Gotta say I wouldn't want to be without my cell phone nowadays. Or my PC.
But yeah, I sure remember rotary phones, our black and white TVs, buying a microwave when they first came out. I even remember helping my mom do dishes by hand every night until I was around 13 and we got our first dishwasher.
As to cars with personality, my first was a '61 Buick LeSabre. I had a Dodge Monaco. I had a Ford Galaxy XL.
And drive ins? My biggest memory of a drive in is when a girl I was going out with walked out on me in a drive in and left with another guy. I can remember too, when I was younger, my dad having financial problems and so being ashamed to go to a regular theater because of fear of being seen 'having fun' when people knew he was in trouble, so we'd go to the drive in once in a while. Dad was a WWII gen guy, and I can remember we went to see Bonnie and Clyde - the one with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway - and leaving before it ended by my parents got offended by some of the scenes.
I remember going to an old fashioned theater, too, once in the early 60s with my parents - the kind where there were very plush, comfortable seats, thick red curtains lining the walls, and a curtain that was drawn aside to reveal the movie screen. We saw, "A Mad, Mad, Mad World," and I remember my dad's distinctive braying laughter.
After that I morphed into what my ex father in law, who was a great man and was like a second father to me, said were 'good cars.' He had lived in Europe for many years working for IBM, and he and I were talking once maybe in the late 80s about foreign cars. I said people should by American cars, and he replied, "Yeah, I used to think that too, until I went to Europe and started driving good cars."
He was particularly fond of Toyotas. About '92 or '93, I had a 67 Mercury Cougar. And you know what? That thing was a total piece of you-know-what. ALWAYS breaking down. I spent so much money on that darned piece of metal, that I counted myself lucky when I was able to sell it after spending maybe $3,500 on repairs. Learned a big lesson there. I'm really happy now about the general much better quality of cars. They are an order of magnitude better than they were in the '60s. Beach Boys nostalgia aside, I own two really nice cars, one a mid-sized Japanese SUV and the other a Japanese-American crossover. Both get decent mileage, have very low maintenance costs and are generally quite trustworthy.
Honestly, there's NOTHING worse than a darned car that won't work, and no work more absolutely loathsome to me or futile than trying to work on a car. I've often quipped that if I die and get sent to the bad place it will be working on cars punctuated by bouts of gardening, both activities which I despise to the core of my soul.
= new reply since forum marked as read
