Whilst browsing Fark.Com I came across this site, and this photo…

This is from a G. C.   Murphy’s store, circa 1968.   I was 14 back then.   Note the ad above one of the portable sets on the second shelf above the boy RCA – First In Color TV…   Color sets were just starting to become affordable to the average person back then.   Still hugely expensive, and most TV shows throughout the day were still broadcast in black and white.   But all the prime time stuff by then was in color, and they all advertised that fact proudly…

And so did the networks…

I still vividly remember the impact of watching the premier of the second season of Star Trek in color the previous fall of 1967, when our downstairs neighbor bought a color TV.   I’d grown up watching TV in a black and white world and my little teenybopper jaw just dropped watching those scenes of the planet Vulcan in color.   The next summer mom bought a color TV, pretty similar to the one you see above.   Within a year TV seemed like it had always been in color.   I had a little GE black and white portable in my bedroom by then, and the only thing I bothered watching on it were the old reruns of TV shows that had been filmed in black and white.  

Never mind the clothes and hair styles in the photo above, the first thing I noticed in it were the legs on the TV set.   They mark it as being of its period.   It seemed back then that nearly every piece of furniture you laid eyes on had legs like that…dark wood pegs turned down to a shiny metal cap at the bottom.   In my household we had a TV, a record cabinet and a beautiful Eumig mahogany Hi-Fi console with legs like that.   Teens reading this now note the…Dials…on the set.   That was how you changed the channel back then.   And there were only 12 of them, starting at channel two and going up to channel 13 (whatever Did become of channel one???).   Now you know why all the local TV stations everywhere are somewhere in that range.   The other two large dials were probably a UHF tuner and the volume control.   In theory the UHF channels gave you channels 14 to 69.   In practice there were very few UHF channels.   The Washington D.C. area where I grew up, had 14, 20, 22, 26, 45, and 53, and half of those were PBS stations.   The row of small knobs were probably the brightness, color intensity and tint controls.  

The set almost certainly was powered by a bunch of vacuum tubes and if you looked behind it you would see a Masonite servicing panel with a bunch of holes drilled in it for ventilation.

So…anyway…having found the Pleasant Family Shopping Blog…I decided to do a little shopping.   He links to other sites that have images from the period I grew up in, and I think I spent about half the night browsing, and occasionally shouting with delight like the little teenybopper I once was…  

Oh!!…Fizzies!!!!

You can’t see it…but the back of the pack is a sheet of eight little square aluminum foil packets, each with a tablet in them about the size of an Alka-Seltzer.   And they did pretty much the same thing as Alka-Seltzer did…they fizzed…only these tablets turned the water in the glass into a bubbly soft drink.   Between the ages of 7 and 10 I was addicted to those things.   I pretty much stopped drinking that stuff when I was old enough to have an allowance that let me buy real soda.

Oh!   Crazy Foam…!

I think the most delightful part of last night was finding something I’d played with as a kid and completely forgotten about.   This stuff was a thick foam soap for a kid’s bath.   It was so thick it stood up on it’s own when you squirted it out of the can…practically like some kind of caulking compound.   It was almost as much fun as silly putty…

And as much fun as finding things I’d played with, was finding photos of the architectural environment I grew up in.   They made buildings different back then.   The style was…well…very sixties.   Here’s a shot of a Sears store that really brought it back for me…

Note the palm trees poking up one side of the store.   We didn’t have palm trees where I grew up, but that building just shouts its period.

Here’s what you probably would have found had you walked over to the snack bar…

According to the photo, that’s circa 1962.   Note the signage, the hanging lamps and the chairs.   Oh…and the color scheme.   Here’s what a grocery store might look like…

Back then they actually gave you double lines separating the car spaces.   Here’s what you might see inside at the frozen foods area…

Freezers with no doors.   A couple rows of them usually.   Those things worked because cold air sinks and the electricity to run them was cheap.   These days they mostly use standup freezers with glass doors to keep the cold air in.   I used to hang my head over the edge of these things and look sideways down an entire row for the thin layer of fog that formed in the zone between the warm store air and the cold freezer air.   Note the analog butcher’s scale over in the meat department.

That’s enough nostalgia for now.   I had an absolute blast going through Pleasant Family Shopping.   And some of the sites he links to.   And it really startles me how immediate some of the memories were that those images brought back.   It just doesn’t seem like it’s that long ago.   And while I would not want to go back to those days (not back to a time before the Internet, not back to a time before cell phones and home video and safer cars, and absolutely not back to a time before the APA took homosexuality off the list of mental illnesses!) I can appreciate a little better now why the times I live in irritate me so often.   One thing I think is so appealing about the iPhone is it’s display is made of real glass and the chrome trim around the edge is really metal. I like solid things in my life.   The Mercedes for example. Things used to be made like that.