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34 Trivia-Worthy Facts About The Past That May Leave New Generations Shook
Back in my day, we only had one computer in the whole house. And we couldn’t use it if anyone was talking on the telephone! The world around us is changing at an incredible pace, and it’s extremely easy for young generations to forget or simply be unaware of what our grandparents experienced growing up.
So to remind ourselves how different the world was back then, one Reddit user recently asked older adults to share their favorite “pieces of trivia” that people their age know but younger generations might not. Below, you’ll find some of their most fascinating responses, so enjoy scrolling through. And keep reading to find a conversation with Jean Mader and Laura Bettinger of the OK Boomer podcast!
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#1
Phone numbers were memorized, and there was no speed dial, caller ID, or voicemail. I still remember my home # and my best friend's # from 50+ years ago.
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#2
The world was way more colorful. Cars were cool colors, not just gray, white or black. Like, a mall parking lot would look spectacular. Now it seems like everywhere is just a ubiquitous, low profile, architecturally acceptable sea of blah.
#3
That when you watched TV you had to watch what was on and if you wanted to watch something in particular, you had to wait for it to come on.
To gain more insight on this topic, we reached out to Jean Mader and Laura Bettinger, co-hosts of the OK Boomer podcast. They were kind enough to provide some examples of things they remember that Gen Z might be confused or surprised by. "We all had a crush on Little Joe on Bonanza, watched in black and white," Jean revealed. "[We were] excited to get the annual big phone book and peruse the yellow pages (old books used as handy booster seat for kids)."
The hosts also provided a long list of things Gen Z might not be aware of: Princess style landline phones, typing on typewriters and using whiteout, getting blue fingers from carbon paper to make copies, using World Book Encyclopedias instead of Google, giant paper roadmaps you could never properly refold, and trading Beatles cards. Jean also pointed out that men would hold doors open for women, open car doors, and walk next to curb for women. "Always!"
#4
Not that long ago, but you no security screening at airports. You could literally walk the person to the boarding area and watch them board the plane.
#5
When the internet first came out, you couldn't talk on the phone and be online at the same time.
#6
My boss blew my young co-workers mind the other day when she explained that there is a special kind of black paper, that you can put between two regular pieces of paper, and when you write on the top one, it shows up on the bottom one!
Jean also reminded us of 3.2% low alcohol beer, diets from 1980's like the Cabbage Soup diet and Grapefruit Diet, huge Hi Fidelity furniture like stereo record players, metal lunch boxes, riding in the back of station wagons facing backwards with no seatbelts, view finders, video stores, Swanson TV dinner nights, arm wrestling to settle disputes, nobody wearing sunscreen, fallout shelters and houses with coal chutes.
#8
Tv stations used to just go off at midnight. They would play a test pattern and a tone until resuming broadcasting around 6am.
We also asked the hosts if they happen to miss any of these things from the past. "Do not miss encyclopedias," Jean shared. "Google at our fingertips is amazing (although with this, we lost the ability to spell on our own). Truly thankful for GPS, but miss a map here and there to get a true perspective as to where things are. And a good arm wrestle is always fun and handy."
#10
My 20 yo son liked this one: When driving to anywhere new, you had to get directions or stop at the gas station and ask for them… Or you could buy a map/atlas.
#11
There were telephones EVERYWHERE. Streets, shops, sidewalk corners, etc., etc. You paid for calls with COINS.
#12
We used to make our Christmas or birthday wish list from looking in a Sears & Roebuck (or other store's) catalog. You could actually order and pay for things via snail mail, and it was safe to do so.
And when it comes to things we do today that future generations might be shocked by, Jean predicts that because AI will take over, they may be shocked that we ever had to creatively write anything! "Will cars all be automatic and they will be shocked we used our hands to steer?" she asked. "Robots will clean our houses, and they will chuckle at the fact that we actually moved a vacuum."
If you'd like to hear more from Jean and Laura about life "back in the day," be sure to check out their podcast, OK Boomer!
#13
My adult children and all their friends didn’t believe me when I first told them that married women weren’t allowed to have a credit card in their own name until 1974. Before that, they could only have one through their husband.
#14
There used to be a phone number you could call to get the time. It would update every 10 seconds. “At the tone the time will be…”
#15
All of us kids, as young as toddlers, used to pile into the open bed of a pickup truck and just be driven all over h**l and gone by adults who didn't even have seatbelts in the cab. No one ever questioned this. It was a perfectly legitimate method of transporting small kids.
#16
Ashtrays everywhere. Homes, businesses, restaurants, hospitals, malls, schools (designated area), etc. Even if you didn't smoke you had ashtrays, at least on your coffee table, for guests.
#17
No ATM or debit cards. You would have to withdraw enough cash to cover you for the weekend, since the banks were closed.
#18
Cigarette machines pretty much everywhere, as long as you put the money in you could get a pack of smokes no matter what age you were
#20
(M69). Gas station attendants would put gas in your car, cleaned your windshield, and check your oil as a part of buying the gas. Then you paid him through your car window without getting out of your car. Pop / soda came in glass bottles. Grocery stores only sold food and the stores were about a quarter of today’s sizes. When you needed wood and such for a home project, there was no Home Depot. You went to the lumber yard for wood and anything else, a small local hardware store.
#22
People used to actually write letters, put a stamp on them, and mailed them to their friends and relatives! As a kid, I would write letters to my school friends over summer break just to tell them how my summer was going and most would write back telling me how things were with them. I still remember when stamps went from 18 cents (US) to 20 cents and my Grandma complained about how outrageous that was. Today a first class stamp is 66 cents, and I only mail Christmas cards and thank you notes nowadays.
#23
We had a Tylenol scare where several bottles were tampered with. Those that took them died (if I remember that correctly). Until then, nothing was ever protected. So you could open any bottle or box from drug store items like Tylenol all the way to food and drink. I told this to my 34 year old daughter and she was shocked that there was a time when we didn’t worry about such things.
#24
There was a room called the “coal room” in the basement of our house. We’d shovel coal from that room into a coal furnace to heat our house. The coal was delivered by a truck that had a coal chute that was inserted through a basement window in the coal room.
#26
A 15 minute phone call coast to coast was about $12 in 1977. Equivalent to about $60 today.
#28
I'm just old enough to remember smoking on planes. It still blows my mind that that was a thing!
#29
That "Help wanted" ads in the back of the newspaper were a good way to find jobs, and they were segregated by [intimacy].
#30
Houses in the same area had to share a telephone "party line". And you could listen in to their conversations. Unless you sneezed or something...
#31
Whenever you wanted to download something online, you'd have to basically threaten everyone in the house with their lives if they picked up the phone during the amount of download time it took. It would take hours to download a game or an image, and if someone used the phone, the download would START OVER from the beginning. Plus, in the mid-'90s, you'd have to pay by the hour.
#32
There was such a thing as penny candy. A store near my school sold lots of it. Little Tootsie Rolls, many flavors of gumballs, and lots of other tasty things. A group of kids could come away with a big haul if one of them had a quarter.
#34
Milk was delivered to your house every week in a gallon glass bottle.
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