{"id":1326,"date":"2008-05-19T11:06:09","date_gmt":"2008-05-19T16:06:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/1326"},"modified":"2016-06-08T10:46:35","modified_gmt":"2016-06-08T15:46:35","slug":"if-it-was-that-long-ago-how-come-it-seems-like-only-yesterday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/1326","title":{"rendered":"If It Was That Long Ago, How Come It Seems Like Only Yesterday?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Whilst browsing Fark.Com I came across this site<\/a>, and this photo…<\/p>\n

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This is from a G. C. \u00a0 Murphy’s store, circa 1968. \u00a0 I was 14 back then. \u00a0 Note the ad above one of the portable sets on the second shelf above the boy RCA – First In Color TV<\/em>… \u00a0 Color sets were just starting to become affordable to the average person back then. \u00a0 Still hugely expensive, and most TV shows throughout the day were still broadcast in black and white. \u00a0 But all the prime time stuff by then was in color, and they all advertised that fact proudly…<\/p>\n

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And so did the networks…<\/p>\n

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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. \u00a0 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. \u00a0 The next summer mom bought a color TV, pretty similar to the one you see above. \u00a0 Within a year TV seemed like it had always been in color. \u00a0 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. \u00a0<\/p>\n

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. \u00a0 They mark it as being of its period. \u00a0 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. \u00a0 In my household we had a TV, a record cabinet and a beautiful Eumig mahogany Hi-Fi console with legs like that. \u00a0 Teens reading this now note the…Dials<\/em>…on the set. \u00a0 That was how you changed the channel back then. \u00a0 And there were only 12 of them, starting at channel two and going up to channel 13 (whatever Did become of channel one???). \u00a0 Now you know why all the local TV stations everywhere are somewhere in that range. \u00a0 The other two large dials were probably a UHF tuner and the volume control. \u00a0 In theory the UHF channels gave you channels 14 to 69. \u00a0 In practice there were very few UHF channels. \u00a0 The Washington D.C. area where I grew up, had 14, 20, 22, 26, 45, and 53, and half of those were PBS stations. \u00a0 The row of small knobs were probably the brightness, color intensity and tint controls. \u00a0<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

So…anyway…having found the Pleasant Family Shopping Blog…I decided to do a little shopping. \u00a0 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… \u00a0<\/p>\n

Oh!!…Fizzies!!!!<\/em><\/p>\n

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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. \u00a0 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. \u00a0 Between the ages of 7 and 10 I was addicted to those things. \u00a0 I pretty much stopped drinking that stuff when I was old enough to have an allowance that let me buy real soda.<\/p>\n

Oh! \u00a0 Crazy Foam…!<\/em><\/p>\n

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I think the most delightful part of last night was finding something I’d played with as a kid and completely forgotten about. \u00a0 This stuff was a thick foam soap for a kid’s bath. \u00a0 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. \u00a0 It was almost as much fun as silly putty…<\/p>\n

And as much fun as finding things I’d played with, was finding photos of the architectural environment I grew up in. \u00a0 They made buildings different back then. \u00a0 The style was…well…very sixties. \u00a0 Here’s a shot of a Sears store that really brought it back for me…<\/p>\n

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Note the palm trees poking up one side of the store. \u00a0 We didn’t have palm trees where I grew up, but that building just shouts its period.<\/p>\n

Here’s what you probably would have found had you walked over to the snack bar…<\/p>\n

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According to the photo, that’s circa 1962. \u00a0 Note the signage, the hanging lamps and the chairs. \u00a0 Oh…and the color scheme. \u00a0 Here’s what a grocery store might look like…<\/p>\n

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Back then they actually gave you double lines separating the car spaces. \u00a0 Here’s what you might see inside at the frozen foods area…<\/p>\n

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Freezers with no doors. \u00a0 A couple rows of them usually. \u00a0 Those things worked because cold air sinks and the electricity to run them was cheap. \u00a0 These days they mostly use standup freezers with glass doors to keep the cold air in. \u00a0 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. \u00a0 Note the analog butcher’s scale over in the meat department.<\/p>\n

That’s enough nostalgia for now. \u00a0 I had an absolute blast going through Pleasant Family Shopping<\/a>. \u00a0 And some of the sites he links to. \u00a0 And it really startles me how immediate some of the memories were that those images brought back. \u00a0 It just doesn’t seem like it’s that long ago. \u00a0 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. \u00a0 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. \u00a0 The Mercedes for example. Things used to be made like that.<\/p>\n

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Whilst browsing Fark.Com I came across this site, and this photo… This is from a G. C. \u00a0 Murphy’s store, circa 1968. \u00a0 I was 14 back then. \u00a0 Note the ad above one of the portable sets on the second shelf above the boy RCA – First In Color TV… \u00a0 Color sets were […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,1],"tags":[50],"class_list":["post-1326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-uncategorized","tag-fun"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1326"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1326\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}