Calling all older folks

[Jada59]

I've heard a LOT of people talk about the homework thing, that there didn't used to be as much homework. That's one thing I am envious of.

A lot of teenagers like someone (me and everyone I knew) get hooked on uppers because you just can't sleep. You go to school, go to work, go to your extracurriculors, do your homework, then it's like 4am and you have to get up at 5 to get ready for school- so catch my ass at 6 in the morning driving to school drinking shitty gas station coffee (or if you're a cool alternateen a Jones Soda) with a cigarette and a handful of yellowjackets.

I miss Jones. I don't see it a lot anymore.

I rarely had homework. Some math. Once in a while a report. I do work quickly though and what was supposed to be homework was stuff I did in class after I got my class work done.

In Kindergarten, I remember my daughter having two hours of math each night, followed by 20 minutes of word flash cards and a half an hour of reading. The reading was to be done to a tape. Very slowly.

Thing is, my daughter could already read! After a week of that nonsense I pretty much said "Fuck it!" I never made her do that again. I just initialed the parent sheet saying that she had done it.

She also had a lot of weird artwork. Such as... Read a book then use a milk carton to depict a character from the book. Hers was a black cat. I failed to see the purpose of that one!

 

[Polranny]

We all have our stories of graft, hardship and abuse. For me the eye opener was UK boarding school from 13 yrs old.
Single sex, cruel and sadistic teachers, one phone call home per week, parents disbelieving the sexual abuse that took place. 'Never mind old chap' my father would say, he knew what we had to endure but was in denial. To think he was paying to have me tortured!.
Yet it was worse for his generation. For him it was father killed at Jutland, mother in a wheelchair when he was 7, abuse at school followed by the horrors of a Japanese pow camp.
In reality mine is a lucky life. I am 70, my best friend killed himself at15, of a class of twenty he was the first, two others followed and three were killed in tragic accidents before the age of 20! I moan about my sexless marriage but I have my family and I have Lit. I am a thankful survivor and count my blessings.

 

[bellisarius]

Just ain't goin' they way you planned you little cunt..........is it?

Y9ou aren't nearly as smart as you think you're.

 

[dolf]

Lord, honey, you're tedious. Y'all make me tired.

Ignore the pathetic fossil. He's bitter about his continued existence.

This is actually a fascinating thread. You'd have loved working in elder care! I loved talking to my oldies about how much their world has changed. Some of them were literally born Victorian!

"All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."

 

[bellisarius]

Ignore the pathetic fossil. He's bitter about his continued existence.

This is actually a fascinating thread. You'd have loved working in elder care! I loved talking to my oldies about how much their world has changed. Some of them were literally born Victorian!

"All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."

Let's see. you advocate ignoring the "fossil" in a thread where the OP is soliciting the thought's of the 'fossils?';

Seriously, after all these years you should drop that burden. Don't get blinded girl....you're better than that.

 

[beew]

Ignore the pathetic fossil. He's bitter about his continued existence.

This is actually a fascinating thread. You'd have loved working in elder care! I loved talking to my oldies about how much their world has changed. Some of them were literally born Victorian!

"All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."

He's been at the receiving end of Candi's and SJWers dumbtwattery and attacks for months.

'Fossil'?

Let's see.
You Blurt twats feel offended when Lance calls you old hags for still posting naked selfies when you're pushing 50, , yet you continue to hurl ageist slurs at men who are not that older than you.

 

[pink]

I am 51, at present.

I don't know what to share?

 

[beew]

Ignore the pathetic fossil. He's bitter about his continued existence.

This is actually a fascinating thread. You'd have loved working in elder care! I loved talking to my oldies about how much their world has changed. Some of them were literally born Victorian!

"All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."

I actually think that you, LTR and a few others look fantastic and anyone else would share pics if they looked like you.

I just tried to turn it on you to show how much of buffoons you guys are.

 

[beew]

And mean girls.
Back to Lance's thread.

 

[AnneSexton]

there are people of all ages here, some in their 80's. a lot of young people have grown to middle-age since joining lit. and some of us are just, well, ageing!

Yeah. I’m an idiot. Sorry. Of course there are.

 

[Ann_Tagonist]

I am 51, at present.

I don't know what to share?

Candicame is a self confessed catfisher, not unlike your last Lit fling.

 

[CandiCame]

I am 51, at present.

I don't know what to share?

I'm up for anything. You're around my mom's age so I imagine it was all heavy metal and the first real wave of what would become nerd culture. The 80s seem so cool if you don't count the two plagues. I want the spandex and hard rock without having to choose between getting AIDS or being stabbed by a crackhead.

