Things our kids can't imagine...

[indimom]

My kids (19 and 17) have been amazed by:
Manual alarm clock (not digital, clock with a face that had a crank on the back to ring the literal bells at the appropriate time)

That DH and I traveled without cell phones, GPS or credit cards. Just a Rand McNally and cash/money orders. You'd have thought we were crossing the wild west... lol

That road numbers are more than just a name of a road. (that 'odd' highways go north/south and 'even' go east/west... that highways with 3 digits are by-passes... there is information hidden in those numbers...)

No seatbelts. Even for small children and infants.

 

[RedAngie]

That's so funny. I was just telling my daughter about this yesterday. Also, I don't know how widespread it was but here, you used to be able to tell where in the city someone lived by what their phone number started with... all the 237s were one area and the 452's in another.

That may still be the case with landline phones.

Is that a Canadian thing? I've never heard of phone numbers with letters?

It was before my time, but I'm pretty sure the US had them (maybe back in the 40's or 50s?).

Not sure about Canada, but it was definitely a U.S. thing to have letters at the beginning of a phone number. I'm pretty sure it started even before the 40s & 50s, and lasted well into the 70s in some areas. It may have mostly prevalent in the northeast rather than other areas of the country.

That WO4-997x in the photo stood for the exchange WOodlawn4 and translated into 964. Most people in the same neighborhood had the same exchange.

There are plenty of instances in old movies and TV show where characters state such a number. Lucy Ricardo's number in I Love Lucy was MU5-9975. The exchange name was MUrray Hill and had the numerical equivalent of 685. When Alice Kramden got a phone briefly in the Honeymooners, the number was BE 0-7741. Exchange name BEnsonhurst. People either said the two letters or the whole exchange name when reciting their phone number.


While we're at it, I vaguely remember addressed mail before zip codes were commonly used. In larger cities, you'd write, for example, Philadelphia 16, Pennsylvania. That evolved into Philadelphia, PA 19116.

 

[PollyannaMom]

We took DD8 to our local library the other day. Unfortunately the librarian told us we would not be able to borrow a book because their computer system was down. I found that kind of ironic.

I love our librarians!! When this happens (twice that I can remember) they pull out a notebook, write down the bar code from your card and all your books, and key it all in manually when the system comes back up!

Singing the wrong lyrics to a song for years. Now kids can google the lyrics.

OMG - I do Google lyrics all the time!

That road numbers are more than just a name of a road. (that 'odd' highways go north/south and 'even' go east/west... that highways with 3 digits are by-passes... there is information hidden in those numbers...)

Love it!! - I read a book once on the Eisenhower Interstate system, and was just as fascinated as you!

 

[DawnM]

Off topic. But sort of related the post I quoted. My dad told me a story about when he was younger and wanted to impress his father (my grandfather). He dropped a letter to him in one of the big blue post office mailboxes in town and intentionally did not put a stamp on it. Only he wrote my grandfathers address where the return address should go and the letter found its way to my grandfathers mailbox without ever using a stamp. I wonder if this still works?

My friend used to do this in college when she didn't have stamps.

 

[brooke789]

No seatbelts. Even for small children and infants.

My kids were just amazed by this yesterday. They were asking if I rode in a seat like theirs when I was a kid. I said "You're not going to believe this, but when I was a kid car seats didn't exist" I told them about my mom bringing me home from the hospital in a 'car bed' which was basically the lid to a box. haha I really don't know how parents drove with kids going crazy in the back seat back then!


ETA: I was born in '82. Car seats did in fact exist, but I guess weren't required by law. My Mom says "poor people didn't have car seats." I'm not sure if this is entirely accurate though because she also said "poor people didn't use sunscreen" when I told her that my (now) husband said they always had sunscreen when he was a kid and I thought it hadn't been invented!

 

[Kitty 34]

these might have been mentioned already:

Toys at the bottom of the box of cereal
transistor radios
Brownie cameras
walking a mile uphill (both ways ) to school in grade school

 

[tvguy]

Tell that to one of our nurses. She REFUSES to give out her cell phone number and still uses a pager. She will send an email "I'm off today. Page if needed." I forget how to even send a page!

LOL. Many doctors nurses, paramedics, firefighters here all still carry pagers. Cell phones are pretty much useless inside a hospital unless you are next to a window. Pagers operate on a different radio frequency (usually around 42 mhz) that can get through. Sac Metro fire uses computers, radios and pagers to dispatch every major call incident to this day. I have a fire pager sitting next to me so that we can be alerted to major incident.s

 

[tvguy]

Our company bought 3 "around town cars", Hyundai Accents, all with manual rollup windows. Several people....some in their mid-30's....say they had never seen roll up windows before.

 

[Magpie]

Cursive writing, no one writes anymore they either print or of course type. My kids have a hard time reading cursive writing and they are 16 and 19.

Actually respecting teaching in class and not having a phone to fill in there spare time at school . You either took a book out or just sat there and never complained to about it either. Wouldn't want to be a teacher these days. The things my kids tell me I usually say they let you do that...like eating in class...we never ever wanted to be caught chewing gum or anything in class.

This is funny! They teach cursive writing in Grade 3 around here, and I'm currently tutoring three different kids in the topic.

I think kids write a lot more than adults do, these days. Of course, as soon as they get to high school and are allowed to use tablets, they'll probably give up writing, just like their elders did.

(Haven't noticed a respect issue, but that probably varies a lot from district to district, and school to school.)

 

[tvguy]

Inspired by a meme on Pinterest, a "just for fun" thread where we post things that were perfectly normal when we were kids, but that seem completely absurd to our kids:

1) the anticipation of answering a telephone without already knowing who it is

Laughing......I do have caller ID on my cell phone, but not my landline, but most folks who call me have their outgoing ID blocked, so I never know who is calling anyway.

