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Missing America

Two other things I really miss are drive in movies and drive up burger places with carhops wearing roller skates.

We use to take the old ranch pickup to the drive in movies and park with pickup bed facing the screen. Sit in the back on lawn chairs enjoying the movie and a cool spring night.

Doesn't get much better!
 
Cowboys and Indians, and cops and robbers. Walking to school, carrying my books , no one had backpacks. 45 rpm records, and the new fangled high fidelity.

I remember getting our first TV, 3 channels, black and white, no remote. National anthem at the end of the broadcast day followed by a test pattern.

News reels before the matinee at the movie theater on Saturday. The earliest I remember were of the Korean War .

Sonic booms.

Atom bomb tests. '
 
In November I was up in Nebraska. I drove by a new drive in theater that is being built about one mile west of Valley, Nebraska.
 
meanstreak said:
... I remember getting our first TV, 3 channels, black and white, no remote...
Click to expand...

In 1949 there was only 1 TV on my block. It was at Tommy's house. Tommy had polio but he tried to keep up with every thing we did. He'd play Cowboys 'n' Indians, baseball [w/ special rules for him], and mumblety-peg to the max.

The 5 or 6 kids in the block were always invited to see their b&w TV in the afternoon and we' watch mostly Howdy Doody and cowboy flix. When it came time for dinner, the kids were welcome to leave the home but stay outside and watch the tv thru their front window!

So sometime in '49 or '50 my dad was having a conversation about some company was trying to make TVs that would show pictures in COLOR! I said I'd already seen TV in color. They of course claimed that there were no color TVs in homes and would not be for years.

So I did not argue with them... they were grow-ups, you know. But I could distinctly remember seeing green trees, and brown horses and red wagons and blue dresses at Tommy's! I'd take Dad over there and show him next week.

I thought about that all weekend. On Monday afternoon when over to Tommy's house to watch the cowboys... there was no color... no greens or browns or reds or blues... just grey and grey and grey and grey.

That was when I learned what imagination meant. I sure did miss my color on TV for the next 10 years
 
Scoop, do you remember the pieces of colored plastic they put over the screen to get "color"?

We were always a radio family and spent many an evening sitting around listening to shows and baseball on the radio. Think our first tv was in 1952 with three channels and limited broadcast hours.
 
Ernst said:
Scoop, do you remember the pieces of colored plastic they put over the screen to get "color"?
Click to expand...

I do remember those. They were sort of bluish at the top and greenish on the bottom to give outdoor shots a sky-to-grass effect I guess. Didn't work very well and people got tired of them pretty fast. Made good Christmas presents for a year.

But, as a kid, what I liked was the clear plastic sheets you could put on the screen that you could use crayons on, then peel them off, clean, and re-use. Some kiddie shows would use them so you could finish up some "art" with your own coloring. Then at the end of the show they would show a screen that would have some random lines on it. The kids had to trace over the lines to decode a message later. Then at the end of the show another screen would come up with lines behind your traced ones to present an important "secret" message such as EAT WHEATIES EVERY MORNING.
They were verboten in my home... never got crayons near the TV.

This was our first TV. It was a FADA with a 9 or 10 inch screen.
upload_2021-3-24_2-18-6.jpeg
The knobs on the bottom adjusted channel [the big one], fine tuning, brightness, contrast, focus, vertical hold and volume.
I was the kid that kneeled next to the set with my hand on the Vert Hold knob to keep the weak stations from flopping up and down.

That was pretty easy compared to when my uncle got a big color TV in early '60s.
I would lay on the floor an adjust the Color, Tint, Hue, in addition to the Contrast and Brightness to maintain realistic flesh colors. Damn I got good at that! TV today just isn't that much fun... right?
 
The little rascals, Flash Gordon, and Crusader Rabbit. Over the years, every once in a while I would get into a conversation about the old days. No one had ever heard of Crusader Rabbit.

In the early 90s I had a girlfriend that was about 3 years younger than me. We had had a few of those conversations ourselves. One day she surprises me with a VHS tape of Crusader Rabbit. She had bought it at a grocery of all places.

I still have that VHS tape.
 
I love this thread...It's really making me feel young. Thanks!!

And no offense, it is what it is. ;-D
 
meanstreak said:
The little rascals, Flash Gordon, and Crusader Rabbit. Over the years, every once in a while I would get into a conversation about the old days. No one had ever heard of Crusader Rabbit.

In the early 90s I had a girlfriend that was about 3 years younger than me. We had had a few of those conversations ourselves. One day she surprises me with a VHS tape of Crusader Rabbit. She had bought it at a grocery of all places.

I still have that VHS tape.
Click to expand...
I get the same blank look when I mention Clutch Cargo and Paddlefoot, and Fireball XL5..lol..
 
MikeD said:
I love this thread...It's really making me feel young. Thanks!!

And no offense, it is what it is. ;-D
Click to expand...
'
None taken, lol. Enjoy feeling young while you can. The baton in the race of life is being passed to those coming up.
 
I fall somewhere between Howdy Doody, Bozo & Capt Kangaroo. West Coast guys may remember Wallace and Ladmo, which was a popular TV show for kids in the early 60s.

