Thanks for bringing back memories with this list.

Answer 1

Yes, old enough. Don't care for Black Jack, love Teaberry, Beemans, and Clove.

Comments

Same for me, Deb.

And I buy Mexican Cokes because they are made with cane sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup.

Answer 2

About 1/2, the others were phased out by the time I was a young lad.

Answer 3

"In the morning"?  In my day, the test card was on all day.  TV started at 5.10 pm.

Comments

They played the National Anthem before the tv channels went off the air. We received 4 channels but we could only see three of them. I had a television in my bedroom with an indoor antenna that I always had to move around to get the channels. We recently dropped Satellite and 200 channels for 10 over the air channels.

Answer 4

Yes, I remember just about everything on the list. Especially if you lived in a small town.

Answer 5

Yes I remember a lot of those.

Answer 6

Yes, Yes, Yes.   Though I never used Butch Wax.

Answer 7

Definitely remember them all and used most. Home milk delivery was very helpful when my kids were small.

Answer 8

As most of the items are exclusively American, I can't say. But we watched newsreels on the cinema (and tobacco ads on the childrens' matinee), and the test picture on TV was on most of the day. Here in Norway we had only one TV channel, but if you had a big enough antenna on the roof, you could (barely) watch Swedish TV. And of course we played 45 RPM singles on our Philips portable stereos.

Answer 9

I'm 43 and remember 8 of them. I have relatives that used to live in Philomath, Oregon that had milk delivered in glass bottles. In the 90s

Answer 10

Speaking of dirt. Can anyone remember the good old days of the Night Soil Men?...Not sure what else they are called in other countries.

Comments

Gave me nightmares did they.

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We used to leave them a hot stubby and a chrissy card at the little back door of the old outback dunny in the 1970's in Moreton Bay, Qld. Not far from the City of Brisbane.

The night soil men were usually drunk by the time they got to us and Dad would have to check our yard for spillage the next day. Oh! MY! The grand ol' days.

Sorry they scared you Melanie...that is not funny

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Hi Shaon,

My grandfather really didn't care for one brother-in-law because he worked at that job. Here in Ohio they were known as "honey dippers."

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Thanks Skip

Honey Dippers sounds a little nicer than the "dunny can man" as we called them as children.

I hope you are having a great Weekend in Ohio

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@ Sharon .. well, it's kind of amusing these days, but to a small girl it was terrifying having the "need to go" and knowing it was close to the time of day the men came to change the pans out.  All my mind did was show me images of those men seeing me from underneath. 

As I said .. nightmares!  (I learnt to hang on for hours and hours!)

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I understand exactly Melanie.

 Night time visits were the stuff of flippin' nightmares. I always managed to bump into snakes in summer and froze to death on the can in winter.

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Oh! Oh! Oh! Melanie I just remembered this incident at Beautiful Josephine Falls of Far North Queensland, Australia. 

Wont help you sleep better I am afraid.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2005-12-14/toilet-films-land-pensioner-in-jail/761562

Answer 11

Well, I guess I'm "almost" older than dirt. I remember all of them except party lines and newsreels. The wax coke bottles were quite a novelty along with wax lips and wax mustaches.

Thanks for the trip in the "way back" machine!

Answer 12

The first 4 of those were still around into the 1980s. Glass wasn't replaced with plastic for soft drink bottles until around 1989; that was around the same time that Pepsi went from 16 ounces to 20 ounces, and advertised the change as "25% more free!" (which was probably just making up the weight savings from not using glass bottles with an extra 4 ounces of beverage).

Answer 13

When we got our first TV set (1953?) in the U.S., TV stations would sign off the air completely overnight.  They'd fire up the transmitter an hour or so before programs were to begin (4 p.m. ish) and run a test pattern until they started programming.

Around the same time, the great majority of U.S. AM broadcast radio stations would sign off the air on Monday mornings, generally between midnight and 1 a.m. and return to the air at 5 or 6 a.m.

Yes, I definitely qualify as "older than dirt".

Answer 14

Yes. The milk had foil toppers and you could buy homogenized or pasteurized and pour cream off the top for coffee.

I liked Teaberry and also clove.

What about potato chips delivery in a can?

Bit-oh-honey candy bars and fireballs. Fudgies that were ice cream not ice milk.

Listening to AM radio from long distance at night.

Comments

I remember visiting family in Colorado as a teen. We could only get AM radio (there was no FM) at night. My sister and two of my cousins would sit in the living room in the dark listening to Wolfman Jack.

Answer 15

I remember 2,3,4,5,6,7,11,14,15,16,17.

Comments

Pretty similar here, but a few less: 2-5,7,17.  

Being back in the boonies, we had a party line longer than most.  My grandparents didn't have a phone until '61, after my older brother was born.  They got electricity in the township in December 1949.

We had neighbors that didn't have indoor plumbing into the late 80's.

Answer 16

By the way, that pack of Blackjack gum cost a nickel.  So did any kind of candy bar.  You could get a square of pink bubble gum, Double Bubble or Bazooka, for a penny.  And dimes and quarters were made out of silver.

Comments

I remember those prices!

Answer 17

I remember all except milk delivery. We never got that as I recall. You know the back forty? We lived behind that. I remember cigarette gum. It was gum shaped like a cigarette you could pretend to smoke. We loved that stuff. And the party lines were a pain when we finally got one.

Answer 18

I remember all but the newsreels. That might be because we seldom went to movies except occasionally to the drive-in.

Answer 19

Not sure I know what everything is, but we had TV test patterns in Sweden, too.

Not sure we ever had home delivery of milk - but I remember being sent together with my cousin to the milk store with an aluminium milk pot with a handle. This was in the small town where my grandparents lived and we stayed in the summers.

45 RPM records?? We mostly had 78 RPM records :-)

And I remember fishmonger's and butcher's stores with water running down the windows in summer.

Comments

One of my earliest memories - must have been about '56 or '57 - was going to the dairy with one of my elder sisters to buy milk in a tin pot. We got milk in glass bottles with foil caps soon afterwards. There was no milk delivery, but we got all those wonderful small shops within a couple of hundred metres from home: Dairy, fishmonger, butcher, colonial, vegetables market, clothes shops, shoes shops, and everything you'd need. My daddy worked at the fire station, just about five minutes' walk away, and used to come home for lunch.

We had no car, and didn't need one, but in the early Sixties dad bought both a tiny cabin 15 kilometres away and an old Moskwich to bring us there.

In the Seventies the shopping centers came, and one after the other of the small special shops closed up. People got used to need a car for everything.

I remember my mother's aunt, who was the closest thing I ever had to a grandmother, said that she believed all the cars would end up in the junk yard one day, and people would start to use their legs again. It doesn't seem that far-fetched anymore.

Answer 20

Every one!

Comments

Like you I remember all of those.

I'm surprised that a "church key" wasn't mentioned. This was what my dad always called the can opener. One end punched holes into cans; the other end removed the caps from bottles. While these are still made and sold today, they aren't the necessary household item they once were.

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I remember the one you mention ..

 

but I also remember the one that I used an awful lot of the time ..