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The Olden Days
Jun. 30th, 2006 10:41 pmMolly asked me today whether I'd ever considered writing a book about the way things were when I was a little girl. I told her I really wasn't old enough to pull this off yet -- these books are pretty cool when they're about covered wagons and hand-dug wells, but no one would be all that impressed with rotary phones. She persisted and asked if maybe I'd write one when I got older. I said I'd consider it.
This got me thinking, while cleaning up from dinner, about the hardships of the olden days -- you know, the late 1970s and early 1980s. (I turned five -- Molly's age -- in 1978. Yes, all you people who flinch when I mention that I was four years old when I saw Star Wars can flinch now. In fact, you might want to just skip the rest of this post.)
We had rotary telephones, of course (something Molly has only seen a handful of times), with actual cords, though my parents were phone junkies (still are) and had a phone in every room, plus the kitchen phone's cord was so long you could walk all the way through the dining room and sit down in the living room to chat. I'd say we had no Internet, but that may not have been true: my father was using a paper dumbterminal with an acoustic coupler modem so early that I can't remember the study without it, and was certainly using e-mail in the earliest days of the Internet. I didn't have Internet access, of course, nor could I do my research with Wikipedia -- we had an encyclopedia and some other reference books, or I could go to the library. And use a card catalog.
The childhood hardship I was mulling over while cleaning up was heat. I lived in Wisconsin, and we did not have air conditioning. No one I knew had central air; I did know one girl who had a room air conditioner in her own bedroom, but this was a rare privilege. To escape the heat, I could skulk in the semifinished basement, eat a popsicle, sit in front of a fan, or go to the library or movie theater. My parents didn't get central air put in until I was in college, and they still don't use it much. Neither do we; I did not have it on today, and had positioned a box fan to blow on me as I scraped plates.
Our TV only got four channels, but we had a TV aerial on our roof so at least they came in pretty clearly. Ed and I don't have an antenna up, and don't have cable. I'm not sure how many channels we get in theory, but only a few of them come in well. We do, however, have a DVD/VCR player; VCRs came along pretty early in my childhood, but they were something rented occasionally for birthday parties. Since my parents were weirdos, we had a color computer monitor in our house before we had a color TV; my father had some gadget that let the computer monitor be used as a TV, on special occasions like when Wizard of Oz was being broadcast. (Or we were renting a VCR.)
This isn't exactly roughing it, I think, even to an easily-impressed five-year-old.
This got me thinking, while cleaning up from dinner, about the hardships of the olden days -- you know, the late 1970s and early 1980s. (I turned five -- Molly's age -- in 1978. Yes, all you people who flinch when I mention that I was four years old when I saw Star Wars can flinch now. In fact, you might want to just skip the rest of this post.)
We had rotary telephones, of course (something Molly has only seen a handful of times), with actual cords, though my parents were phone junkies (still are) and had a phone in every room, plus the kitchen phone's cord was so long you could walk all the way through the dining room and sit down in the living room to chat. I'd say we had no Internet, but that may not have been true: my father was using a paper dumbterminal with an acoustic coupler modem so early that I can't remember the study without it, and was certainly using e-mail in the earliest days of the Internet. I didn't have Internet access, of course, nor could I do my research with Wikipedia -- we had an encyclopedia and some other reference books, or I could go to the library. And use a card catalog.
The childhood hardship I was mulling over while cleaning up was heat. I lived in Wisconsin, and we did not have air conditioning. No one I knew had central air; I did know one girl who had a room air conditioner in her own bedroom, but this was a rare privilege. To escape the heat, I could skulk in the semifinished basement, eat a popsicle, sit in front of a fan, or go to the library or movie theater. My parents didn't get central air put in until I was in college, and they still don't use it much. Neither do we; I did not have it on today, and had positioned a box fan to blow on me as I scraped plates.
Our TV only got four channels, but we had a TV aerial on our roof so at least they came in pretty clearly. Ed and I don't have an antenna up, and don't have cable. I'm not sure how many channels we get in theory, but only a few of them come in well. We do, however, have a DVD/VCR player; VCRs came along pretty early in my childhood, but they were something rented occasionally for birthday parties. Since my parents were weirdos, we had a color computer monitor in our house before we had a color TV; my father had some gadget that let the computer monitor be used as a TV, on special occasions like when Wizard of Oz was being broadcast. (Or we were renting a VCR.)
This isn't exactly roughing it, I think, even to an easily-impressed five-year-old.
