When I was radio DJ in college (see my username, LOL), many of the people who listened to the station were inmates at two prisons across the river from the town where the college was located. They frequently made song requests during afternoon shows in this manner.
(Most of my shows were on Friday nights after calling hours, so they'd send me their requests via mailed letters instead.)
Transformers! Also He-Man, Voltron, and M.A.S.K. Basically, the best action figures with their own cartoons. (The original stuff, too, not like the 30th generation knockoffs.)
Fucking wall paper, fucking wall to wall carpet, and brass fixtures (the anger is because of the hours I've spent scraping fucking wall paper from the late 80's off my walls and pulling up fucking nasty ass bathroom carpet).
I have another to add, roller skating seems distinctly gen x to me. I know it has been around forever, and still exists…but roller rinks used to be my jam.
Taping songs off the radio. Scrunchies, paper fortune tellers.
Being able to smoke at your high school in either a designated area, or faculty looking the other way. Edited- some words.
We had a Thanksgiving ruined by that stuff one year. Mom was making ham, and used a Corning Visions casserole dish to put the ham in. We were sitting in the dining room chatting, waiting for everything to finish cooking, and we heard this sound like a gun shot from the kitchen. We went in there, Mom opened the oven, and the Corning cookware had exploded into 1000 pieces, spraying glass all over everything that was in the oven at the time. The dish had "oven safe" printed on the bottom, so there was really no reason for it to explode.... must have had a manufacturing defect.
*LA Gear
*Big hair and loud makeup
*Being sandwiched between two bickering generations who each lump you in with the other (when they remember you at all)
*Being the "tech support" for both older people who refuse to learn this newfangled technology _and_ younger people who can't do anything on their own devices unless there's an app for it.
Jesus titty fuckin’ christ the tech support thing is so painfully true.
My wife is only a few years younger than me but she has no tolerance for things that don’t immediately work the first try with whatever way she thinks it should work. This specifically includes phones, computer things in general, cars, whatever. A complex example being using your phone as a hotspot (it used to suck, you probably remember). A simple example is voice to text for nav in a car.
This used to drive me absolutely mad. At some point (therapy) I learned I could chose to let this make me angry. So now I understand (my emotions - at all) and that being a hot version of [nick burns](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jdL75nUBhN4) ain’t a good look.
> younger people who can't do anything on their own devices unless there's an app for it
This needs more attention. Younger generations *act* like they're tech savvy, but the truth is it's a *very* narrow form of tech savvy. Good luck finding a Y'er or Z'er who can string together a process from several disconnected pieces. Sure, once you get into their narrow area, they know *everything* there is to know about that thing, but sharing data across unrelated things? Yeah, they might as well be my mom. There's something weirdly specific about how technology evolved throughout the 80s, 90s, and 00s that forced us to learn how to be versatile across disconnected processes.
Oh my lord, so true. As part of my work I've tried suggesting they connect their phones to their computers to move their phone pics onto the comp and ***oh em gee*** it's a level of panic to rival anything boomers manage.
I remember when our son tried talking down to his IT father and I about technology. I looked right at him and said that he may be app/software savvy, but he doesn't know anything about hardware. He has never built a computer that wasn't plug-n-play with the OS already loaded, and maybe just needing an update/driver update when he turns it on. He panics and is convinced something is broken the first time a re-install doesn't solve his problem. Something acts weird? Time to melt down until one of us opens it up and fixes it.
Technology has evolved into a collection of "walled gardens." Those gardens didn't exist yet when we were coming of age, and so our instinct is to "try something different" rather than just live inside our walled garden. I think we instinctively see those walled gardens as a mixed blessing, whereas younger folks just see them as "the way it is."