We had a 15 inch b&w portable TV. I saw John Kennedy get shot on that TV.

It was later replaced by a 17 inch, in a big rush, the day that Neil Armstrong landed on the moon.

Our TV died and we all hopped in my dad’s Scout and drove 5 miles to (perhaps the nations first) Target store. We watched the moon landing there on 20 TVs, all at once, which was fantastic, and we bought a new Zenith black and white portable, and went home.

But my first television was a 12” black and white portable in a brown Bakelite case and it had a very long skinny picture tube.

I picked it up off the street corner in Duluth Minnesota, cleaned it up, lubed the controls, and bought a new rectifier tube for it at RadioShack. I can’t imagine how many x-rays that thing fed me, but it was like something from 1950 for sure. By the time I was in the ninth grade,I had three other TVs, a radio, and two phonographs, which I had all repaired or modified,
 
Can't say they're things I miss, but there are some things I wish I could've experienced for myself. I've lived in LA my entire life, less than two hours from Muroc Air Force Base (if you remember that name you already know where I'm going with this). Today it's called Edwards, after test pilot Glen Edwards who was killed flying the Northrop YB-49 Flying Wing. Back in the day this was the place to be for cutting-edge aviation. It seems every hot airplane ever built at the time was being tested out here, with guys like Chuck Yeager competing to the death to be the fastest man alive. All the NASA X-planes, new fighters, even the space program were being flown out here. Every hour it seems some hotshot fighter jock would go ripping across the desert at mach 2. And the best part: the rest of the country cared. The Space Program was a big deal in most families and watching launches and landings was a big event for a lot of people. Yeager became a national hero when they finally announced his supersonic flight months after it had occurred. Guys like John Glenn were national celebrities long before anyone landed on the moon.

Today it seems like we're living in the world of Interstellar, where most people either couldn't care less or deny it ever happened.
 
Montgomery Wards, Sears, Western Auto , You could buy a gun in most hardware stores back in those days. Even mail order right out of the catalog.

My grandparents had an outhouse (side by side for reasons that I never figured out) that always had one of those magazines in it. Always had pages missing. Ouch.
 
We had a Whitefront store.

There was a drive up dairy here that we could get milk and eggs right out of the window.

Used to go buy stuff at military surplus stores and electronics surplus stores and other places that sold surplus tools and such.

Going to buy diode’s & a transformer so I could build my own power supply.

Watching Fireball XL5, and Supercar, which were basically puppet shows on television.

Ricky Ricardo in the two-tone jacket with big lapels, wailin’ on the conga drums.

Being sent to bed because we were too young to watch Jack Parr. Also being told we were too young to see the movie Rancho Deluxe.

I heard the jingle for that movie so many times on the radio I can still sing it 60 years later.

My mom had one of those 1951 Studebakers that looks like it was going both ways at the same time. Dad sold it because she couldn’t figure out how to drive a stick shift, and he didn’t trust automatic transmissions.

Mom ran over a pig with dad’s ‘56 Chevrolet, because she still couldn’t figure out how to drive a stick shift. Eventually he bought her a Merc-o-matic Monterey with the fancy roof. Electric windows. I had my first solo date in the car.
 
Growing up on a ranch in the 1940s was an enjoyable experience despite what most folks today would consider as a hardship. We had no electricity or running water. Kerosene lanterns provided our light and a tin cistern, my blacksmith grandfather made, provided our water from roof runoff when it rained. Water was heated in a large cast iron pot which sat in the back yard and used a wood fire to provide heat. We had an outhouse and took baths in a square wash tub on the back porch. We had an old wooden ice box and got ice from an ice plant in the city. No locks on the doors.

Family car was a 1939 Chevy two door coupe and we had several old Farmall tractors from the 1920s. We raised all our food and only bought a few staples like sugar and baking powder when we went to town maybe once a month. A piece of candy or ice cream bar was our treat during trips to town. We ate fresh meat, garden vegetables, and fresh baked bread every day. Around 1953 we got power through the REA program and some time later a rotary dial phone which shared the line with only seven other families.

By five I'd been taught gun safety and loaded guns hung on the house walls and were always carried in our trucks. By 9 or 10 I had my own .22 bolt action rifle and a year or so later a 20 gauge shotgun. Had the roam of the ranch and never stayed inside. Staying inside was punishment! By 10 or 12 I was driving a tractor and plowing fields and as soon as I could reach the clutch on the old ranch pickup I was driving it. None of the kids had drivers license back then but we drove the gravel country roads. Went swimming in the cattle ponds and played in the dirt. Got hungry we raided the garden and brushed off the dirt. Always had morning and evening chores when I was going to school. During harvest season our country school would close for a couple of weeks because all the kids had to help with the harvest.

Despite all the modern conveniences I long for the good old days! We try to live a simpler life even today.
 
That was a different world for sure. For me it would be like camping out, only there was a house and a barn etc . . .

Until I moved to California, fresh vegetables were rare. We mostly lived in parts so cold the Green Giant wouldn't go there, and ate a lot of canned and frozen food from some USAF commissary.

But we didn't know how lucky we were to have regular meals and a bed and parents who didn't cheat on each other.
 
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