Spin off... 1980s | Imamother

amother

Yolk

Mon, Nov 22 2021, 9:56 am

I was born in 1989 and I can relate to a lot of this like btw

Reality

Mon, Nov 22 2021, 10:32 am

Am I the only one who had parents (in the 80's) who wouldn't drive unless we were all seat belted?

And yes a lot of these memories apply to the 90's as well. People still used pay phones in the early 2000's...

imasinger

Mon, Nov 22 2021, 10:51 am

Ah, pay phone stories....

My parents let us teens use an old Pontiac that my sister named "Bessie the Bomb". I borrowed it as a young adult to go a few hours away, and my parents were worried. I gave her a collect call from Bessie Mae DeTripp.

A few days later, the carburator cracked. I made a collect call from Bessie Zilligan.

I remember the Mets vs Red Sox world series.

I remember East and West Germany.

I remember vaccinations were widely accepted and not a topic of debate, ditto circumcision among non Jews.

I remember how big a deal AIDS was.

I remember getting my first personal computer in the 80's. But usually, people communicated by telephone or letter.

I remember debating whether to replace my LPs and cassettes with CDs. I remember how exciting it was when cars came out with cassette players.

And when you could record movies on VHS, or rent them from stores.

Fave

Mon, Nov 22 2021, 11:01 am

I remember a fax machine being a novelty

amother

Stoneblue

Mon, Nov 22 2021, 11:11 am

Having only 3 kosher restaurants in Flatbush, Brooklyn (not counting pizzerias).
Using asimonim (tokens) to make telephone calls in Israel. I still have lots of them.

chanchy123

Mon, Nov 22 2021, 11:12 am

Reality wrote:

Mine too, and we lived in Israel. My parents had to go to a special place near the airport to have seatbelts installed in our car and we were basically the only ones to use safety car seats (like we do today).
I was not allowed to ride in a car without being buckled or to be piled up in a station wagon, but of course I did those things when picked up from birthday parties and such things. I totally remember sitting backwards in a station wagon.
Our neighbor from across the street had a car phone - that was a huge deal, he was the only person I knew who had one.

thunderstorm

Mon, Nov 22 2021, 11:14 am

Being a six year old outside after dark and asking a stranger to cross me so that I could go to the grocery and buy my mother the odds and ends she needed . That was the instructions my mother would give me. “Ask an adult to cross you”. Those were part of “safety” rules.

mfb

Mon, Nov 22 2021, 11:23 am

I remember Laying across the back seat and going to sleep while traveling some where and then rolling off by a short stop.

I also remember in day camp someone (I guess from the city cuz he wasn’t Jewish) coming and showing us how seatbelts work and it’s really important to buckle up. It was totally a new concept.

A relative of mine had a cherry light on his car and that was the ultimate in coolness!

thunderstorm

Mon, Nov 22 2021, 11:30 am

Girls played “Hi-Li” (paddle ball) . One of my biggest rewards was my mother buying me new hi-li balls because the rubber string always tore.

Kids were always breaking their fingers with rocket balls. And some schools banned them . But I must admit they were the best balls ever.

The playgrounds in Brooklyn had sandboxes. But because the sand was so filled with broken beer bottles and empty syringes from drug users the city decided to get rid of every kids favorite part of the NYC playgrounds .

Reality

Mon, Nov 22 2021, 11:37 am

chanchy123 wrote:

We had a Ford station wagon and it had seatbelts. Even in the third row which faced each other (side ways!)

I remember car seats for my younger siblings as well.

I do remember being so excited in 1st grade having computer class. We were each given a floppy disk. We had to write our name on it and file it and use it to save our work.

Last edited by Reality on Mon, Nov 22 2021, 11:43 am; edited 1 time in total

watergirl

Mon, Nov 22 2021, 11:40 am

clowny wrote:

What about these station wagons that made me so nauseous?? Thinking about it now makes me gag. Oh the smell… maybe because I was the lucky one all the time to sit in the back seat backwards??? And the way we turned that handle to open up the window.

The way way back!

Raisin

Mon, Nov 22 2021, 11:45 am

When everyone in Stamford Hill had a volvo estate. Ours had a seat in the back that 2 people could sit it. With seatbelts of course. But I do remember when seatbelts came in and being in a car without them.

Computers that you had to play a cassette tape to play a game.

Floppy discs that were actually floppy. We had to format them before using them.

Dial up internet. Early internet chat rooms.

Nintendo handheld games.