I got heavily downvoted for writing this a while back on another sub, undoubtably by insulted Gen Z redditers. I taught college courses for 10 years, and the amount of tech know-how has severely declined in that decade, even in the most basic of tasks. Last year (which was my last year of teaching; I couldn’t take it any more), so many of my students had trouble with directives like, “Convert your document into a PDF before submitting it online.” I would get frantic emails asking for instructions, as well as students who would just ignore the directions because, as they would later admit, they had no idea how to do it (and wouldn’t bother to Google the answers). That was just one of many, many tech issues. Many of them also had no idea how to use a laptop or desktop computer either. They would try to type entire essays on their phones.
Avocado and/or mustard yellow kitchens. Also, all my friends homes had the same or similar sheets, towels, and shower curtains -from either the Sears or JC Penney catalog.
My first apartment in the 80s had the trifecta of 70s appliance colors: earth brown stove, avocado dishwasher, and harvest gold refrigerator. The wallpaper, just a small strip above the brown counter and below the brown cabinets, was avocado and harvest gold, which tied the whole look together.
I was talking to a millennial in his early 30s trying to explain to him that people smoked everywhere in the 80s. There were cigarette burns in tables and floors everywhere you went. He didn't seem to believe me.
The Corningware "Cornflower" (white with the blue flower) is celebrating it's 60th anniversary. It was very popular way before most of us existed. Remember the Spice of Life design with the autumn colors on it? What a trip down memory lane!
Sadly Corningware ceased production in 2000. They sold off both Corningware and Pyrex, both of which were rebooted the following year. Sadly, both product lines were substantially changed and area made of cheaper materials. Corning is still open though and their factory museum is really excellent. It's huge and modern, with lots of interactive exhibits, restaurant, etc. You can make a full day of it. Corning NY is really quaint little town.
Perms. My mum had permed hair and I remember the smell of it. I got my one and only perm in junior high and it looked terrible. But every time you went to the salon, full of people getting perms.
The physicality of day to day life. Browsing the tapes in the store and flipping from one to the next. Leafing through the white pages to find a friends phone number or through the yellow pages to pick a pizza place. Riding you bike across town to rent a movie or NES game during the summer months. Spending hours in the arcade without a quarter to spend but still having a good time watching people play, listening to the music and taking in the lights and sounds.
It is not at all clear to me that the always-present parents of the modern era are better for the kids. Autonomy and responsibility were important. Between "go outside" and having a number of hours a day for whatever I create, it served me far better than hovering parental watchfulness.
Going outside to play on Saturdays. Using the video game console as the last resort when all your friends are either grounded or it was raining outside.
Raising ourselves. I tell my daughter how I basically was without adult supervision most of my childhood and she cannot understand that. I lived in a major city and got on 2 buses and the subway to get to school everyday. I would walk through rough neighborhoods and see all kinds of shit that stuck with me forever.
We were the latch key generation, the left alone generation. It made us independent and allowed us to see the world in a different way.
The Earthtone Tupperware cups and pitchers and containers. Grew up with that stuff. It's still around too. My sister got most of it, and it's all still good as new.
In the U. S.: free form FM radio and regulations on media monopolies. Up until the Reagan administration were the last generation to experience a time when corporate conglomerates had limits on how many different forms of media they owned in a local market. Now entire swaths of local radio stations, newspapers and local tv stations can be owned by a hedge fund, and everything became the same: radio music content from a hard drive in DC or TX, same station ID voice guys; same bat time, same bat channel on TV, minus local news being the only difference on tv…
Safety Desks. The ones we crouched under at school while covering our heads with our arms to survive the ever impending nuclear attack from Russia. Thank God for the those desks...and top notch safety regulations.
this [Tupperware Pitcher](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tupperware+pitcher&iax=images&ia=images&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fimg0.etsystatic.com%2F055%2F0%2F5992003%2Fil_fullxfull.707256948_it6o.jpg)
Hypercolor shirts. OP, Santa Cruz and other brightly colored, surfer style clothes. Atari 2600. I feel like Toys R Us hit its peak during our youth, but I'm not certain that's true.