Hella horror too. I grew up on her favorite movies. 80s seem kinda magical to people who didn't live through it, I think. I don't know any other decade painted in neon light and dayglow. It seems like a dream...

 

[CandiCame]

Appalachia has always intrigued me. My ex husband's family lives somewhat near there. But closer to the Poconos. I've tried to buy books about the area but am coming up pretty dry. I have one that I started but it's more like history and statistics and not about people's real lives.

I lived in Wichita until I was 7 and it was totally different than the Seattle area where we moved to. I do "get" the differences in different parts of the coiuntry.

Heck, in Wichita in those days there were no bars. It was almost a "dry" area. You could drink at home but if you wanted to go out for a drink, you had to join a supper club and bring your own liquor. The bottle or bottles were kept on a shelf with your name on them. They could do mixed drinks. They supplied the rest. You supplied the liquor.

When we moved here, I think you could buy liquor on Sundays. I could be wrong on that. But you could not buy meat. Weird, huh? Could get meat in a restaurant but not a grocery store. They were not allowed to sell it.

I do think women could get into most bars back then. But some had a sign stating "No unacompanied women". They also had two entrances. One for single men and another for couples. A man could take two women in. But two women couldn't go together. I remember begging two guy friends to take me into one such bar near where we lived but they refused.

We've got dry counties too. I have a lot of family on the boundary and it's dry, which is a pain in the ass because all that means is you have to go over the county line and get liquor. And if the cops are feeling extra jackassy they'll pull you over for having it. Like WTF? You wanted us to drink and drive?

You couldn't buy meat?? I've never heard that one.

I still... can't wrap my head around why you would have a bar without women. Like I am having trouble with the core concept. The point of a bar is not to drink. It's cheaper to drink at home. The point of a bar is twofold- 1: To hang out with your friends (which will inevitably include people of all genders) or 2: To meet new people (so the gendered bars would only work if they were gay. But I still can't imagine someone checking for gender, like a bouncer.) Like this one is legit confusing me. I don't see the point of the bar.

To be fair, I guess my experience with bars has been somewhat limited, in that I'm not like, a barfly. I've never been like, "I'm gonna go to X bar every day" like I'm on fucking Cheers. I just go out with buddies. And I don't know anyone who is a barfly so I don't know what their mindset is.

 

[oggbashan]

Telephone

My parents had a telephone in 1949, the only one in the road of 120 houses. We only had a telephone because my father worked for the Ministry of Defence and might be called in to work at any time if there was an emergency.

But it was a shared, or party, line. We shared the line with two others. We only answered our telephone if it rang in sets of three. If single or double rings it was for the other people.

It didn't have a dial. To make a call, you picked it up, checked that none of the others were using it, and waited for the operator to say 'Number please'. Each exchange had a name e.g. Whitehall or Mayfair. You had to say the name and number very clearly. If the number you wanted was outside London you had to say 'Trunk call, please' and your local operator would transfer you to the Trunk operator. For a trunk call you might have to wait for minutes or hours for the operator to call you back when a line was available. If you wanted an overseas call it might take days to get a line.

Our telephone was used by the whole street for emergencies such as a pregnant woman going into labour or for an accident that needed an ambulance. Otherwise you had to use the telephone box two streets away and queue until the previous person had finished their call. It was always very busy between the hours of 8 and 9 am as people called their employer to report that they were ill and wouldn't be at work. There weren't many other people you knew who had telephones so if you wanted to speak to someone they had to go to the public call box or Post Office near their home at a specified time and wait for you to ring - if the call box wasn't being used by someone else.

There was only one car in the street. A travelling salesman had a 1936 Ford 8 (a very small car, not a V8). It was only at home late on Saturday and all day Sundays but he couldn't use it for family outings because petrol (US =gas) was rationed and he needed all his petrol for work. Sometimes he would let the neighbourhood kids sit in it and pretend to drive.

 

[CandiCame]

I was born in 1949. Almost no houses had central air conditioning. Rich people might have a window AC unit or two. You cooled the house in summer by opening the windows and using electric fans. A few public buildings (like movie theaters) which had AC boasted of the luxury.

NBC made the first coast-to-coast color broadcast when it telecast the Tournament of Roses Parade on January 1, 1954. And, along with CBS, they were the only two national networks in most markets. My city did not have an ABC affiliate until 1961.

When your TV broke down (like a tube burned out), a serviceman came to your house to fix it. You would no more take it IN somewhere than you would strap a broken washing machine to the top of your car.

