Blaine's memories list

Some things your kids and grand kids have no idea about:


01. Being able to choose from only two or three television channels.
02. Finding out information from an encyclopedia.
03. Using a road atlas to get from place A to place B.
04. Shopping only during the day.
05. Carrying on a correspondence with real letters, especially the handwritten kind.
06. Typewriters and using carbon paper in them.
07. Spam--the meat in a can.
08. Putting film in your camera and taking it to a photo processing establishment. Also, advancing the film in the camera manually for the next shot.
09. Telephones with actual bells in them.
10. Remembering someone’s telephone number.
11. Kentucky Fried Chicken, as opposed to KFC,
12. Trig and Log tables.
13. Finding books by way of a card catalogue in a library.
14. Roller skates. And, the skate key.
15. A floor model television set.
16. Knowing what a Polaroid camera is.
17. LED digital watches.
18. Pulling vacuum tubes out of your television set and taking them down to the drug store and testing them on the Tube-Tester to see which one was bad.
19. Spending your entire weekly allowance at the candy counter at the drug store.
20. Playing a 45-rpm vinyl record on your record player.
21. Using a rotary-dial telephone.
22. Hard-packed dirt under the swings at the playground.
23. Gasoline at under $1 per gallon.
24. Watching the test pattern on television with total fascination.
25. Starting a car by pressing the starter button on the dashboard, or switched on the high beams by pressing a foot switch, or riding on a running board.
26. Watching a Kodachrome slide show in someone’s living room and smelling that hot projector smell.
27. The smell of a freshly-printed test from a mimeograph machine.
28. Wind-up alarm clocks.
29. Toy guns without the orange tips.
30. Buying Coca-Cola in bottles and cigarettes from vending machines.
31. Telephone numbers that had letters in them.
32. Getting cash from the bank before the ATM.
33. Blackboards and taking the erasers to the school basement to clap them together to get the dust out for your teacher.
34. Fountain pens that you filled with ink from a bottle. And, wooden school desks, firmly bolted to the floor, with inkwells in the desktop.
35. Backing off the throttle (gas) so the vacuum-driven wipers could swipe the rain off the windshield of your car.
36. Flash bulbs for your camera.
37. Metal lunch boxes.
38, Automobiles without air conditioning.
39. Milk in glass bottles delivered by the milkman to the silver box on your porch.
40. Hand-pushed lawn mowers.
41. A Western Union telegram delivered to your home by a boy on a bicycle.
42. Looking at disks in a View Master.
43. When every elementary school boy carried a knife to school in his pocket.
45. Cut-out paper dolls.
46. Pay public toilets.
47. Mercury thermometers.
48. Slide rules.
49. Kick the can in the street in the evening.
50. Brylcreem.


Blaine Bierley