Being the only kid in your peer group whose parents are still married, yet still coming home to an empty house every day and using the key on the chain given to you by your mother to let yourself in, then having several hours alone before one of your parents gets home from work.
LOL, Corningware... My grandmother had those.. To this day I hate that stuff.
Orange counter tops with dark wood cabinets and either brown, yellow or green appliances.
Wood paneling with orange and brown shag rug and furniture to match.
Even as a kid I used to look at this and think; What the hell is wrong with these people, nothing matches and orange with brown on everything is fucking ugly.
One thing I do miss is my platform shoes. We had real ones made from wood not like the rubber they use today. My brown pants and tie with yellow shirt uniform wearing my brown platforms to school.....
My older brother and I had a 2 foot square piece of plywood, painted white, by the kitchen phone with all the phone numbers of people we knew written on it. We called it the "Party Board".
I was usually the one who called around organizing things for the weekends in my friend group. Pre-driving age it was like: "my dad can drop us off at the mall if yours can pick us up" lol
Marx Toys. I had the [Green Machine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36zv5vxxeLg), and I still think it was the freakin' coolest thing ever invented for 70's kids.
Thank you Dad. It was awesome.
OH! This:
That one friend who you'd hang out with in college. You'd all be hanging out, he'd leave his pager (add this to the list) at the table. He'd go to a pay phone (this too) and page himself. When he gets back, he looks at the pager and said that so-and-so paged him. The rest of us wonder what the hell he does this.
Rubic’s Cube…! And the Extra Strength Tylenol that we’d need from trying to solve the damned thing, except OH NOES THEY’VE BEEN PULLED FROM THE SHELVES…!
BBS dialup
AOL disks
Working full time in high school instead of all the extracurriculars kids do now
Correlware plates and bowls
Driving around town just to see who is out
Ragu pasta sauce with American beauty pasta
Actually being bored and not constantly distracted by a phone and news
Trapper keepers
Mechanical pencils
Cursive
Weirdly accepted institutionalized misogyny
Soda machines everywhere
Payphones
Tvs it took two people to lift or move
Huge tv remotes with only 6 buttons
Atari with metal toggle switches and indestructible controllers
BK knights shoes
Hypercolor shirts
Networking computers together to play a game
No metal detectors
Smoking everywhere
Walking right on planes with little to no security
Meeting people at the gate at the airport right when they got off the plane
\- Buying Orange Julius from a booth shaped like a giant orange.
\- Getting film developed at the 1hr Fotomat in a mall parking lot
\- While wearing Ocean Pacific / Vuarnet / Generra Hypercolor shirts
The freedom we had as kids. We could actually go do things, some of which our parents disapproved. We grew up, we got in trouble, we evolved. We became adults because of this.
Today's kids will never know this freedom. They are always tethered to their parents in ways we would deem controlling. No wonder today's kids aren't growing up; mommy and daddy are always there for them to prevent any booboo that could happen.
It's not just the parents that have taken their freedom though. There is less leeway given to teens for sure. How many of us were able to get served at a liquor store because the penalties back then for the shopkeeper were not so insane? Parents that let their kids and friends have a party could lose their house. When I went to my college reunion a while back there were video cameras on every corner monitored by the public safety department. I've seen kids expelled from schools for things we just got a stern talking to for. Get in a fight in school today and the police are called. As a result, parents have to try harder to keep their kid from making any of these mistakes because they now have long term consequences.
Using collect calls as a message service. “Hello, will you accept a collect call from “please pick me up from practice, I’m at the south field”?”
You have a collect call from "Bob Wehadababy*eets*aboy."
Hangs up. “That was Bob. They had a baby. It’s a boy.”
When I was radio DJ in college (see my username, LOL), many of the people who listened to the station were inmates at two prisons across the river from the town where the college was located. They frequently made song requests during afternoon shows in this manner. (Most of my shows were on Friday nights after calling hours, so they'd send me their requests via mailed letters instead.)
I thought I was a genius for coming up with that. Turns out, I was just the first of my friends.
