You Might Be OLD.....If You Remember These!

I'm old. I still see a lot of that. We even have a drive-in theater.

I remember keeping score at the bowling alley for my parents with the overhead projector and the grease pencil.

We didn't do the giant station wagon. My mom did have a Ford LTD (old Crown Vic) and then a full size Ford van.

We used to play outside. We'd play football or baseball in the park, or ride skateboards, or jump trashcans on our bikes, or make rope swings over the local creek. I liked newspaper tag. Headshots didn't count, but we sometimes did it anyway. If you were slow, you learned to throw very well.

Wait! WHAT?
It says..
"you have unfortunately gotten old" ???!!!

I gar-own-teeee, I'm FORTUNATE to be this old and damned glad I made it this far.

Those examples are for the youngsters... Whyyyy, I 'member when Jasper, a guy a few caves down the path, figgered how to spark a fire; his brother made a wheel outa' a piece of log....

Marvels of the modern world !
Signs of future progress there, I tell ya'

hmmm, thought it was funny when thinkin' it...
-shrug- maybe not.... heheheheh

Yeah, I'm old. I remember all of them.

Except the clothesline. Only the poorest of the poor had clotheslines in our world.

Why? Cleveland is overcast, 300 days a year. I'd have to look up rainfall averages, but the rule of thumb is, it can rain, any time, any day. It was only when I came out West that I discovered that in some places, weather is PREDICTABLE. And in some places, there's lots of SUN.

Also, Cleveland, like many Rust Belt cities, had gritty air. Hang your clothes out, and they don't smell fresh - they smell like the Ford Engine Plant, or the Bethlehem Steel plant in Buffalo. Whites become not-white. For a working man, that's no problem with his tee-shirts; but the Sunday dining table cloth, it's not so good.

We didn't live near heavy industry, at least not initially. Our home was close to the western county line, an area that had been an apple orchard four years earlier.

Two years after we moved there, Cleveland Hopkins Airport, a little place for putt-putt planes to put down, was expanded for the new jets. Which had an approach pattern right over our subdivision. You get used to the noise, but occasionally the smoke, or even dumped jet fuel, would be in evidence. No pools of kerosene, but the air would have a scent, and there'd be rainbows in puddles, or in the toddlers' wading pools.

We didn't have VCRs, though - even when they became commonplace. Only reason we had a color television was, my brother, who was fascinated with electronics, asked for and got a friend's discarded, inoperable color set. He fixed it in three hours, and he then had a huge color console television in his bedroom. With rabbit ears on it.

The station wagon. Yup, all up and down the street. Chevrolet and Olds wagons were the fashionable ones. Some Fords. We had a 1962 Rambler, unfashionable. No back-back seat, but we'd crawl around in the carpeted luggage area. Later a neighbor bought a 1969 Rambler wagon, much smaller.

Our Rambler rusted out in six years (remember THAT?!) and we replaced it with THE most un-cool car you can imagine. A car my mother was ashamed to drive. She had her Ford sedan, but occasionally she had to take the wagon.

It was a Jeep Wagoneer. A 1968. My mother HATED that thing! And no, it didn't have a third-row looking-back seat. Nor was the luggage area carpeted. Nothing was carpeted; it had a rubber mat instead of carpeting.

Long story why my old man bought it, but it turned out to be a lemon. It was a demonstrator; my father was not told it was a demonstrator; it wasn't broken in right. AND...18 months later, AMC bought Kaiser, the maker. AMC invalidated the warranty. Giving my father ANOTHER reason to hate Rambler.

But times were getting hard for him, and he had to keep it for five years. NO status attached to that thing. Today, I look at how those same surviving Jeep Wagoneers are selling for $50k and more...how they're SO sought-after...and thinking, my father was so far ahead of his time, even he thought he goofed.

He unloaded it for $1500. In fairness, he got 120,000 miles out of it, which was unusual. He did eventually work most of the bugs out of the rig...it was basically a solid machine.

But it didn't give you status points when you arrived in it at high school. I remember when my brother would take his GF out to school events. He could get the Jeep...but he'd just drive it to her house; and take her car, a Gremlin. THAT had moar status.

Yeah...I am old. I predate jet travel and Jeep mania.

This was the end of TV broadcast in NZ for a number of years