Observation of a kid the early 1950’s

[Uffdaphil]

Keeping alive some memories of a different era. A time when people my current age were telling tales of WW1 and even pre-automobile life.


Smaller towns had ditches instead of storm sewers. 95% of our candy money came from collecting bottles tossed in ditches for the 3 cents deposit. Littering was only mildly frowned on.

Crank telephones with separate ear ear and speaker horns were still in use in rural areas. The operator in my grandparent’s tiny town moonlighted writing the local gossip column. Always a thrill to read about our visits - who we saw, where we ate etc. We city slickers had rotary dials that were rented from AT&T. No one owned a phone. “Party lines” were common - if you picked up the handset and heard someone talking, you had to wait for them to finish to make your call. Long distance was expensive and cause for panic if the callee did not rush to take the call. You could not direct dial, but dialed 0 for the operator and told her (never heard of a male) the number.

Only the rich had air conditioned cars. Our first was a 1966 Dodge with an aftermarket unit hanging under the dash. Also our first with power windows. You could not pump your own gas. Every time you filled up the attendant would offer to check the oil, water and clean your windshield. The first self-serve gas station I ever saw was out west about 1971.

The same song might be recorded by many different singers. The biggest music show on television pre-Elvis was “Your Hit Parade” where the same cast would sing the latest new hits. Much of kids programming was westerns and film shorts from the silent era through WW2.

Many rural areas still had no running water. For a city kid the hand pump was fun. Using the outhouse at 30 below was not. Clothes were washed in a hand filled electric washer with rollers to squeegee out water. Farm wood stoves were common and heat was from a mammoth oil fired space heater in the living room. The only heat for upstairs was an open grate in the floor. In winter we huddled 3-4 in a bed with parkas, long johns and 3-4 quilts.

Only cities had in-town school buses. At age five I walked alone a mile to kindergarten over railroad tracks and through downtown. Almost no parents drove their kids. Most women were marooned at home while hubby took the car to work.

That’s all for now. Other oldsters fell free to add memories of differences from today.

[schambers]

I remember the dark time before the internet, when I had to open an encyclopedia if I wanted to learn about stuff.

Recording mix tapes by holding a casset player up to the radio.

[KW900A]

Well, I’m only 35 but...

I grew up in a farmhouse in nowhere Virginia in a town of 16. the original part of the house was built in 1852. We had a massive freestanding wood stove in the living room, which was used to heat the entire house. We had electric baseboard, but anyone who knows about pre 1900s houses and single pane windows that rattled after the glass ‘settled’ using the baseboard heat was throwing money away. My bedroom was over the living room with the grate in the floor. I usually slept with a window cracked in the wintertime because my room was always roasting.

We eventually put in new windows, and insulated the house and brought the water supply to the 20th century, but that didn’t come til I was in high school.

The party line phones were still in use there after I was born, though I really don’t remember them.

We had 3 spring houses at the bottom of the hill and our water was pushed uphill via a ram pump. Google it. I remember many times thawing the pumps out in wintertime and eventually wrapping the pumps in heat tape to keep water flowing.

My ‘yard’ was 275 acres. If the weather was nice, I wasn’t allowed inside. I remember when my parents got cable. It was 11 channels. It was then that I fell in love with scooby doo on Saturday mornings. We had a 60x90 garden and grew nearly everything, we raised beef cattle so a good meal was something I always had. To this day, one of my favorite memories as a child was just the waking up to the sound of the tiller in the garden or a tractor in one of the fields. Once I got bigger I was the one waking up and firing up the tiller, or tractor or mower. But it’s the little things. I wouldn’t trade my childhood for anything.

[Big_Tom]

I'm 31 but my dad was born in the early 50s. The stories he tells are pretty cool. I grew up in the exact same house he did. With him being a carpenter it gets updated every year or so. The house was originally an old rock chicken coop. Which is the kitchen and one little bedroom. I want to say it's about 30x15. And the rest of the house is built around that. One joke we would always tell friends staying the night was. watch out for the headless ghost chickens running around.

I need to see if I can find some old pics of the house.

Sent from my Alcatel_5044R using Tapatalk

[EO3]

Back in my day... we had dial-up internet, stashes of floppy disks, and tube monitors and TVs. That's about as far back as I can remember