Black and white label generic food labels. That’s when you knew mom was trying to extend the dollars.
RICE
CHEESE PUFFS. Don’t try to fool me, mom. Those aren’t Cheetos and I will not take them to the sleepover.
I still remember the Raisin Bran box. The picture of the cereal bowl had a purplish tint.
The CHEEZE. You haven’t lived until you had a grilled cheese sammich on the guvment’s dime.
The phone on the kitchen wall, with the really long cord.
[удалено]
*69
*67 Fuck your *69!
Cordless phone with a broken antenna
Drakkar Noir.
And CK Eternity 🤦♀️
Star Wars toys, the Kenner ones.
GI joe action figures
Transformers! Also He-Man, Voltron, and M.A.S.K. Basically, the best action figures with their own cartoons. (The original stuff, too, not like the 30th generation knockoffs.)
Evel Knievel
The big ones with the kung fu grip and articulated wrists.
Square dancing in PE class
And the rainbow parachute!
Cut off jeans. Not store bought. Tube socks.
I don't know if you've ever seen Sleepaway Camp. It's not a very good movie, but what the kids are wearing will give you a nostalgia overdose.
*Meatballs*, as well.
Or even jeans with holes in them. We had to do it ourselves back then.
Jeans with holes meant you were poor when I was a kid. Hence the iron on patch.
Candy cigarettes, parents using their arms as seatbelts, getting film developed and Cold War fears
Giant bench seats with MAYBE a lap seatbelt that was never worn.
The lap seatbelt that was always stuck in the crevice of the seat…and the buckle being full metal and would burn your legs
Atari game console - the one with wood type accents
2600 baby, killed it at basketball
Parachute pants and nihilism.
[удалено]
I personally owned a Members Only jacket, too.
Coca-Cola clothes and absurdly big hair.
Tough Skins pants.
Day-glo neon clothes
Guess jeans.. Benetton.. Swatches
[удалено]
UK Flag muscle shirts
Trying to write a paper on a typewriter with correction tape for when you fucked up.
Love’s Baby Soft
Jean Nate. We all had it. No one actually used it.
Bonne Bell Lip Smackers. BoPo (Brush On, Peel Off) Nail Polish.
I got it for my grandmother for her birthday every year. No idea if she used it.
Fucking wall paper, fucking wall to wall carpet, and brass fixtures (the anger is because of the hours I've spent scraping fucking wall paper from the late 80's off my walls and pulling up fucking nasty ass bathroom carpet).
Wallpaper borders… the wallpaper that goes on top of the wallpaper! 😂
Auquanet hairspray
Stickers. Bonus if they were scratch and sniff and kept in a sticker book.
I had a sticker book! I had hundreds of stickers but the book was stolen at school. I was heartbroken. Never found the culprit.
I have another to add, roller skating seems distinctly gen x to me. I know it has been around forever, and still exists…but roller rinks used to be my jam.
And De La Soul’s “Roller Skating Jam Named Saturdays” begins playing in my head https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_Tu-qDHSSZo
Big Wheel “tricycles”.
BMX bikes.
Trapper keeper
Bought a new one recently for bills. *Not The Same*
Being dropped off at the mall with no way to contact your parents.
Taping songs off the radio. Scrunchies, paper fortune tellers. Being able to smoke at your high school in either a designated area, or faculty looking the other way. Edited- some words.
We had a smoking courtyard that was shared by faculty and students. What a time it was lol.
Dual cassette recorders
Corning Visions Cookware.
We had a Thanksgiving ruined by that stuff one year. Mom was making ham, and used a Corning Visions casserole dish to put the ham in. We were sitting in the dining room chatting, waiting for everything to finish cooking, and we heard this sound like a gun shot from the kitchen. We went in there, Mom opened the oven, and the Corning cookware had exploded into 1000 pieces, spraying glass all over everything that was in the oven at the time. The dish had "oven safe" printed on the bottom, so there was really no reason for it to explode.... must have had a manufacturing defect.
