Calling all older folks

[CandiCame]

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.)

No, I get that. My question was how did he have a party line if nobody else in town had a phone? If the other 200 homes had to use the Dr Who phone or his phone-

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/9StMuWF4MvQ/hqdefault.jpg

 

[beew]

I am 51, at present.

I don't know what to share?

I had a similar initial reaction.
I'm in my forties, and save for technology -which is a minor aspect-
I can't imagine myself, my parents or grandparents life as being any different than Millenials'.

But then I remember how I navigated my own Midlife crisis, by inadvertently drawing from the wisdom of other cultures and changing my notion of time from linear to circular.

Your hair gets grey, your outside priorities change
but deep inside you are the same person undergoing the same journey, just at a higher level of the spiral.

 

[SpeareChucker]

I remember a time when the coal truck delivered your heat, the milkman delivered all of your dairy and the garbage man went to the garbage and took it to the truck for disposal and then returned the cans, usually 55-gallon metal drums...



My grandfather witnessed not only man's first flight, but his first steps on the moon.

 

[lovetoread]

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?

rule #1, never break a window

 

[bellisarius]

I remember a time when the coal truck delivered your heat, the milkman delivered all of your dairy and the garbage man went to the garbage and took it to the truck for disposal and then returned the cans, usually 55-gallon metal drums...



My grandfather witnessed not only man's first flight, but his first steps on the moon.

And I still remember the smell of a coal fired furnace.

 

[SpeareChucker]

No doubt.

We had some coal lying about at the lake house and just burning that brought back the memories of my grandparent's home.

 

[oggbashan]

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?

In theory, we didn't know who the other people on the party lines were, except that we were on the same telephone exchange. In practice we did because if we were expecting an important telephone call we would contact the other two on the same line to try to keep the line free at that time.

The telephone box:

https://www.mediastorehouse.com/p/213/red-london-telephone-box-london-england-9972601.jpg

The Doctor Who box was a Police Telephone box for use by the Policeman to contact his police station or for the public to call for Police:

http://www.the-telephone-box.co.uk/assets/banners/banner-furn-c.png

The nearest one to us was about 400 yards away.

 

[oggbashan]

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.

My aunt was awesome. She was tiny, about 4 feet 10 inches tall but you knew when she was in a room.

In her 80s she started a youth club for lads who had been in trouble with the Police. They were all bigger than her and aged up to 21. She organised activities, outings and events for them. She used to get referrals from the courts and probation services.

When she died, aged 90, over 100 of the current and past members of her youth club came to her funeral service and six of them carried her coffin. The Police also attended but there was no trouble at all despite most of the attendees having extensive Police records. Her youth club still exists, 30 years later, run by past members, many of whom never knew her but they still have a minute's silence on the anniversary of her death.

 

[Colonel Hogan]

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.

You had a professional come fix your TV set because there was nothing "portable" about them physically, and there was nothing user friendly about them electronically. There was no "plug and play" or integrated circuits. The earliest home TVs predated the commercial implementation of transistors by almost a decade.

Do it yourself? Fine, ma'am. Your problem is in here somewhere:

https://www.boxcarcabin.com/rca-ctc-16-round-tube-tv.jpg

 

[oggbashan]

Visit to a country cousin

In the late 1940s my parents took me to see my mother's cousin who lived in rural Essex.

We travelled on the Underground, Central Line, to Epping and then changed to an ancient steam train to Ongar where we were met by the cousin with a pony and trap. She drove us about five miles to her bungalow.

The bungalow's arrangement fascinated me as a child:

Lighting: candles and paraffin lamps. The lamps had to be cleaned and refilled each morning from the paraffin drum in the scullery.

Heating: coal fires in each room with open grates except for the kitchen range which did the cooking and had a built in boiler for hot water. The boiler had a water gauge, was filled up by a galvanised watering can or from a tap from the upstairs tank (see below), and must not be allowed to be less than half full. A large kettle, on a swinging arm, was moved over the open part of the range's fire to make tea.

Plumbing: All water came from the bungalow's private well. There was a hand pump and cold water tap by the butler sink. There was a tank in the loft which was filled by turning a valve to direct the pumped water up to the tank, from which it flowed down into the sink. The tank provided a constant flow for washing vegetables instead of using one hand for the pump and one for the vegetables. Hot water was taken by bucket from the range's boiler.