Telephones were rotary dial. No push buttons until the 60s -- and they were optional for a LONG time. Long distance was a very big deal (expensive) in the United States. International long distance was unheard of. And all long distance calls went through a live switchboard operator. Cell phones did not exist.

When I was seven years old my father read me a newspaper story that President Eisenhower had signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of (June 29)1956 which would eventually make it possible to drive the family car non-stop (except for gas -- no traffic lights) from our house in Kentucky to Florida where we often vacationed.

I thought my dad had gone nuts.

I remember when polio was a common illness, and I remember the introduction of the Salk and Sabin vaccines that effectively eradicated it.

There were no microwave ovens.

There was no such thing as weather radar or satellites. Weather forecasting was primarily predicting on the basis of barometric readings of cities to the west and prevailing wind patterns.

Those were a few of my slices of early life.

I'm digging this.

The TV thing is crazy to me, in that you would have someone come to your house and fix it rather than just fixing it. Like it's weird to me that that would necessitate an outsider come into my home. But I also realized, as I was typing this that I was about to say, "Just google what's wrong with it and fix it your damn self."

And then I was like, "Oh right. I'm a spoiled bitch."

Dude I bet a lot of places went out of business when the internet came along and people could google for what used to be specified knowledge. Because you're kind of insinuating that you would once also have someone fix a washing machine instead of fixing it yourself.

Also though I still can't imagine you'd get like, a professional. There has to be that one guy everyone knows who can fix anything for $20 or will let you pay him in pizza and alcohol. I feel like that profession of jerryrigging has been around for as long as human civilization.

 

[Ann_Tagonist]

I'm up for anything. You're around my mom's age so I imagine it was all heavy metal and the first real wave of what would become nerd culture. The 80s seem so cool if you don't count the two plagues. I want the spandex and hard rock without having to choose between getting AIDS or being stabbed by a crackhead.

Hella horror too. I grew up on her favorite movies. 80s seem kinda magical to people who didn't live through it, I think. I don't know any other decade painted in neon light and dayglow. It seems like a dream...

She should share how she got catfished here and took it to r/l. Could be a valuable lesson for all.

 

[CandiCame]

It's a Pre-Pro school. Typical for a kid to go straight from school then be there till 9-10 at night. Sometimes 4 times a week. They made it easy for kids to eat. Tried to allow an hour or two break in there. If not, then 10 minutes between classes. They had a kitchenette, and snacks/drinks for sale behind the reception counter. The parent could even buy a snack card so the student didn't have to bring money.

But.. These kids were dropped off by another parent or an older sibling. The parent never thought about food and in some cases even refused to buy the snack card. I always kept a balance on my daughter's and told her she could use it for others. I also sometimes left food in the kitchenette like a big tub of energy snacks from Costco.

As for smoking, I started at 12. I don't smoke now.

Yeah, I mean, that's what I thought you were talking about. If I had been a parent I wouldn't have bought a snack card either, because of how easy it is to get deathly ill if you eat while you're dancing. I get that you're not supposed to fast, but I am JUST NOW learning that you can have light snacks (again, like fruit, not like vending machine shit) but if they were giving my kid a full meal or vending machine food I'd be down there tearing my ass because, again, it is so easy to get sick.

Plus it's just always dangerous to feed someone else's kid unless you know like EVERYTHING about them. People generally have good reasons for feeding their kids or not feeding their kids. If it's like one person letting a kid starve that's a bad sign, like obviously. But I'm just saying with a dance class in particular I've /been/ the kid who ate and got real sick from it. I actually kind of think it was irresponsible for the to be selling snacks at all. Like parents have a pretty good reason to not want kids to eat during a dance class. That reason is projectile vomiting that leads to abdominal hemorrhages that make your core hurt for days because you tried to do intense cardio on a full stomach.

Now I've been to dance competitions where it's a trip and we had the two hour break like that and I've eaten and not gotten sick. But that's because you can eat something in the first half hour and then give yourself a lot of time to come down. So I totally get how you might let them eat then if they ate right when they came off the floor and had like 90 minutes to come down. That's probably the only time I wouldn't be really weary about it.

Didn't you also dance? It's weird to me that you've never eaten and gotten sick from it. Especially leading up to competition season when you're just constantly going for like 6 or 7 hour practices. I've seen people do classical solos, like depending on the genre, like ballet especially, on like 500kcal a day, because there's so much practice and you just can't eat during a dance practice. You just start living on smoothies. That's more for teenagers when people are actually talking about making audition tapes and shit and the competitions actually mean something, though.

Congrats on kicking the cigs, btw! I'm trying so hard. I'm making it an actual goal.