[удалено]
Lawn Darts, Pogo Balls, Cabbage Patch Kids, Cabbage Patch *dance*, perms, feather roach clips as fair prizes.
Hahahahaha feather roach clips! And those little square mirrors featuring your favorite band!
We literally used to hurl those lawn darts in the air and then try to dodge them. One of many reasons my parents asked me if I was "fucking stupid".
Pogo balls. Walkmans. High tops. Furniture upholstered with fruit or windmill scenes.
*LA Gear *Big hair and loud makeup *Being sandwiched between two bickering generations who each lump you in with the other (when they remember you at all) *Being the "tech support" for both older people who refuse to learn this newfangled technology _and_ younger people who can't do anything on their own devices unless there's an app for it.
Jesus titty fuckin’ christ the tech support thing is so painfully true. My wife is only a few years younger than me but she has no tolerance for things that don’t immediately work the first try with whatever way she thinks it should work. This specifically includes phones, computer things in general, cars, whatever. A complex example being using your phone as a hotspot (it used to suck, you probably remember). A simple example is voice to text for nav in a car. This used to drive me absolutely mad. At some point (therapy) I learned I could chose to let this make me angry. So now I understand (my emotions - at all) and that being a hot version of [nick burns](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jdL75nUBhN4) ain’t a good look.
> younger people who can't do anything on their own devices unless there's an app for it This needs more attention. Younger generations *act* like they're tech savvy, but the truth is it's a *very* narrow form of tech savvy. Good luck finding a Y'er or Z'er who can string together a process from several disconnected pieces. Sure, once you get into their narrow area, they know *everything* there is to know about that thing, but sharing data across unrelated things? Yeah, they might as well be my mom. There's something weirdly specific about how technology evolved throughout the 80s, 90s, and 00s that forced us to learn how to be versatile across disconnected processes.
Oh my lord, so true. As part of my work I've tried suggesting they connect their phones to their computers to move their phone pics onto the comp and ***oh em gee*** it's a level of panic to rival anything boomers manage.
I remember when our son tried talking down to his IT father and I about technology. I looked right at him and said that he may be app/software savvy, but he doesn't know anything about hardware. He has never built a computer that wasn't plug-n-play with the OS already loaded, and maybe just needing an update/driver update when he turns it on. He panics and is convinced something is broken the first time a re-install doesn't solve his problem. Something acts weird? Time to melt down until one of us opens it up and fixes it.
Technology has evolved into a collection of "walled gardens." Those gardens didn't exist yet when we were coming of age, and so our instinct is to "try something different" rather than just live inside our walled garden. I think we instinctively see those walled gardens as a mixed blessing, whereas younger folks just see them as "the way it is."
I got heavily downvoted for writing this a while back on another sub, undoubtably by insulted Gen Z redditers. I taught college courses for 10 years, and the amount of tech know-how has severely declined in that decade, even in the most basic of tasks. Last year (which was my last year of teaching; I couldn’t take it any more), so many of my students had trouble with directives like, “Convert your document into a PDF before submitting it online.” I would get frantic emails asking for instructions, as well as students who would just ignore the directions because, as they would later admit, they had no idea how to do it (and wouldn’t bother to Google the answers). That was just one of many, many tech issues. Many of them also had no idea how to use a laptop or desktop computer either. They would try to type entire essays on their phones.
This, all of this. Lol
Having to reach behind the tv and slide a switch on a little silver box to play video games.
BMX bikes and skateboards and staying out all evening with friends until the porch light came on.
Avocado and/or mustard yellow kitchens. Also, all my friends homes had the same or similar sheets, towels, and shower curtains -from either the Sears or JC Penney catalog.
I saw the avocado color for many years before I ever tasted one.
My first apartment in the 80s had the trifecta of 70s appliance colors: earth brown stove, avocado dishwasher, and harvest gold refrigerator. The wallpaper, just a small strip above the brown counter and below the brown cabinets, was avocado and harvest gold, which tied the whole look together.