Toilet: There was a wooden hut on wheels at the end of the garden perched above a trench. Anyone using the hut would wipe their backside with a square of last week's newspaper and cover whatever they had deposited with earth from a bucket. The earth had been roasted in the lower oven of the kitchen range and the arrangement was surprisingly smell-free. When the earth level had filled that part of the trench the hut would be pushed along to be above an open section. Next year, the hut would be moved forward or back to a new trench and last year's trench area would be used for growing celery. I didn't like celery!

The rear garden was completely given over to growing vegetables. Beyond the garden was a wooded area where she kept chickens and pigs. The front garden was a typical English cottage garden covered in flowers with no grass. The grass was in the field where the pony grazed.

It was completely different to the suburb where we lived with hot and cold mains water, sewage, electricity and gas, but the land around her house seemed like a massive private park to me.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

My birth started the Korean War. I was a mistake, just like the war. Back then my parents, parents made them get married. I and the war continued on for another few years. The war stopped, I didn't. The first place we lived was an apartment we shared with my mother's brother's family. My cousin, born a couple of months before me was my bestie growing up. When she walked at eleven months, I walked at nine month. We eventually moved and lived in a duplex that had been build for the workers of the nearby Ford manufacturing plant. It burned down in my sixth year. We were homeless, but my grandmother took us in. By that time we were destitute.

My dad drove a cab at night to make extra money. He had a day job, but I didn't know what it was until later in life. He was a draftsman. My mom didn't work, she had two boys to take care of. Eventually, we moved out of my grandparents house and into an apartment. My aunt and uncle lived there with my cousin in an another apartment.

I remember catching grasshoppers in the backyard, an apartment building with a back yard was common back then. As I got older we moved into a house that my parent bought for $17,000. A 3 bedroom house with a full basement. It had a great back yard. There was a prairie about three blocks away where us kids could explore.

We didn't get our first TV until 1959. It was used and was a black and white set. Color sets didn't come out until a lot later. My grandparents were the first ones to get a color set and then most of the shows on TV at the time where still only broadcast in black and white.

For the rest of my childhood, I lived in that house. When my parents finally sold it when my dad got transferred to Atlanta, they sold it for $52,000+ in 1976. I had gotten married and was in the Air Force at the time.

So that's my childhood, you can figure out how old I am, it really easy.

I was in the service for 8 years, then went back to school and became a computer programmer, no PC's back then, just Mainframes and Mini-Computers. I did that for a long time eventually becoming a Software Engineer.

I traveled all over the country and the world when I was in the service and for my job while a computer person. Actually, look at my author profile for all the placed I went, lived, mostly lived and what I did in my adult life.

Was I happy? Happiness is relative. Like time it slips away and passes us by.

Am I happy now? A this very moment, yes. Who knows what will happen tomorrow? Or in an hour?

 

[oggbashan]

You had a professional come fix your TV set because there was nothing "portable" about them physically, and there was nothing user friendly about them electronically. There was no "plug and play" or integrated circuits. The earliest home TVs predated the commercial implementation of transistors by almost a decade.

Do it yourself? Fine, ma'am. Your problem is in here somewhere:

My aunt's TVs had vertical hold, horizontal hold and other user controls. Whenever we switched channels we would have to use one or other of the controls to stop the picture scrolling upwards, or sideways or just too large or too small. The BBC test card was important for fine-tuning the TV at least once a week.

http://www.meldrum.co.uk/mhp/testcard/bbc_test/tcc320.jpg

 

[oralaccents]

My aunt's TVs had vertical hold, horizontal hold and other user controls. Whenever we switched channels we would have to use one or other of the controls to stop the picture scrolling upwards, or sideways or just too large or too small. The BBC test card was important for fine-tuning the TV at least once a week.

http://www.meldrum.co.uk/mhp/testcard/bbc_test/tcc320.jpg

So that's what the Test Pattern was for.

You'd think I'd have figured that out by now, given its name.

 

[Que]

That TV thing is so cool. That's the kinda stuff I was talking about, not like, "Who was president?" like I could look up online. I mean like human stuff. Like packing a TV for 9 blocks in 59.

Wait you furnished an apartment with $250? I mean, I guess you could because inflation but like... where'd you work/how much did you make? Because that blows my damn mind.

Like I mean I get that you can't get a second-hand TV right now for $20 but if I tried real hard I could probably get one for $50 so that makes a little bit of sense to me. But the 'furnish an apartment with a nursery in it' thing blows my mind. You must have had a hell of a baby shower.

