Reminiscences of the Old Days

If you remember these, you're officially old.

March 23, 2022

I don’t know what this is going to turn out to be.  I’ll keep writing and see what comes out.

I’m sitting here in front of my computer, typing this.  Across the room, my TV is playing an old Jack Benny program.  It’s early in the morning, and a couple of cable stations are playing shows to benefit us old enough to remember them.  That would be me, among others.  The Jack Benny Program is one of my favorites.  Others are Dragnet, Leave It to Beaver, Dennis the Menace, Father Knows Best, and Hazel, all of which play on cable TV, one after the other, on weekday mornings.  It is a cornucopia of reminiscences.  Perry Mason also plays on weekday mornings, but that one requires attention to a plot.  It’s not good background TV.

It amazes me how normal life on those programs seems to me.  There are no computers, cell phones, laptops, or tablets in evidence.  People talk on old-fashioned dial telephones, and sometimes they have party lines.  Texting is unknown.  If you call someone and the line is busy, you’re out of luck.  You have to keep trying until someone hangs up.  To anyone born after 1990, this must seem like a nightmare scenario.  To someone like me, who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, it’s life as we knew it.  We didn’t know any better.

Old hairstyles and clothes fashions are something else.  Seeing those on TV can elicit laughs as well as sighs of recognition.  They also bring back memories of the discomfort we went through to look good and be in fashion.  Anyone who has ever tried to sit modestly in a pencil skirt or, even worse, a miniskirt knows what I mean.  The memory of the torture we females had to go through every night to set their hair on rollers and bobby pins then try to sleep on them brings on a case of the trembles today.  Handheld hair dryers came out in the 1920s, so they were nothing new.

How did I find that out?  I just now Googled it.  Back in the day, we couldn’t do that.  If we wanted to find anything out, we had to go to a library or an encyclopedia and look it up.  How’s that for time-consuming inconvenience?  Again, we didn’t know any better.  I hate to seem like an old fogey, but you youngsters have it easy, at least as long as the new technology works well.  That’s a subject for a whole other essay, though.