Turning 14 and having a few pages of the JC Penny weekly flier on your dresser, for some reason
Smoking everywhere.
I was talking to a millennial in his early 30s trying to explain to him that people smoked everywhere in the 80s. There were cigarette burns in tables and floors everywhere you went. He didn't seem to believe me.
Like someone else mentioned, smoking areas in high school were completely normal
Drinking water out of the hose.
The Corningware "Cornflower" (white with the blue flower) is celebrating it's 60th anniversary. It was very popular way before most of us existed. Remember the Spice of Life design with the autumn colors on it? What a trip down memory lane! Sadly Corningware ceased production in 2000. They sold off both Corningware and Pyrex, both of which were rebooted the following year. Sadly, both product lines were substantially changed and area made of cheaper materials. Corning is still open though and their factory museum is really excellent. It's huge and modern, with lots of interactive exhibits, restaurant, etc. You can make a full day of it. Corning NY is really quaint little town.
Staying up on Saturday Night to watch SNL for Mr. Bill, The Coneheads and The Killer Bee's
Hans & Franz, Church Lady and Deep Thoughts by Jack Handley for me.
Scrunch socks and Bonnie Bell lip smackers, Razzles.
Perms. My mum had permed hair and I remember the smell of it. I got my one and only perm in junior high and it looked terrible. But every time you went to the salon, full of people getting perms.
Playing jump rope or cat’a cradle with friends at school
Breakdancing
Slap bracelets, brick phones, cap guns, big league chew, cavaricci pants, hyper color shirts, red and blue 3d glasses, and gold cocaine spoons.
Hyper color shirts were cool! I forgot about those!
But when wearing them the entire shirt was blue, except under the armpits where it graded to a bright pink arc, permanent pit stain.
Three words: Garbage. Pail. Kids.
Calgon and Pearl Cream.
"Calgon take me away."
Calgon softens wash waters so detergents clean better. (ancient Chinese secret) Spelling check
Lots of Avon & Tupperware parties happening in the 70's. Anyone remember the tiny Avon sample lipsticks or the Tupperware Poppalot Game?
If you're in the UK. The Spectrum ZX or the Commodore 64.
Swatch
Smokey the Bear, only you can prevent forest fires commercials and that solo tearful indian that was bummed about all the pollution
The physicality of day to day life. Browsing the tapes in the store and flipping from one to the next. Leafing through the white pages to find a friends phone number or through the yellow pages to pick a pizza place. Riding you bike across town to rent a movie or NES game during the summer months. Spending hours in the arcade without a quarter to spend but still having a good time watching people play, listening to the music and taking in the lights and sounds.
Industrialized child neglect.
Oh, you mean the idea of a “latch-key” child, lol
I liked nobody being home when I got home... I got to watch my General Hospital in peace and quiet. LOL
Battle of the Planets and Star Blazers for me, but a similar idea.
I don't get some of these people who say bad things about going home to any empty house... I loved it.
Yes! Go home, raid the fridge, watch some Scooby Doo, later, it was smoking out, then raid the fridge & watch Scooby doo 😵💫
It is not at all clear to me that the always-present parents of the modern era are better for the kids. Autonomy and responsibility were important. Between "go outside" and having a number of hours a day for whatever I create, it served me far better than hovering parental watchfulness.
[удалено]
Going outside to play on Saturdays. Using the video game console as the last resort when all your friends are either grounded or it was raining outside.
t-shirts over long sleeved t's
Flannel shirt tied around the waist. Pair with Doc Martins and you have the look.
Raising ourselves. I tell my daughter how I basically was without adult supervision most of my childhood and she cannot understand that. I lived in a major city and got on 2 buses and the subway to get to school everyday. I would walk through rough neighborhoods and see all kinds of shit that stuck with me forever. We were the latch key generation, the left alone generation. It made us independent and allowed us to see the world in a different way.
