Calling all Older (than me) folks

butters said:

i cannot believe i typed that! i know it was 20, and 21 made a guinea! i need to go edit that for reals

and HI, torchy!

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I only posted to get your attention. Nice to see you

CandiCame said:

I know a lot of people in that age range who went to grade school and then decided not to go to high school, because apparently you could just DO that and no one would make you, and instead started working in the mines because the logic was, "If I'm going out that far I ought to be getting paid" which is buckwild to me.

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When I was at school you could still leave at age 14 and get a job. Now people leaving with degrees are vying for those same sort of jobs.

My eldest aunt earned more than her brothers even when women were generally paid much less than men.

In 1938 she bought a television to watch the experimental transmissions from Alexandra Palace. It cost the same as a medium size family car. At the outbreak of war in 1939 the transmissions stopped for the duration and did not start again until the late 1940s.

Unfortunately her television was useless because she had the Baird system that was obsolete. She bought a new one, again costing as much as a medium size car. It was the size of a four-drawer foolscap filing cabinet and had a six inch screen. She traded it in for a new one before the 1953 coronation. The latest set was half the overall size but with a ten inch screen. Thirty family members crammed into the living room to watch the coronation.

Later on she tried some enhancements - a stick-on magnifying Frenzel screen that made the ten inch screen look like a 12 inch, and later a 'coloriser' that made the picture blue at the top, yellow at the bottom and normal in the middle. The coloriser was not a success and was thrown away.

In 1955 she got a second channel - commercial ITV. The only way to get that was to plug in a black box between the aerial and TV, and remove the black box to revert to BBC.

oggbashan said:

My eldest aunt earned more than her brothers even when women were generally paid much less than men.

In 1938 she bought a television to watch the experimental transmissions from Alexandra Palace. It cost the same as a medium size family car. At the outbreak of war in 1939 the transmissions stopped for the duration and did not start again until the late 1940s.

Unfortunately her television was useless because she had the Baird system that was obsolete. She bought a new one, again costing as much as a medium size car. It was the size of a four-drawer foolscap filing cabinet and had a six inch screen. She traded it in for a new one before the 1953 coronation. The latest set was half the overall size but with a ten inch screen. Thirty family members crammed into the living room to watch the coronation.

Later on she tried some enhancements - a stick-on magnifying Frenzel screen that made the ten inch screen look like a 12 inch, and later a 'coloriser' that made the picture blue at the top, yellow at the bottom and normal in the middle. The coloriser was not a success and was thrown away.

In 1955 she got a second channel - commercial ITV. The only way to get that was to plug in a black box between the aerial and TV, and remove the black box to revert to BBC.

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What was the colorizer supposed to do? Make grayscale color? I'm just trying to figure out how that would work.

older

the need is so strong to give pleasure to younger, and to help them to learn

hey...

I was born in 1954.
Gas was 11 cents a gallon where I lived, it cost more than a loaf of bread. Good thing was that we ate tortillas not that white bread stuff that the white people ate. Had my first taste of racial predjudice on the first day of school. This gorgeous little blonde girl, with the MOST beautiful crystalline blue eyes said--- "EEEEEW, I'm not sitting next to a Mexican!!!" I will never forget her or her name, that has haunted me ever since.
Back then it was still safe, to settle friendly differences of opinion, by expressing your rights and a couple quick lefts as well.
Music was still a common binding force for people, that and catastrophes.
My Dad hated white people and he didn't trust no one, no matter what color they were but disaster struck, my Dad never saw color as a hindrance. We were living in an area that was right on the shore of Lake Erie. This one spring after the thaw, we had terrible flooding. In our neighborhood alone 200 hundred families got drove out of their homes because of the flood waters. My dad spent the better part of a 2 weeks helping people who had spent a lot of their spare time bad mouthing and cussing my Dad and Mexicans in general, helping these same people get stuff together and loading trucks or throwing shit out to keep what was good from getting mouldy.
Imagine all these white people surprise when the right to vote was given to black people!?
SHIIIIIIIT!!! They almost forgot about my dad.