 

[lovetoread]

not everyone on here is an old

everyone seems to forget that there is actually a genx era

 

[oggbashan]

Televisions

My eldest aunt was a high flyer. She was born during Queen Victoria's reign but trained initially as a Lady Typewriter on legal documents - a very high tech role in the Edwardian era. She went on to become a Secretary when most Secretaries were men and the role was much more significant. Eventually she became the Company Secretary of several Company Boards - one of the permanent Board members and number two only to the Company Chairman.

Throughout her working life she earned substantially more than her younger brothers despite women being generally paid less than men. She could afford to buy a television when test transmissions from Alexandra Palace started in 1936.

Her television cost 300 guineas - I know, from a previous post in this thread that guineas ceased to be legal tender in the early 19th Century but expensive goods were often priced in guineas because the amount appeared less - and 300 guineas would buy a small family car at the time. Think £10,000 in modern terms.

TV programmes ended with the start of WW2 and resumed in the late 1940s. But my aunt's television was obsolete. It was a Baird system and the new broadcasts weren't. So she bought a new one - 400 guineas this time. It was the size of a 4-drawer filing cabinet and had a six inch screen. There was only one channel - BBC and only for a few hours each day. The family sat in a circle watching the tiny screen.

For the coronation in 1953 she traded in her TV and bought a new one with a 12" screen. Apart from doubling the screen size the definition was far clearer. Thirty members of the family crammed into the living room to watch for hours, sustained by tea and cakes.

In 1955 ITV, UK's second channel and first commercial channel, started broadcasting. My aunt bought an add-on box that plugged between the aerial and the TV so we could watch ITV. To change channel you unplugged the ITV box, replaced the aerial, and fiddled with the controls to get a decent BBC picture, reversing the process for ITV. Each change took about 5 minutes so we either lost the end of a program or the beginning of a new one.

 

[CandiCame]

I rarely had homework. Some math. Once in a while a report. I do work quickly though and what was supposed to be homework was stuff I did in class after I got my class work done.

In Kindergarten, I remember my daughter having two hours of math each night, followed by 20 minutes of word flash cards and a half an hour of reading. The reading was to be done to a tape. Very slowly.

Thing is, my daughter could already read! After a week of that nonsense I pretty much said "Fuck it!" I never made her do that again. I just initialed the parent sheet saying that she had done it.

She also had a lot of weird artwork. Such as... Read a book then use a milk carton to depict a character from the book. Hers was a black cat. I failed to see the purpose of that one!

Oh, I actually never did the busywork. Because it was busywork. Anything I had to turn in I just didn't do. And I initialed all that shit myself and signed my own permission slips and whatnot. Signed my brothers' too so they'd all look the same.

I legit thought everyone did that and made the mistake of doing it in front of my financial aid officer in college because I just... genuinely hand to god somehow missed the fact that your parents were supposed to do that. Like intellectually I knew but in my heart I didn't, I guess. The only time I ever told anybody I needed something signed was if I needed money, and then I would tell my gramps and he would vastly overestimate how much money I needed, and it was awesome.

I'd be like, "Hey my class is going to see horses or whatever, I need $5 for lunch" and he'd hand me a $20 bill and be like,

"J (my brother) is going too right?"

And I'd be like, "No that's not... how grades work. I'm older than him. We're not in the same class."

And he'd be like, "Buy J's food out of that."

And then I would just have $15 profit.

Sometimes I'd shop around. Call all 3 living grandparents, my good uncle, and my great grandparents. Watch my ass strolling around the Challenger center just FLUSH with cash.

God I miss childhood when $50 was an obscene amount of money.

 

[CandiCame]

We all have our stories of graft, hardship and abuse. For me the eye opener was UK boarding school from 13 yrs old.
Single sex, cruel and sadistic teachers, one phone call home per week, parents disbelieving the sexual abuse that took place. 'Never mind old chap' my father would say, he knew what we had to endure but was in denial. To think he was paying to have me tortured!.
Yet it was worse for his generation. For him it was father killed at Jutland, mother in a wheelchair when he was 7, abuse at school followed by the horrors of a Japanese pow camp.
In reality mine is a lucky life. I am 70, my best friend killed himself at15, of a class of twenty he was the first, two others followed and three were killed in tragic accidents before the age of 20! I moan about my sexless marriage but I have my family and I have Lit. I am a thankful survivor and count my blessings.

Wow dude this is... yeah that's fucked up, bro. That's awful.