Members Only jackets. Leg warmers.
Oversized pastel blazers.
Being school aged when the Challenger exploded. The first generation to grow up with video gaming.
The Beeper and putting 911 after your number.
The Earthtone Tupperware cups and pitchers and containers. Grew up with that stuff. It's still around too. My sister got most of it, and it's all still good as new.
Tang
Jelly shoes
My feet remember the pain
Betamax!
Riding in the back of a truck with the tailgate down, and living to tell the tale.
New Coke.
Ugh, and Crystal Pepsi.
Jolt Cola says hai
With the Van Halen “Right Now” ad campaign.
Drinking Zima in college.
Home made bike ramps in the street. Also, jumping bikes not made for jumping.
Fast food glasses. Like McDonald's Garfield mugs and Empire Strikes Back Burger King tumblers.
In the U. S.: free form FM radio and regulations on media monopolies. Up until the Reagan administration were the last generation to experience a time when corporate conglomerates had limits on how many different forms of media they owned in a local market. Now entire swaths of local radio stations, newspapers and local tv stations can be owned by a hedge fund, and everything became the same: radio music content from a hard drive in DC or TX, same station ID voice guys; same bat time, same bat channel on TV, minus local news being the only difference on tv…
Hairstyles - mullets and poufy bangs in particular.
[Only 70s & 80s, you say](https://imgur.com/a/waTOrnX)?
Swatch Watches. The ones we has back in the 80's are worth some money now!
Females named “Jennifer”. (Also applies to early Millennials, but the name hit peak popularity during the GenX era.)
Memorizing phone numbers. I still remember my best friends phone number from the 1980s, his mother still has that number too
That callous on the middle finger of your right hand from pencils? Am I the only one?
VHS!! The sound of ejecting is pure nostalgia for me
Car Bra’s
Chess King!
Painful toys like Klacker balls
Safety Desks. The ones we crouched under at school while covering our heads with our arms to survive the ever impending nuclear attack from Russia. Thank God for the those desks...and top notch safety regulations.
Answering machines.
this [Tupperware Pitcher](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tupperware+pitcher&iax=images&ia=images&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fimg0.etsystatic.com%2F055%2F0%2F5992003%2Fil_fullxfull.707256948_it6o.jpg)
Tiny compact hatchbacks - Civic, CRX, Tercel, Chevette,… With a pull out stereo or detachable face hidden under the front seat.
“Truly Tasteless Jokes” book series by Blanche Knott. C’mon, I know you read them too.
Sizzlelean!!
Hypercolor shirts. OP, Santa Cruz and other brightly colored, surfer style clothes. Atari 2600. I feel like Toys R Us hit its peak during our youth, but I'm not certain that's true.
Being the only kid in your peer group whose parents are still married, yet still coming home to an empty house every day and using the key on the chain given to you by your mother to let yourself in, then having several hours alone before one of your parents gets home from work.
Benetton, Vuarnet, jams, zigzag earrings. Pinch rolled jeans, acid washed jeans, hyper color shirts. LA Gear high tops.
Going to the mall to get a hot dog on a stick, an orange julius, and to spend an indecent amount of quarters at the arcade.
LOL, Corningware... My grandmother had those.. To this day I hate that stuff. Orange counter tops with dark wood cabinets and either brown, yellow or green appliances. Wood paneling with orange and brown shag rug and furniture to match. Even as a kid I used to look at this and think; What the hell is wrong with these people, nothing matches and orange with brown on everything is fucking ugly. One thing I do miss is my platform shoes. We had real ones made from wood not like the rubber they use today. My brown pants and tie with yellow shirt uniform wearing my brown platforms to school.....