smile

oneblueye said:

I was born in 1954.
Gas was 11 cents a gallon where I lived, it cost more than a loaf of bread. Good thing was that we ate tortillas not that white bread stuff that the white people ate. Had my first taste of racial predjudice on the first day of school. This gorgeous little blonde girl, with the MOST beautiful crystalline blue eyes said--- "EEEEEW, I'm not sitting next to a Mexican!!!" I will never forget her or her name, that has haunted me ever since.
Back then it was still safe, to settle friendly differences of opinion, by expressing your rights and a couple quick lefts as well.
Music was still a common binding force for people, that and catastrophes.
My Dad hated white people and he didn't trust no one, no matter what color they were but disaster struck, my Dad never saw color as a hindrance. We were living in an area that was right on the shore of Lake Erie. This one spring after the thaw, we had terrible flooding. In our neighborhood alone 200 hundred families got drove out of their homes because of the flood waters. My dad spent the better part of a 2 weeks helping people who had spent a lot of their spare time bad mouthing and cussing my Dad and Mexicans in general, helping these same people get stuff together and loading trucks or throwing shit out to keep what was good from getting mouldy.
Imagine all these white people surprise when the right to vote was given to black people!?
SHIIIIIIIT!!! They almost forgot about my dad.

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I was born in 1948 in the Uk when the going was tuff but I survived and I learned o forgive and help people, Now I am mote tolerate and love to give pleasure

oneblueye said:

I was born in 1954.
Gas was 11 cents a gallon where I lived, it cost more than a loaf of bread. Good thing was that we ate tortillas not that white bread stuff that the white people ate. Had my first taste of racial predjudice on the first day of school. This gorgeous little blonde girl, with the MOST beautiful crystalline blue eyes said--- "EEEEEW, I'm not sitting next to a Mexican!!!" I will never forget her or her name, that has haunted me ever since.
Back then it was still safe, to settle friendly differences of opinion, by expressing your rights and a couple quick lefts as well.
Music was still a common binding force for people, that and catastrophes.
My Dad hated white people and he didn't trust no one, no matter what color they were but disaster struck, my Dad never saw color as a hindrance. We were living in an area that was right on the shore of Lake Erie. This one spring after the thaw, we had terrible flooding. In our neighborhood alone 200 hundred families got drove out of their homes because of the flood waters. My dad spent the better part of a 2 weeks helping people who had spent a lot of their spare time bad mouthing and cussing my Dad and Mexicans in general, helping these same people get stuff together and loading trucks or throwing shit out to keep what was good from getting mouldy.
Imagine all these white people surprise when the right to vote was given to black people!?
SHIIIIIIIT!!! They almost forgot about my dad.

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Racism was different in the UK. The country was historically overwhelmingly white; almost exclusively so. But the 'empire' had been ruled from London for a century and before that it was a major colonial power. There was a heritage = a folk history - indoctrinated into the population that somehow this was good for the world. Black and brown people were infantilised in British culture. The Second World War broke that.

For the first time, with conscription, millions of ordinary men came face to face with the reality of empire. My uncles and dad served in India, the Far East, Egypt and Palestine during that time. They, and all their friends, were disgusted by what they saw and horrified by the attitudes prevalent among administrators and officers (the same bastards that treated them like shit). That didn't mean there was much solidarity with the locals - they were a uniformed alien force after all, would you trust them? So they came home with a principled solidarity but very little experience of personal relationships. Attempts to maintain empire after the war in the face of independence struggles were basically rejected by the people who had seem what went on there.

That continued after the mass post war immigration. Mostly men came over to do service jobs and factory shifts us native preferred not to. They were living almost exclusively in the very poorest areas. I for instance never had more than one or two non-White pupils in any of the schools I attended. That is one or two in several hundred (it took a decade for wives and children to follow husbands, or marriages to be made in their new homes). I was lucky, I got a job in a poor neighbourhood at a very young age where people tolerated my ignorance and were willing to accept I was well meaning. For lots of my contemporaries, the ingrained concept of the other remained unchallenged. It is still strong in culture, politics and the media.

