Nostalgia Lane

[smokeshadow]

^^when was that billboard from, the 1940's? 

[cdadbr]

12 hours ago, RHawk said:

The beach is probably now at their front doors!

[RHawk]

On 3/14/2024 at 10:27 PM, vallam2222 said:

I had a pair of these, before they were banned in the 1970s for safety reasons.

Clackers gave me a lot of bruises on my arms.

[vallam2222]

53 minutes ago, RHawk said:

Clackers gave me a lot of bruises on my arms.

I would try to start the motion and then move my arms up and down, extended away from my body, but a few times I ended up getting hit in the face.

[vallam2222]

1 hour ago, RHawk said:

Clackers gave me a lot of bruises on my arms.

I think there were already some rumblings about the "toy" but I seem to remember that on some talk show (Mike Douglas?) there was a segment with a chimpanzee using the clackers. He was really good. I think that my parents thought that if the chimp could safely play with it, then it was okay for me.

[vallam2222]

My absolute favorite toy/game of all time growing up was a portable air hockey table. The legs were a bit wobbly so my older sister and I ended up playing it on the floor. It was so much fun and it felt very futuristic.

I had seen Michael Crichton's Westworld 1973 and later Futureworld 1976 (the 3D chess scene was so cool!) and it gave me those kind of vibes.

BTW, when my much older sister took me and my older sister to see Westworld she freaked out when Richard Benjamin's character was having sex with a robot prostitute and she frantically covered my eyes. It was rated PG, for pity's sake!

Obviously if she had done nothing everything would have been fine. As it was, all it ended up doing was make me very curious about it and made me think sex was naughty and shameful growing up. Sigh.

BTW, it was my mother that took me to see Futureworld and she was totally cool with the movie, no weirdness at all!

[Ludwick]

3 hours ago, vallam2222 said:

My absolute favorite toy/game of all time growing up was a portable air hockey table. The legs were a bit wobbly so my older sister and I ended up playing it on the floor. It was so much fun and it felt very futuristic.

I had seen Michael Crichton's Westworld 1973 and later Futureworld 1976 (the 3D chess scene was so cool!) and it gave me those kind of vibes.

BTW, when my much older sister took me and my older sister to see Westworld she freaked out when Richard Benjamin's character was having sex with a robot prostitute and she frantically covered my eyes. It was rated PG, for pity's sake!

Obviously if she had done nothing everything would have been fine. As it was, all it ended up doing was make me very curious about it and made me think sex was naughty and shameful growing up. Sigh.

BTW, it was my mother that took me to see Futureworld and she was totally cool with the movie, no weirdness at all!

My grandmother had an old, battered metal hockey set with slots that we played with, something like this, though I couldn't find an exact match: (I've cropped this image and painted out the distracting background.)

[vallam2222]

18 minutes ago, Ludwick said:

My grandmother had an old, battered metal hockey set with slots that we played with, something like this, though I couldn't find an exact match: (I've cropped this image and painted out the distracting background.)

That is so cool.

My dad used to take us to an arcade gallery and we'd play on a full-sized air hockey table.

I never saw anything like your grandmother's metal set, though.

[Ludwick]

13 minutes ago, vallam2222 said:

That is so cool.

My dad used to take us to an arcade gallery and we'd play on a full-sized air hockey table.

I never saw anything like your grandmother's metal set, though.

The set my grandmother had looks like others made in the mid-1950s, which helps explain why it was so beat up by the time I was old enough to play with it in the late 60s/early 70s - I was the youngest child, and my older brothers were 5 & 12 years older than me.

[Ludwick]

36 minutes ago, vallam2222 said:

That is so cool.

My dad used to take us to an arcade gallery and we'd play on a full-sized air hockey table.

I never saw anything like your grandmother's metal set, though.

Re: arcades, they didn't exist in the rural place where I grew up. When we were old enough to drive, my friends and I would head to a nearby larger town's bowling alley, where they had a couple of pin ball machines. Our favorite was one called "Dragon's Den", if memory serves (definitely not the Gottlieb "Dragon" machine, and not the "Dungeons and Dragons" machine, either. I think it was a Bally machine, possibly with art by Boris Vallejo. it was really classy looking. I was hoping to find a pic of it, but no luck.)  Eventually they also installed a few early video games - Asteroids and Space Invaders.

