When one gets to become my age, one is occasionally wont to reminisce.
I have lived through such amazing times. So much history. So many advances. So many struggles. Such cool gadgets.
Herewith, a few of these memories.
I REMEMBER:
- Dial phones.
- 300 Baud modems.
- Thick daily local newspapers.
- Early color TVs with unnaturally orange hues.
- Plymouths, punch cards, and pubic hair.
- Mood rings and copper bracelets.
- Qiana.
- Girdles.
- CompuGraphic typesetting machines, and the HTML-like codes needed to enter text into them.
- National Educational Television (NET).
- Rock n’ roll on AM radio, played by live local DJs.
- When girls in high school were first encouraged to be anything they wanted, but boys were still expected to all be jocks.
- When you had to go a thousand miles to lose your money in a legal casino.
- Rhinelander, Heidelberg, and Lucky Lager.
- Lumbermen’s taverns.
- Road houses.
- When grooming and behaving as a gentleman was not considered ironic or strange.
- Reel-to-reel tapes.
- Life, Look, and The Saturday Evening Post in every doctor’s waiting room.
- When discrimination was so everyday as to be invisible, if you weren’t the one being discriminated against.
- When most writers in Seattle could be classified in two categories: those who would rather be in New York, and those who would rather be in Missoula.