The Good NEW Days

Remember that Youtube video of two seventeen-year-old guys trying to figure out how to use a rotary phone? It was funny to my generation because nothing seems simpler or more obvious to operate than a rotary phone. But to kids who have never worked one, it’s pretty much inscrutable.

Early in elementary school a teacher asked our class to draw pictures of what we thought the world would be like in 1980 when we were to graduate from high school. My picture featured people going places in flying cars and zipping through the air via jetpacks. As I grew older, I read a lot of Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury science fiction/science fantasy stories in which robots would do all the work for people and where huge computers that took up rooms full of floor space could answer questions. Surely those would be integral parts of our daily lives in the far-off future year of 1980!

Well, I got a lot of that wrong. Even in 2022 (1980-plus-forty-two), we’re still not zipping around in flying cars. And, yes, we have robots, some of which are really amazing, but the average person can’t afford one. And no one foresaw the invention of the microchip, so we all assumed that computers of the future would have to depend on big, ugly, clunky vacuum tubes and would thus of necessity take up acres and acres of space.

I was born in 1961, which means this year I turned 61. The intersection of those two events got me thinking about how much has changed since I was a kid. The differences really are astounding. Let’s take phones and television as two examples.

Phones in a variety of colors

started coming out in the 1970s.

Telephones. When I was a kid, the telephone had a big, clunky base with a dial on it that was attached to a wire that disappeared into the wall, and the base of the phone was attached to the receiver by a curly wire. The phone was heavy and black, and sometimes when you picked it up and put it to your ear, you could hear a neighbor’s conversation. If you picked it up and hung it up several times and maybe sighed into it with irritation after several attempts, you would hear your neighbor say pettishly, “Well, I guess we’d better hang up. Apparently someone else wants the line.”

That was called a “party line.” Sharing your line with two or three other families was much cheaper than having your own line.

Touch tone wall phone

We had two phones in our house, one upstairs in Mom and Dad’s room, and one downstairs in a little nook in the corner of the dining room. Eventually we got rid of the one in the dining room and got a newfangled model in the kitchen called a “wall phone.” It had a curly receiver cord that could be stretched out to approximately fifteen feet. If it rang and you couldn’t pick it up before the person hung up (etiquette dictated that the caller hang up after six rings), you had no idea who it was or how to call them back.

At some point on TV, everyone started having a touch-tone phone—ones with little buttons you pushed rather than a dial that you turned. Oh, how I coveted one of those cool, modern phones! They were really neato! But they cost extra every month, so. . . .

By this time Mom and Dad had gotten our own dedicated line. It cost more each month than a party line, but there was still a limit to what they would spend—and one thing you always had to be careful about was calling long distance.

“Long distance” meant calling outside your own area code, whether that was Cleveland or Honolulu. Most people kept their long-distance calls to a minimum, and if they made them, they kept them short. Why? You had to pay extra for long distance. And the longer the distance, the higher the per-minute charge.

Speaking of money, here are just a few monetary comparisons before we leave this topic. I am very grateful to Marie Concannon, Head, Govt Information & Data Archives, University of Missouri Library, for her help in finding this source (see image below).

Thus, the monthly cost for a phone in 1973 was around $8 (equals $53.70 today). That would be $96 per year, or $644.40, today. According to one source, the average monthly cost of a cell phone in 2022 is $114. That’s over $1300 per year. That equals nearly $4000 a year in 1980 dollars.

$1300 per year (2022 dollars) minus $644.40 per year (2022 dollars) is $655.60 per year.

Phones back then didn’t travel with you. They didn’t give you up-to-the minute news. They didn’t offer 24/7 entertainment. They didn’t offer fun games to play (unless you count prank phone calls). They didn’t allow you to text friends. They didn’t remind you of appointments. They didn’t allow you to join social networks. They didn’t offer emergency help if you were alone in a car at night.

Are those perks worth $55 bucks a month, or $656 per year, to you?

I gripe a lot about the costs of cell service. I guess I need to stop that, because, allowing for inflation, it’s not really such a bad deal!

Television. Wow, how simple and predictable television used to be! There it sat in your living room, a huge console that just assumed itself to be the focal point of the room. The fanciest ones eventually had a stereo record player on top!

Console TV with integrated stereo

system. In a museum. Because that's
how old I really am. (Creative
Commons, Greg Gjerdingen)

When I was very young, ours was a black-and-white set. Then something went wrong with it, and Mom and Dad told us they had sent it off for repairs. But they actually replaced it with a color TV! I remember lying on my stomach in front of it many afternoons and evenings after it arrived, chin propped on my hands, watching game shows in garish colors. There was Bob Barker on Truth or Consequences and Art Fleming on Jeopardy! (I can still recall the way he said, “The an-swer is. . . .”), Peter Marshall on The Hollywood Squares, Gene Rayburn on Match Game, Allen Ludden on Password, and Bob Eubanks on The Newlywed Game. As an adult I’ve rewatched clips from some of those shows, and my jaw has dropped at some of the jokes they got away with back in those “innocent” times! (We used to call them “dirty jokes.” Sadly, nowadays they’re just “jokes.”) But it all went over my head when I was a kid.

By the way, I recently came across this unexpected and surprising exchange from Hollywood Squares on Youtube.

Peter Marshall: Paul, true or false? According to the Bible you, you, Paul Lynde, are a sinner.

Lynde: [snarky] As long as they spelled m’name right. [much laughter]

Marshall: But according to the Bible, are you a sinner?

Lynde: Yes.

Contestant: I agree.

Marshall: We are all sinners, yes. “For all have sinned,” Romans 3:23.

Primetime TV Schedule for a week
in 1973. Notice: just three networks!
(Credit: SuperSeventies.com)

There were basically three ways to know what was going to be on TV and when: look in your daily newspaper for that day’s schedule; save your Sunday newspaper insert, which contained the whole week’s schedule; or purchase a copy of TV Guide for gossipy articles plus the week’s schedule.

Johnny Carson on the cover
of TV Guide, March 4, 1972.

(Credit: TV Guide Magazine)

And when I say “schedule,” that’s what it was. No streaming, no DVDs, no VHS tapes. When something was on, that’s when it was on, and if you missed it, you missed it. I remember a babysitter saying to me, “Oh, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was on tonight, but we missed it.” Now, try to imagine—that meant I had to wait an entire year to see it again. She really didn’t need to share that information. It was quite possibly the cruelest blow of my childhood.

You could also miss crucial portions of shows if Mom decided to run the mixer in the kitchen. Was it the noise that made you miss things? Not mainly, no. It was the electrical interference the device caused on screen—vibrating horizontal lines would appear while the speaker went “vvvvvvv!”

But noise, not electricity, was a problem, when in the middle of your favorite show Dad would go out to the kitchen to make popcorn in a pan with oil in the bottom and a lid on top. He would shuffle it back and forth across the burner to keep the kernels from burning. It went “shook-a shook-a shook-a shook-a” more loudly than you can imagine, turning your TV shows into something like this imaginary example from one of my favorite shows back then, The Brady Bunch.

Mom Brady: “Oh, Mike, I’m worried about Marcia. At school today she—”