30 Facts From The ’70s And ’80s That Seem Unbelievable Now, Shared In This Online Thread

Yay! This! It’s like Stranger Things

Trawling through the library index first to find the right encyclopedia / reference publication then building your footnotes / bibliography to support your submission. Roughly 30 minutes for per reference...

well then...

We made those for our dads, for mom we made potholders.

I remember when there was only BBC and ITV

This was "normal" in the UK in the 80s and 90s. Uniform was a skirt for the girls. In winter they simply wore woolly tights, which was also part of the uniform and had to be a certain colour. Boys wore trousers and it was only if it was really hot we could wear shorts and very occasionally it would be declared a "no tie" day.

You think that's bad. When I was a university, I didn't have a phone and used the public call boxes at the end of the street. Doesn't sound too bad until I say that I lived in the red light district and got propositioned whilst on the phone to my mother! LOL

The amount of times I would burn my hands on the monkey bars from the hot Aussie sun 😤 the blisters! But my god was it fun!!!

It wasn't summer in Texas unless you left your thigh flesh smeared down the metal slides.

Especially the merry go round of death! Hot metal and a teacher that would help us go really fast!

So my dad worked for the schools when they switched to newer plastic playground equipment. He was allowed to take the old stuff home. I had a merry-go-round and monkey bars in my backyard growing up. 👍good times

Those slides would get hot enough to melt your tennis shoes if you lingered too long before the trip down

Painted with lead paint!

We had a metal slide that was a real pain in the butt

And hard ground underneath.

Ours had a 1/2" rubber mat underneath (big help that was) that was replaced by tanbark (yay, splinters!).

Over concrete lol

Well, we still have some where I live lol

And "tire" playgrounds.

This looks like it's from the 1910's, not the 70's or 80's. But dyoll

Hot! Hot!

Concrete base! We used to hang upside down on the monkey bars, with our legs crooked over, then swing and jump off to land right way up. We were daredevils!

often with cement under all the playground equipment.

I got my first set of stitches from these playgrounds. Maybe my second and third as well. Ah...good times.

Built on concrete too. Kids today don’t know what it’s like to plunge headfirst from the top of a high slide, split your forehead open and then get walloped because you’ve got blood all over your clothes! And no, I wasn’t taken to A&E as I still had all four limbs attached!

Going down a hot metal slide in a dress was painful as well.

We still had metal playground equipment into the 90s in SoCal

Yes, hot metal bars and just asphalt on the ground below.

Here is to many broken arms and second degree burns!

...with concrete slabs underneath.

Isn’t that a photo of the 1914 Olympics

Ha, and that peagravel my husband's school had that after he was an adult was carted away by people in those safety suits (asbestos).

ours wasn't steel but it was metal (I'm gen z)

Yep. Burned you bottom on the slippery dip many times

And no rubber matting underneath.

Over concrete slabs...

My English teacher could have thrown a board rubber for the olympics

Ha. There was one bus stop in the entire village. Apart from the one and only school bus, the remainder of the bus service flipped between one an hour to two busses a week! I walked to primary school, including on my own from about aged 7 or 8, and cycled to secondary school which was 3 miles away in the nearest town. This is probably why I have such little patience with the Chelsea tractors (SUVs) doing the "school run".

Smoking “sections” on airplanes!!

Exploring outside for hours on end was the best.

The one I remember was mostly a toy: molded plastic seat, one inch plastic strap with a buckle, and a plastic steering wheel with a squeeky horn button.

That was a student prank. Our chemistry teacher had some mercury in a beaker and we stuck our hands in it. Not sure that touching it is a big deal, but you don't want to ingest it.

Thank god!

Hamburger jail was awesome!

AND you could pick up the phone and listen in on their conversations!

Katy McMouse

Katy McMouse

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Probably because they were hunting rifles, used for hunting and not assault rifles, used for God knows what.