We have this ridiculous situation where frightened white people are convinced that there's millions of people running about the place who don't 'belong'. But they have no qualms at all about being treated by a non-White doctor for instance and love the kinds of foods I never saw when I was little. With the EU it's even more bizarre. Somehow it's Poles and Bulgarians who are the problem, whilst Spaniards or French people are tolerable; the Italians fall somewhere in the middle.

It's strange to hear Trump and his British equivalents resurrecting 'send 'em back'. There are racist scandals in the immigration department, police etc. But those are perpetrated by people acting illegally, protected, if at all, by conservative politicians - no British cop, for instance, with a reputation for brutalising or killing black people is ever going to have much of a career even if they're not actually imprisoned (unlike the US). There's no grassroots pressure for it to be normalised. So the fascists rant about the white European threat using tropes from an unremembered past. Most are just confused by it all.

My childhood was something like a cross between The Sandlot and O Brother Where Art Thou?

I can remember gas wars and gas being 19 cents a gallon. All soft drinks are Coke, just preceded by what flavor they were (orange Coke = Fanta's orange drink). Movies were great then, fantastic productions and huge events. Music, today's digital "improved" you can't ding in key we can fix that era can't match Sinatra, Bennett, or even The Beach Boys.
Living on a farm, lightning bugs were everywhere, frogs filled the creek and ponds. Adventures were had wandering the woods, finding arrowheads. Work was hard, but we ate good old Kentucky style farm cooking from things we grew and raised. I remember meat hanging in the curing closet in the attic. The snow so high during the blizzard of '78 that I could walk over the fence without stepping up. Trust me, carrying buckets of water to water the cattle during that was not fun. The old farmer across the road taught me how to drive. A 1964 Ford truck with tree-on-the-tree. He smoked/chewed a cigar the while time. At 13, I was driving 10 wheel grain trucks.
I will tell you this, my kids are in their 30's and experienced the same childhood as I. Trips to the barber shop, not hair stylist, on Saturdays, followed by a trip to the baseball card shop. When my boys (3 of 'em) were 5 or 6, we bought them bib overalls, straw hats, and cane fishing poles. Those little fellers didn't miss too many days heading down the tracks to their fishing hole.
I suppose we make life best as we see fit. Things definitely are different now, but we can keep our same values and celebrate our old ways of life and pass them along.

haha_on_me said:

My childhood was something like a cross between The Sandlot and O Brother Where Art Thou?

I can remember gas wars and gas being 19 cents a gallon. All soft drinks are Coke, just preceded by what flavor they were (orange Coke = Fanta's orange drink). Movies were great then, fantastic productions and huge events. Music, today's digital "improved" you can't ding in key we can fix that era can't match Sinatra, Bennett, or even The Beach Boys.
Living on a farm, lightning bugs were everywhere, frogs filled the creek and ponds. Adventures were had wandering the woods, finding arrowheads. Work was hard, but we ate good old Kentucky style farm cooking from things we grew and raised. I remember meat hanging in the curing closet in the attic. The snow so high during the blizzard of '78 that I could walk over the fence without stepping up. Trust me, carrying buckets of water to water the cattle during that was not fun. The old farmer across the road taught me how to drive. A 1964 Ford truck with tree-on-the-tree. He smoked/chewed a cigar the while time. At 13, I was driving 10 wheel grain trucks.
I will tell you this, my kids are in their 30's and experienced the same childhood as I. Trips to the barber shop, not hair stylist, on Saturdays, followed by a trip to the baseball card shop. When my boys (3 of 'em) were 5 or 6, we bought them bib overalls, straw hats, and cane fishing poles. Those little fellers didn't miss too many days heading down the tracks to their fishing hole.
I suppose we make life best as we see fit. Things definitely are different now, but we can keep our same values and celebrate our old ways of life and pass them along.

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That is a cool story.