When the height of fashion at weddings were taffeta dresses with puffy sleeves. And permed hair.

When cellphones (the really cool people who had them) were the size of bricks.

Growing up in London. I don't think I went to a restaurant to eat until I was well into my teens. A pizza shop opened up in stamford hill but the rabbanim did not allow it to have seats in case it became a hangout.

amother

Lilac

Mon, Nov 22 2021, 11:52 am

amother [ Stoneblue ] wrote:

Having only 3 kosher restaurants in Flatbush, Brooklyn (not counting pizzerias).

Which 3?

watergirl

Mon, Nov 22 2021, 12:01 pm

imasinger wrote:

OMG yes with AIDS. I remember, clear as day, when my Jewish (not frum) school brought in a theater group who did a play about a couple (two men) who had contracted HIV. At the time, it was just starting to come out that it was no longer called "GRID" and there were other ways to contract it. We were all terrified because we all heard stories of people hiding infected hypodermic needles in the sand at the beach, in public bus seats, in Halloween candy, etc.

sequoia

Mon, Nov 22 2021, 12:03 pm

Sticky Bear Reading and Sticky Bear Math!

clowny

Mon, Nov 22 2021, 12:20 pm

Fave wrote:

I remember a fax machine being a novelty

With the shiny fax paper.

mindyme

Mon, Nov 22 2021, 12:30 pm

-Concerns of the day - the Ozone layer (mostly depleted by the thousands of cans of hairspray we used) and acid rain. Never hear about those anymore
-free trade with Canada/US
-when my friend's older techy brother got a commodore64 computer. At a time when almost no one even had a computer at home. Imagine - 64K of memory! and it was color even
-car phone - one rich girl's father had one the size of a shoe, was the coolest thing
-yes collect calls which asked the person to call you back
-kever rachel with entrance by the famous arch on the side of the road across from the Arab drink sellers, feeling like it must have back in tanach times.... now that arch is in the mens side and there are all the high walls
-being able to access all of maaras hamachpala
-neon and many many goomie bracelets
-Biz skirts, champion sweatshirts and keds sneakers
-buying clothing in the mens section so it would be super big
-enhanced with 2 or 3 shoulder pads on each shoulder
-big huge puffy hair and bangs in a waterfall to one side or a huge bump (held in place by the aforementioned hairspray) and permed hair that looked like you'd been electrocuted.
-the backy back of a station wagon and waving and making faces and showing signs to the car behind you
-putting babies in a "car bed" basically a bassinet off a stroller and putting that on the seat of the car, even the front seat (!)
-being so less concerned with brands and what was new in the past 5 days
-when a trip to Israel was a big big deal
-when we called home once a month from sem - once a week if you really had money instead of every 5 minutes like now
-when you left the house and people had no idea where you were or how to reach you. And that was normal.
-First answering machine.
-Super long curly cords that stretched from the kitchen to your bedroom so you could have a private conversation
-phone booths
-when phone booth call went from a dime to a quarter
-no call waiting yet
-bank machines introduced - at first they only accepted money, didnt dispense it. And my parents were too nervous to use it, "how will the machine know what I put in?"
-when you could only use cash or cheque at a grocery store, no credit cards allowed (Still not sure why)
-electronic typewriters in typing class - so cool you could go back and change the last 20 characters before they printed to the paper
-actually typewriters in general
-walkmans - so cool, take your music with you!
-rewinding a cassette tape with a pencil
-trying to save a cassette tape by carefully taping it back together
-when CDs first came out, and the superior sound. And first diskman
-VCRs and video rentals. Imagine! being able to record a show if you cant watch it! And being able to rent a movie and watch it whenever you want! And rewind and fast forward
-dial up internet
-compuserve
-AOL CDs in the mail
-film cameras and hoping "the pictures came out ok". Take 2 just to be sure if it was a very important shot.
-the excitement of opening up a package of prints from the store
-when 1 hour photofinishing came along
-phantom of the opera
-les miserables
omg this got very long lol

mfb

Mon, Nov 22 2021, 12:31 pm

Blue airmail letters to send a letter to Israel. Squeezing g in the writing onto that one page

mindyme

Mon, Nov 22 2021, 12:33 pm

-and computer paper from the printer with the holes down the sides and all the pages attached, pulling it off and the crafts we did with the holes
-xerox machines
-when a "stencil" really was a stencil and was run off on a mimeograph machine and as the years went by the purple ink got fainter and fainter

MrsDash

Mon, Nov 22 2021, 12:36 pm

Shoulder pads!!!