I'm so old that....

[Midnightmoon]

This is definitely in the running for the best thread of 2021. So many great memories.

[JFlightRisk]

And many more to come, I'm sure. I'm having such a great time reading all of these!

[camjam]

Originally Posted by Superseneca

I remember when pumping gas was done manually. You would operate a manual pump to fill a glass reservoir on top of the pump, then you would derail it into your tank.

Now that's old

[RAurand]

Originally Posted by Tunce the traveler

Remember when Mom would tell me to be home right after 5 bell rings from the church bell. No iPads back then & none of us had a watch. Oh the care free days the kids of today will never experience.

Hummmph, My dad would whistle real loud. (Could hear it all over the neighborhood) when it was time to come home for supper.

[JFlightRisk]

Had to be in the house before the sun went down. When I was very young, the dog followed me everywhere. If my mother saw the dog somewhere on the street, she knew where I was, It took me a while to figure out how she knew all the time!

[FPM III]

Who remembers the days when the new model year cars arrived at the dealers (usually around September). It was like a party that ran for a week. Free food, drinks (non-alcoholic), balloons for the kids and gifts (usually advertising merchandise) for the adults. Some dealers had huge spotlights mounted on trucks outside to attract attention. The entire family would pile into the car to go see the new cars. We’d spend an entire evening going from dealer to dealer to see all the new models.

[JFlightRisk]

I sure do. New models were kept under covers in the showrooms until the debut at the local armory building. No spy photos, or advance showing to the public. It was a big event. I would go around and collect the keychains they were handing out.

[Tunce the traveler]

When I worked at Eastman Kodak in Rochester, NY and you bought a new car when the new models came out your first payment wasn’t due till you received your bonus check on March 17 th. St. Patrick’s Day. Your bonus was based on the total of your last 5 years salary. Back then you bought a new car every 2 years.

[Stan&Sharon]

Family would gather around Saturday night for a TV show.

[norty1]

Us 4 kids had to be home when the street lights came on. No one knew where we were until suppertime.

[deepsea5]

Originally Posted by norty1

Us 4 kids had to be home when the street lights came on. No one knew where we were until suppertime.

X2 on that!
Many "adventures" were had and "wars" fought, in the woods of our neighborhood. In our teen years, we blazed many a snowmobile/dirt bike trail in those woods. We even built a couple of crude cabins there.
My best friend lived about 5 miles from me. His parents had about 500 acres of wooded land. We blazed many trails on that property for running our "woods cars" on. Back then, rusted out cars were a dime a dozen. Buying them and flogging them for all they were worth on those woods trails was great fun. This was before we were old enough for driver's licenses. Our parents were fine with us running those cars. If they only knew some of the stupid stunts we pulled with those cars...

[Racinforthefinish]

Electricity was starting to come to the rural areas and Willy Wired Hand was on the radio for electricity advertising.

[norty1]

Even younger yet, we used to dig trenches and cover them and had a whole fort underground. I think we saw it on a Little Rascal's show.

[Hazman65]

Real toys in Cracker Jack boxes.

[GABob]

Originally Posted by Thomson

You are old!!! I, also, had an 027 Lionel electric train. Put it on a 4 x 8 sheet of plywood.

Woke up early one Christmas to find the Erector set with the motor!! So happy but had to rewrap it as dad wasn’t up yet to see my reaction

Still have my American Flyer set…

[Thomson]

We made inner tube guns, where we cut an old inner tube into about 1" rubber bands. Made the gun with a broom stick and a handle nailed to the stick. Then we put a small trigger made from a piece of wood and a fulcrum made from a dowel or twig. The trigger was held forward by a bunch of inner tube bands. You loaded it by putting one end of a band in the trigger and stretching it over the end of the broomstick. To fire you pushed on the lower side of the trigger. Great fun. Also, our favorite airplane engine was an .049. We made many balsa u-control airplanes typically broke them.

[RedHorse1]

Real toys in Cracker Jacks, YES!

I remember watching “Leave to Beaver” and “Dobie Gillis” when they were new shows.

[JFlightRisk]

"Route 66" with the two guys in their Vette. They seemed to go down that road forever.

Martin Milner, and I don't remember the other one...

[JimD]

Ah, the old black and white TV shows on one of 3 channels. I absolutely loved Science Fiction Theater and Twilight Zone. Must have been geek before there were any. I now own the entire DVD collection of both and have watch all Science Fiction Theater episodes and am working my way through Twilight Zone.

I watch these while camping when I go to bed before my wife comes. When dry camping I monitor my battery level to know when to kill the inverter. Ruffing it has never been so good!

[mharrison]

Originally Posted by deepsea5

The 9PM fire siren for our local fire department cycling twice to announce curfew.
I joined our local volunteer fire department when I was 16 (not sure if that's even allowed anymore). Back then, there were no pagers or cellphones. We had to listen for the fire siren, which was VERY LOUD. It was installed on the roof of a local 5 stories tall woolen mill. I lived 2 miles from that siren and could hear it at home.
We eventually got Plectron devices for fire callouts. They were not portable, but a big step ahead vs listening for the fire whistle. Around the same time period, Bearcat police scanners were becoming a "thing". They could only monitor 8 channels, and you had to buy a crystal for each channel frequency. A few of us bought those and used them in our vehicles. They were pretty large, though.

Of course, being a teenager, I just had to buy the crystal for our local police frequency.

Sounds familiar, had a Plectron myself, we even have a couple Plectron helmets hanging on the station wall. Most of us bought portable Sears 4 channel crystal scanners to carry. Had a Bearcat in my truck when I was 16, didn't join the department until I was 19. When I was full-time (we only had 3 full-time then) we had fire phones in our house. When a call came into the station our phone at home would ring so we could pick up and hear the call. At the time we had the tallest fire pole still in service in Missouri, it was a building built in 1905 that had a hay loft and a lot next to it for the horses. Our town got it's first motorized fire truck in 1914. Things have come a long way since then, I'm 59 now and still running fire & EMS calls.

Oh yeah every truck was a stick shift! All we have now is automatics.