 

[mi*vida*loca]

LOL. Many doctors nurses, paramedics, firefighters here all still carry pagers. Cell phones are pretty much useless inside a hospital unless you are next to a window. Pagers operate on a different radio frequency (usually around 42 mhz) that can get through. Sac Metro fire uses computers, radios and pagers to dispatch every major call incident to this day. I have a fire pager sitting next to me so that we can be alerted to major incident.s

Cell phones work everywhere in our hospital except the basement. Kicker is she's an outpatient nurse so she's rarely in the hospital and never in the basement. lol. Our surgeons only carry iPhones that are reimbursed by the hospital.

 

[Magpie]

I teach 6th, 7th and 8th Language Arts. We are doing research papers right now. They are still hard - all that MLA citation stuff is overwhelming to them. They also struggle a bit with the research because I do make them visit a library. They have to use one real book and one periodical (magazine, newspaper or scholarly journal) that was originally circulated in print (it can be archived on the web now though) and a website. They are all over the website, but struggle with the book and periodical.


We also teach cursive at my school in grades 1-5. When they do research (especially in high school and college), primary source documents are often written in cursive. Hard to read these documents if you don't know cursive.

ETA: I teach at a classical school, so our curriculum is a little different than most public schools.

Honestly, it sounds similar to what my two experienced in public school, in Ontario, Canada.

The main difference I saw between my education and theirs, was that in addition to being able to write a properly-cited paper, they also had to learn to do research online (meaning, they had to be able to assess a source and decide if it was legit), and they had to be able to do Powerpoint presentations.

 

[NHdisneylover]

My kids find it most difficult to imagine booking overseas travel without the help of the internet. Heck, I did it, and i can't beleive we did lol

 

[Lilacs4Me]

So true.
I have decided I will take a stamp from my desk drawer and throw it in the garbage. There......my father's debt has now been settled.

haha. I never use stamps but maybe once a year, and usually will buy two so that I won't have to "come back again" for the next time. Then I end up losing it in my purse and probably throwing it away eventually. So, I, too, will help settle your father's debt!

 

[Liberty Belle]

I think this is really the biggest one. The amount of information instantly available to us at any time, no matter where we are, is really astounding.
I was born in '71, so I grew up before the internet, and it's even hard for me to imagine how we used to have to do things. In addition to just getting answers to questions, think about how people did things we take for granted as being quick and easy now, like booking plane tickets or hotel reservations.

I remember we used the phone a lot. If it was a question like "what was the bad guy's name on Guiding Light," you'd call a friend or family member. If you needed to know a zip code or the capital of South Dakota, you'd call the local library and ask a librarian.

 

[Liberty Belle]

these might have been mentioned already:

Toys at the bottom of the box of cereal
transistor radios
Brownie cameras
walking a mile uphill (both ways ) to school in grade school

Remember those 45's that would come on cereal boxes? Those were great.

And Crackerjack prizes were so much better back then.

 

[Liberty Belle]

Oh - Diagramming sentences. I don't think they are taught to do that anymore. I used to love it!

 

[Magpie]

Oh - Diagramming sentences. I don't think they are taught to do that anymore. I used to love it!

My mom used to talk about enjoying diagramming sentences, too! They'd stopped teaching it by the time I started school (the 70's).

 

[tvguy]

I texted my mom and asked her and she never heard of it, either. Maybe it's regional.

Phone dials have always had letters on them, and I thought that was why?
I wonder if it was an A-T& T thing? The letters went away here in the early 1960's here. This is from 1960, the phone number starts with IV which stood for IVANHOE with was the name of the phone company central switching station that your phone line came from.

 

[Lilacs4Me]

My kids were just amazed by this yesterday. They were asking if I rode in a seat like theirs when I was a kid. I said "You're not going to believe this, but when I was a kid car seats didn't exist" I told them about my mom bringing me home from the hospital in a 'car bed' which was basically the lid to a box. haha I really don't know how parents drove with kids going crazy in the back seat back then!


ETA: I was born in '82. Car seats did in fact exist, but I guess weren't required by law. My Mom says "poor people didn't have car seats." I'm not sure if this is entirely accurate though because she also said "poor people didn't use sunscreen" when I told her that my (now) husband said they always had sunscreen when he was a kid and I thought it hadn't been invented!

In Michigan, car seats weren't required until sometime between 1984 and 1990 (at least not for my family! LOL) because my youngest sister came home from the hospital on my mother's lap, but my brother who was born in '90 came home in a carseat.

However, it wasn't until 2008 in MI that kids needed to be in booster seats until they were 27 or 350 lbs....(j/k, it was really 8/80). Before that, it was 4/40 and on July 1st of 2008, the new law requiring 8/80 was put into effect. I know this for sure, because my son, who gave up a booster around age 5 (It was OK back then to do so, and he was a 60 lb, 4 foot 5 year old) and just used a seatbelt, was exactly 1.5 days away from having to go back into a booster. He turned 8 almost exactly 36 hours before the law went into effect. At the time, he was nearly 5 feet and weighed about 95 lbs. He didn't even fit in a booster!

OTOH, DS11, who was born 5 1/2 years after DS16, still can fit in a booster at just BARELY hitting 80 lbs right now and about 4 1/2 feet tall. He thinks it was so crazy that DS16 "never" had to be in a booster seat, and how did he stay safe!!!? This, coming from the kid who still puts himself in the backseat when it's just he and I in the car going a couple blocks through the neighborhood to school.