[vallam2222]

My mom was a paradox...Watching daytime talk shows like Phil Donahue with frank subject matter (sexual liberation, vibrators, etc) in broad daylight while us kids played and listened at the same time.

Yet when nightfall hit, sometimes she'd sneak away to her bedroom (door open) with her tiny b&w portable tv & earphone (one, for one ear only) and watch things that made her laugh so hard she'd turn beet red and make tears run down her face like nobody's business.

She had no problem with me playing on the carpeted floor. I was young but I was able to read! Where we lived in the Southwest Norman Lear's (at the time groundbreaking and controversial) Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (so nice they named it twice) aired after our local news broadcast (10:30pm).

So I wasn't able to watch shows like that or the nighttime comedy Soap until a few years later as a teenager in syndication when I had my own tv. In retrospect I see how they freaked some puritanical people out, but they were obviously tame, even by 1980s standards when I saw them for the first time.

 

I thought I saw all the Barbara Walter interviews when they aired originally in the 1970s. How did this one sneak by me? Mother...?!

 

 

 

[Brucex]

Pre-internet Tik-tok

[rwc]

I decided this was a better place than What Made You Laugh Today.

[Brucex]

Scooters before they became a hipster fashion accessory

[Brucex]

[Kawika]

I have always been fairly averse to any Jell-O product... but Jell-O 123 was introduced when I was a student at UCLA... loved it... the middle level was my favorite...discontinued  sadly...

[cdadbr]

2 minutes ago, Kawika said:

I have always been fairly averse to any Jell-O product... but Jell-O 123 was introduced when I was a student at UCLA... loved it... the middle level was my favorite...discontinued  sadly...

Any Jello product was neat in the middle 1960s (for me).  When I tried to consume it normally, it was difficult, so I ended up just quietly slurping it down.  No problems, that way.  It could make some colorful products!

[Ludwick]

18 hours ago, Brucex said:

Scooters before they became a hipster fashion accessory

Have never used one. They look like death on two wheels to me.

[Ludwick]

7 hours ago, Kawika said:

I have always been fairly averse to any Jell-O product... but Jell-O 123 was introduced when I was a student at UCLA... loved it... the middle level was my favorite...discontinued  sadly...

Jell-O 123 was one of my mother's go to desserts when she didn't feel like baking. Fond memories.

[ElfredNox]

19 hours ago, Brucex said:

Scooters before they became a hipster fashion accessory

 

40 minutes ago, Ludwick said:

Have never used one. They look like death on two wheels to me.

i had scooters (multiple) because i couldn't ride a bike as a kid. one day when i was riding around with some other kids i hit an uneven part of the side walk and fell straight onto my face, wasn't wearing a helmet (don't know if it would've helped though). knocked both of my front teeth right out. adult teeth too, some of the only ones i had at the time. still have a gap today, fixing it is considered cosmetic so insurance won't ever cover it and it's thousands to have it fixed.

i still rode scooters after that. even learned how to ride a bike. fell multiple times but never hurt myself that bad again.

[Ludwick]

1 minute ago, ElfredNox said:

 

i had scooters (multiple) because i couldn't ride a bike as a kid. one day when i was riding around with some other kids i hit an uneven part of the side walk and fell straight onto my face, wasn't wearing a helmet (don't know if it would've helped though). knocked both of my front teeth right out. adult teeth too, some of the only ones i had at the time. still have a gap today, fixing it is considered cosmetic so insurance won't ever cover it and it's thousands to have it fixed.

i still rode scooters after that. even learned how to ride a bike. fell multiple times but never hurt myself that bad again.

Ouch! I'm from "gravel road country". Riding a bike for me was a treat reserved to visiting an uncle who lived in a small town (paved streets), or family friends who had a farm with hard-packed dirt paths. That said, I don't recall any "townies" with scooters, either. May just have not been in the right time and place for them.

[Brucex]

3 hours ago, Ludwick said:

Have never used one. They look like death on two wheels to me.

When you are four you know no fear😃

[Brucex]

Before USB memory sticks there were-

[Steve]

Boeing 747 - Economy seats in 1970

[cdadbr]

39 minutes ago, Steve said:

Boeing 747 - Economy seats in 1970

It's a shame that airline passengers don't dress like that any more!  Now it's flip-flops, shorts, and other "low-rent" apparel, generally.  Plus fast food sacks!