Just how vintage are you?

[Shaul-Ike Cohen]

OK, here's another similar question that boils it down ever further: Who is your first president? Which is the first president you were aware of? For me it was Harry Truman. If there's anyone here who remembers before Franklin Roosevelt, my hat's off to you! Kids, don't be embarrassed to say Ronald Reagan! Or Bush the first!

Strangely, growing up out of the US might actually help here. Maybe it's that people were more political this side of the ocean, but even though I was a child, I knew Jimmy Carter was the American president. (Still, I had no idea whatsoever about his politics, of course, and mainly associated him with peanuts. Kind of still do, I'm afraid - blame my parents. )

 

[Tourbillion]

I don't think that I am that old yet, but I guess I am very vintage.

I was born during the Johnson administration, but only remember Nixon (and the Vietnam War and "I am not a crook") as a kid.

Anyway, I saw Coke in a machine with glass bottles recently, can't remember where. What I remember is that it came in wooden boxes and that you return the glass bottles to the store for the deposit.

Also, that list is very "Boomer" oriented, even though I remember a lot of them. What would people who were "old" remember in the 1940's? Horse drawn ice trucks? Dipping girls long braids in the ink wells at school? (Back when ball point pens cost more than fountain pens.) Queen Victoria? I mean my parents grew up knowing Civil War veterans (The Grand Army of the Republic). Their list would be pretty different.

 

[Miss 1929]

My dad

grew up in Brooklyn, and he was born in 22. He remembers horse-drawn delivery wagons in Manhattan! And the rarity of in house telephones.

So definitely older people remember a very different time.

Speaking of the five and dime, I do remember being taught by the old man at the Ben Franklin how to pronounce Czeckoslovakia! I learned it off the tag on the 10 cent glass beads they used to sell. Maybe that's where I got my Czech jewelry fetish too...

 

[Edward]

...18 or so without stretching. But we need some Euro versions for our folks on the other side of the pond.

Yeah, I scored four, but I'm not sure how far that is because it's a very US-themed list (I don't believe there was ever a drive-in cinema in the UK or Ireland, for instance). FWIW, I'm solidly Generation X (birth between the Kennedy assassination and the release of Star Wars), born 1974, so that would probably affect it too.

 

[Leutnant]

25! I was born a couple of months after JFK took office and the first president I remember is President Johnson.

 

[LizzieMaine]

If such lists had made the rounds in 1950, intending to provoke nostalgia for the generation born in the teens and raised in the twenties, it might look like this...

How many of these ring a bell????? Do you remember....

The Pig Woman and her mule

"Every Day in Every Way I am Getting Better and Better"

Professor Sherwin Cody

Judge magazine

"They laughed when I sat down at the piano, but when I began to play..."

Larry Semon

Radios with earphones and big batteries that smelled like the inside of a garage.

Alabama casting 84 votes for Oscar W. Underwood

Wondering if Farina was a boy or a girl

Where you were when you heard President Harding died.

Where you were when you heard Valentino died.

Where you were when you heard that Lindy made it.

Graham McNamee

Your dad setting off a Bangsite cannon on the 4th of July.

The day your ma bobbed her hair.

The smell of the sawdust on the iceman's wagon.

Circus parades.

"Yes, We Have No Bananas, We Have No Bananas Today!"

Floyd Collins' fate.

Reciting "In Flanders Field" on Armistice Day

"OH MIN!"

Getting your first silk stockings (girls) or your first long pants (boys)

"Don't step on that bug, it might be Lon Chaney!"

Giggling nervously at the pictures in Physical Culture magazine

The Clicquot Club Eskimos

Worrying about Pyorrhea

Seeing your first talkie.

 

[Smuterella]

only 4

and party lines means something entirely different now I think!

 

[Brooksie]

I remember 12 and no I won't tell my age - most of you all know it anyways.

Brooksie

 

[Joli7211]

> Wax Coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water
> Candy cigarettes
> Soda pop machines that dispensed glass bottles
> Party lines
> 45 RPM records
> Hi-fi's
> Mimeograph paper
> Blue flashbulb
> Drive-ins
> Dad and Grandfather wearing a Fedora (and my great-grandfather)

Mind you I've lived in a part of the country where we don't easily cotton to new ideas... lol

 

[staggerwing]

At first count, 19 because I'd forgotten what Party Lines were. Then, reading some other replies, I remembered. Heck, I used to install and repair party lines when I worked for the phone company! So, my count is 20, and I'm 51. I guess lack my of memory is the result of sniffing too much fresh mimeograph paper in elementary school.

 

[Flivver]

If such lists had made the rounds in 1950, intending to provoke nostalgia for the generation born in the teens and raised in the twenties, it might look like this...

How many of these ring a bell????? Do you remember....


The day your ma bobbed her hair.

.

What a great list Lizzie! As a 1920s enthusiast I really enjoyed this.

The bobbed hair entry brought to mind a story my best friend's wife tells about when her ma (Evelyn) bobbed her hair (as a young teen) in 1925. When her pa saw what she had done, he sent her to live with her aunt in Vermont until her hair grew back to a "respectable" length. He just couldn't stand the sight of his daughter with bobbed hair!

In another incident, also from 1925, Evelyn brought home the sheet music to the song "Roll 'Em Girls" and began to play it repeatedly on the piano while singing the words. Her pa couldn't stand to listen to such "decadant" music so he grabbed the sheet music from the piano and threw it into the parlor stove.

Even though Evelyn grew up in rural western Massachusetts, she nevertheless was a flapper and enjoyed telling stories of her high school experiences.

 

[pretty faythe]

They brought back the "we have no bananas today" in what was it the late 80's, 90's for the fig newton commericals? when they started making other flavors besides fig? And they still have no banana. lol Gee, the things that stick with a person.