My dad sold a 1963 Corvette in 1972 for $2,500; that was pretty good money in those days. That same car is worth $250,000 today. We were reasonably comfortable on Dad's salary as a plant manager which I think was somewhere less than $10,000 a year. It was still a bit of a luxury to finally splurge on a washing machine in about 1968.

 

[dolf]

My aunt's TVs had vertical hold, horizontal hold and other user controls. Whenever we switched channels we would have to use one or other of the controls to stop the picture scrolling upwards, or sideways or just too large or too small. The BBC test card was important for fine-tuning the TV at least once a week.

http://www.meldrum.co.uk/mhp/testcard/bbc_test/tcc320.jpg

A button for each channel. But when you get the TV, you need to set each one up. First the tuner dial, then the little vertical and horizontal hold dials...

I'd forgotten all about that!

 

[oggbashan]

A button for each channel. But when you get the TV, you need to set each one up. First the tuner dial, then the little vertical and horizontal hold dials...

I'd forgotten all about that!

Not on my aunt's TV. It was built for one channel only. It was 1955 before the UK had a whole TWO channels and most TV owners, like my aunt, had to buy a black box which fitted on the aerial to get the second channel. Put it on, tune TV. Take it off, tune TV.

 

[oggbashan]

So that's what the Test Pattern was for.

You'd think I'd have figured that out by now, given its name.

It was particularly useful for adjusting the brightness and contrast controls.

 

[RobDownSouth]

The railroad tracks.
Heard the phrase "the other side of the tracks"?
that was my town.
There was a GM assembly plant nearby and the first five years I lived in the South they'd have giant steam locomotives hauling cars away two or three times a day.
Kids from "the other side of the track" would scour the railbeds after a train pulled through, looking for coal that might have fallen off a coal tender.

They knocked down the entire poor section of town to build light rail circa 1970 or so, and I remember the homes on the "good side of town" were suddenly infested with rats. Big rats. I think this is when the movie "Willard" came out too....

 

[Zeb_Carter]

My aunt's TVs had vertical hold, horizontal hold and other user controls. Whenever we switched channels we would have to use one or other of the controls to stop the picture scrolling upwards, or sideways or just too large or too small. The BBC test card was important for fine-tuning the TV at least once a week.

http://www.meldrum.co.uk/mhp/testcard/bbc_test/tcc320.jpg

Our TV had a brightness adjustment on it, but it didn't work. No matter which way you turned the programming was still stupid.

And this was the test pattern the put up after the stations signed off...

 

[coati]

Hmmm. It's interesting to learn all this from the old people.

 

[butters]

many years ago, when there were only 2 or 3 channels on tv, the service would play the national anthem before closing down broadcasts at around 10pm, i think. the bloody national anthem. that makes me laugh.

 

[jomar]

...and we LIKED it!

 

[CandiCame]

Oh my god you guys a lot of this stuff is so cool!

I can't really hit all of it but thanks for all the cool stories. It seems like a lot of people have a lot of memories about TV, but nobody's really said what you watched on it.

Also, that toilet that you put dirt in- I thought very seriously about putting in composting toilets when I was building this place, but eventually decided against it. They seem like they work about the same way as what you're talking about here.

 

[Gamine67]

You had a professional come fix your TV set because there was nothing "portable" about them physically, and there was nothing user friendly about them electronically. There was no "plug and play" or integrated circuits. The earliest home TVs predated the commercial implementation of transistors by almost a decade.

Do it yourself? Fine, ma'am. Your problem is in here somewhere:

https://www.boxcarcabin.com/rca-ctc-16-round-tube-tv.jpg

The really cool thing was they came with schematics so if you knew how to read them, or taught yourself back there, you could repair it yourself.

Take the suspect tube to the drug store, put it in the tester, and just buy a replacement. I loved tinkering back there, more room than the radio.

 

[Polranny]

Children's tv started at 5pm for an hour.
When ITV started the first ad I remember was for pepsodent toothpaste. My favourite programme was Casey Jones but the Lone Ranger on BBC was pretty good too.
No daytime TV. Instead we would listen to the radio. The Goon Show, Beyond our Ken, Journey into Space to name but three.
I still remember rationing , it ended in 1954. I also remember parcels from relatives in America, tied up with brown paper and string, mainly clothes, but a lot of sweets (candy) for us kids.
I could go on. Interesting to compare USA and UK. I had a bit of both.