July 20, 1969.... Where Were You?

I was an angry teen when Cobain was alive. Two when Elvis died.

I remember a long trip from south Florida to Pennsylvania in which my father played the same Elvis 8-Track over, and over, and over... and over.

Hell, I did that last weekend.

On acid.

The information highway of the 60's, the party lines. Your neighbor knew everything that was going on in your house or family!

zap

Ditto.

To heck with the '60s . . . we were still using party lines into the '80s where I grew up in Maine. Fortunately, the two other parties on the line were my grandparents and my uncle/aunt.

And . . . while I am too young to remember it . . . as a toddler my parents said they still used the old-fashioned crank phone in their brand new 1970 vintage split level Ranch.

It's not that old Daksy . . . I remember getting up early on Saturday morning and having to wait for the test pattern to change -- on one of two or three stations we got the morning always started with a very odd-looking cartoon rendition of "American Pie" with a local TV personality's head flying off . . . and then it was time for Looney Tunes.

Wringer washers . . . my grandmother was using them well into the 1980s.

AM radios . . . FM was still in its infancy when I was growing up. Most folks were still tuning into AM stations.

Milkmen . . . I was too young to remember, but my Mother said they got their milk from one when I was a toddler.

Push mowers . . . Got me there . . . then again Dad was always tinkering and building equipment to make life easier . . . such as the time he built a riding mower . . . but forgot to add brakes . . . he discovered that when he went downhill . . . with me on it. Fortunately, I was a toddler so I don't remember much about that experience . . . well, actually I don't remember anything.

Cap guns . . . kids with their Air Soft guns would laugh at how much we enjoyed buying caps and shooting them off.

Not since two weeks ago . . . maybe I'll do so tonight for "old times sake."

P.S. No one come by between the hours of 5:15 and 5:30 p.m. . . . you have been warned . . . if you stop by and your eyes start bleeding you have no one to fault but yourself.

I used to wrap it in electrical tape first.

What? I demand you change your "good ol days" quote. This is new information. You must admit; it is "good".

Counting Leap Years? Or not?

Around 4,334 days. Cobain was one of my Idols back then... As for Elvis, he was near Clarion Pa a couple weeks ago

I still remember the day Cobain died, listening to it on the radio in my parents car on the way home from some after school activity. Elvis, well, I was still in diapers then.

Its amazing how fast things change... I'm certainly one of the younger folks here but I look at my toddlers and think of all the things even I can remember as a kid in the 80s that would just be stories to them... Black and white TV, having to set the choke to start the family car, hand crank windows, vinyl (well, kids will know that one because Im holding on to mine), cassette tapes, VHS, laserdiscs, floppy disks..... Looking up books in a paper card catalog at the library, turning the big antenna on the roof whenever you change the channel on the TV, etc.

I bet even CDs and paper phone books will be a relic by the time they are in high school.