 

[CandiCame]

My eldest aunt was a high flyer. She was born during Queen Victoria's reign but trained initially as a Lady Typewriter on legal documents - a very high tech role in the Edwardian era. She went on to become a Secretary when most Secretaries were men and the role was much more significant. Eventually she became the Company Secretary of several Company Boards - one of the permanent Board members and number two only to the Company Chairman.

Throughout her working life she earned substantially more than her younger brothers despite women being generally paid less than men. She could afford to buy a television when test transmissions from Alexandra Palace started in 1936.

Her television cost 300 guineas - I know, from a previous post in this thread that guineas ceased to be legal tender in the early 19th Century but expensive goods were often priced in guineas because the amount appeared less - and 300 guineas would buy a small family car at the time. Think £10,000 in modern terms.

TV programmes ended with the start of WW2 and resumed in the late 1940s. But my aunt's television was obsolete. It was a Baird system and the new broadcasts weren't. So she bought a new one - 400 guineas this time. It was the size of a 4-drawer filing cabinet and had a six inch screen. There was only one channel - BBC and only for a few hours each day. The family sat in a circle watching the tiny screen.

For the coronation in 1953 she traded in her TV and bought a new one with a 12" screen. Apart from doubling the screen size the definition was far clearer. Thirty members of the family crammed into the living room to watch for hours, sustained by tea and cakes.

In 1955 ITV, UK's second channel and first commercial channel, started broadcasting. My aunt bought an add-on box that plugged between the aerial and the TV so we could watch ITV. To change channel you unplugged the ITV box, replaced the aerial, and fiddled with the controls to get a decent BBC picture, reversing the process for ITV. Each change took about 5 minutes so we either lost the end of a program or the beginning of a new one.

Oh my god your aunt sounds awesome! I LOVE the Victorian/Edwardian aesthetics. She sounds so steampunk. I kinda want to draw her but I know nothing about her so it would be so inaccurate but she sounds so cool.

 

[Saint Peter]

I worked with a union electrician who is older than I but not by much. He and his brother were having a BB gun fight while the parents were away. The shots were simultaneous. The sparky was hit in the corner of the eye, the BB traveling inside the skin of his face. A strange lump in his cheek until the end of days.

The electrician's shot went off target and took out the picture window on the front of the home.

It was the 1970's. Which brother got in trouble?

 

[CandiCame]

My parents had a telephone in 1949, the only one in the road of 120 houses. We only had a telephone because my father worked for the Ministry of Defence and might be called in to work at any time if there was an emergency.

But it was a shared, or party, line. We shared the line with two others. We only answered our telephone if it rang in sets of three. If single or double rings it was for the other people.

It didn't have a dial. To make a call, you picked it up, checked that none of the others were using it, and waited for the operator to say 'Number please'. Each exchange had a name e.g. Whitehall or Mayfair. You had to say the name and number very clearly. If the number you wanted was outside London you had to say 'Trunk call, please' and your local operator would transfer you to the Trunk operator. For a trunk call you might have to wait for minutes or hours for the operator to call you back when a line was available. If you wanted an overseas call it might take days to get a line.

Our telephone was used by the whole street for emergencies such as a pregnant woman going into labour or for an accident that needed an ambulance. Otherwise you had to use the telephone box two streets away and queue until the previous person had finished their call. It was always very busy between the hours of 8 and 9 am as people called their employer to report that they were ill and wouldn't be at work. There weren't many other people you knew who had telephones so if you wanted to speak to someone they had to go to the public call box or Post Office near their home at a specified time and wait for you to ring - if the call box wasn't being used by someone else.

There was only one car in the street. A travelling salesman had a 1936 Ford 8 (a very small car, not a V8). It was only at home late on Saturday and all day Sundays but he couldn't use it for family outings because petrol (US =gas) was rationed and he needed all his petrol for work. Sometimes he would let the neighbourhood kids sit in it and pretend to drive.

I have a question about this if that's cool? I've heard about party lines before, but I thought they connected a bunch of different people on the same line. So if your house was the only one with a phone, who were the other people?

Also was it a Dr Who phone booth? Please say it was a Dr Who phone booth. Was it bigger on the inside?

 

[SpeareChucker]

They would not run a line to just one home due to the prohibitive cost of the new technology (unless, of course, that household had the wealth to install the necessary hardware/lines). A business would have the resources to employ private lines, for example where the common homeowner could not.

It's just like when TVs went flat and got big. Only the wealthy could afford them at first, the little guy had to make do. But as technology improved and volume started going up, cost went down and it became less of a luxury and more a facet of life. It was the same with phones (and almost any other emerging technology. Ask me about the changing landscape of computer use if you want another great example.)