I learned to drive in a 1943 surplus army truck when I was 12. My dad worked on a dairy at the time and he needed me to drive the truck while he drove the tractor with the silage chopper attached. I was suppose to keep pace with him and keep the truck in a position under the discharge shut of the chopper. It took me three passes around the field, with him screaming and cussing from the tractor seat before I got the hang of keeping the truck in the right position for the chopped alfalfa to hit the bed of the truck.

On the fourth pass I thought I was doing pretty good (he hadn't yelled a cuss word at me for a while). As we began to turn a corner I swung the steering wheel but the truck kept going straight. I panicked and kept try to turn. The steering wheel spun but the truck kept going straight. We later found out the splines on the steering shaft had stripped.

I finally stopped about 20' from the irrigation ditch that ran down one side of the field. My dad bailed off the tractor and came running over yelling at me. When he got to the truck I tried to tell him the problem but he was so damned mad he opened the door, jerked me out of the cab and as he climbed in was muttering about,"God damn stupid kids". He slammed the truck into gear, revved the engine, popped the clutch as he spun the steering wheel and drove straight into the irrigation ditch. I can still see the image of my dad sitting in that cab, the door open, the front wheels in the irrigation ditch and the rear wheels off the ground.

Now one thing you should never do as a 12 year old kid, especially if your father is a gumpy old shit and has done something rather stupid, and that's laugh. I couldn't help it, I fell down laughing. I got my ass beat for it but it was funny. Anyway that was my introduction to driving.


Comshaw

new

I'm over 70 do I qualify?

I was born in 57. TV was just the thing. I remember playing baseball in the street until mom would yell,out “SSSTTTTAAAAAARRRRR TTTTRRRREEEKKK IS ON!” Oh shit, it was assholes and elbow. Kids jetting through the sunset for their families TV rooms. Our television was an 18 inch black and white. We kids always sat on the floor about two feet away from it. Mom would always tell us “back up or you’ll burn your eyes out”. I would stare into the mirror at my eyes every morning to make sure I didn’t see any signs of burning.

Mom would give me a dime every afternoon so I could ride my bike to the Safeway and buy a fresh loaf of bread.

We road bikes for tens of miles a day. Built snow forts the size of a school buses. A haircut was a big thing. Dad took us, had to talk over the process with the barber. Put us up in the HUGE barber chair with this big leather booster seat. Then the barber would say something like “well young man, let’s spruce that head up, the girls will be impressed “. Girls? I thought girls were just slower versions of boys. I wondered why the haircut was such a big deal, it was always a buzz cut anyway.
The barber would splash some sort of smelly water all over the sides of your head and neck, fluff out the cover and say “The girls we be after you now!”. Huh? WHAt?

Summer was day after day of baseball, Army, BB guns, sword fighting with willow branches and pirates. No one cared about boys and girls, phones, or inside games. Popularity was based on baseball ability and fishing.

When I was nine, the summer of '64 started about the first of May. My parents pulled my sis and I out of school early and we headed down the Alcan to visit my dad's family in the lower 48. It took 6 days before we pulled into my grandparents driveway. After 2 weeks, my parents headed back to Alaska, stranding us kids with the grandparents for a couple of months. I commandeered a cousin's bike and used it to explore the new world. At the end of two months, when we were shipped home on NW Airlines, I knew every inch of the land bounded by the expressways and major arterials around my grandparents house. I only slept in my bed at home for a single night when I was shipped off to help my uncle work the family set net site. Grandpa had been injured in a fishing accident and my uncle needed some assistance on the beach. I was about as useful as tits on a boar hog for the first few days (yes, I was constantly reminded of this), and after a mountain of cussing from my uncle, I got into the swing of things. I picked fish, learned to drive the Allis Chalmers B tractor, pulled nets, etc. on fishing days. And on non-fishing days, we armored the beach cabin piling with logs and timbers, maintained the gear, etc. At the end of the normal season, we pulled all the running lines, skiffs, and gear off the beach. That month and a half on the beach forged a bond of mutual respect with my uncle that continues to this day.

Interesting, many of you are older than me and some are older than my parents!