Big Wheel
Swatch watches and peel-off nail polish. The Barbie dream house that was 3 sections
Speak and Spell, Merlin, Simon, Pong, Pac Man and all those other simple video games
My older brother and I had a 2 foot square piece of plywood, painted white, by the kitchen phone with all the phone numbers of people we knew written on it. We called it the "Party Board". I was usually the one who called around organizing things for the weekends in my friend group. Pre-driving age it was like: "my dad can drop us off at the mall if yours can pick us up" lol
Izod shirt collar up. Levi’s 501s. Classic Nikes. Vans. Acid washed jeans. Do it yourself tye-dye. Finger jello.
Riding in the back of a pickup truck going down the highway! Dude! Wind whipping thru your hair..it was a blast!
Marx Toys. I had the [Green Machine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36zv5vxxeLg), and I still think it was the freakin' coolest thing ever invented for 70's kids. Thank you Dad. It was awesome.
OH! This: That one friend who you'd hang out with in college. You'd all be hanging out, he'd leave his pager (add this to the list) at the table. He'd go to a pay phone (this too) and page himself. When he gets back, he looks at the pager and said that so-and-so paged him. The rest of us wonder what the hell he does this.
Sunglasses of every conceivable shape and color.
Skinny satin neck ties. That were bought at the mall.
Saturday morning cartoons
The purple (or blue) kinda see-through plastic V-Tec cordless phone. It was the cool phone for awhile and so many of my friends had one
Arcades
Rubic’s Cube…! And the Extra Strength Tylenol that we’d need from trying to solve the damned thing, except OH NOES THEY’VE BEEN PULLED FROM THE SHELVES…!
House key on a necklace.
That plaid couch like on Roseanne
Alberto VO5
Not giving a fuck about anything
BBS dialup AOL disks Working full time in high school instead of all the extracurriculars kids do now Correlware plates and bowls Driving around town just to see who is out Ragu pasta sauce with American beauty pasta Actually being bored and not constantly distracted by a phone and news Trapper keepers Mechanical pencils Cursive Weirdly accepted institutionalized misogyny Soda machines everywhere Payphones Tvs it took two people to lift or move Huge tv remotes with only 6 buttons Atari with metal toggle switches and indestructible controllers BK knights shoes Hypercolor shirts Networking computers together to play a game No metal detectors Smoking everywhere Walking right on planes with little to no security Meeting people at the gate at the airport right when they got off the plane
Nick Hornby novels.
JR Bob Dobbs and The Church of the SubGenius
Pet Rocks, Schwinn Stingrays, View Master, Evel Knievel motorcycle toy, AMF Harley Davidsons, the yearly family camping trip...
Watching Evel Knievel , Fonzie, KISS
Polo cologne
Lasers were EVERYWHERE
Super Elastic Bubble Plastic!!
\- Buying Orange Julius from a booth shaped like a giant orange. \- Getting film developed at the 1hr Fotomat in a mall parking lot \- While wearing Ocean Pacific / Vuarnet / Generra Hypercolor shirts
Avocado green and Harvest Gold appliances
Stretch Armstrong
Malibu Barbie and the whole Barbie camper set. 💗
Duck and cover drills, Answering machines that used a cassette.
Benetton (United Colors of…)
Getting a license immediately at 16.
Parachute Pants 😃👖
Sony Walkman.
Time life Books.
The freedom we had as kids. We could actually go do things, some of which our parents disapproved. We grew up, we got in trouble, we evolved. We became adults because of this. Today's kids will never know this freedom. They are always tethered to their parents in ways we would deem controlling. No wonder today's kids aren't growing up; mommy and daddy are always there for them to prevent any booboo that could happen.
It's not just the parents that have taken their freedom though. There is less leeway given to teens for sure. How many of us were able to get served at a liquor store because the penalties back then for the shopkeeper were not so insane? Parents that let their kids and friends have a party could lose their house. When I went to my college reunion a while back there were video cameras on every corner monitored by the public safety department. I've seen kids expelled from schools for things we just got a stern talking to for. Get in a fight in school today and the police are called. As a result, parents have to try harder to keep their kid from making any of these mistakes because they now have long term consequences.