List those things that were the norm for most of your life but are now the equivalent of a horse and buggy. They exist but you don’t see them very often.
The Video Rental store. I can remember when they didn’t even exist but I wasn’t even a teen yet. Our family got a VHS recorder around 1979 which was pretty early in. I remember blank video tapes costing something like $20 at first. Within a few years video rental stores were commonplace, by the end of the 80s they were as numerous as McDonalds locations. And then suddenly they were gone. The empty stores are still there in some cases, vacant due to the poor economy and property value crash.
Swinging by the video store on the way home from work was almost a daily ritual like getting take out food. While I have fond memories and love the nostalgia, having that damn tape back before the 24 hour period was up (thus preventing the next day rental cost) was often easier said than done. And when they finally did have a copy of the movie you really wanted to see, half way though you discover the tape was destroyed by some jackass with a $45 Wal Mart VCR that eats everything.
The Record Store. Remember going to the mall? Remember how one of the main stops was the record store? Remember flipping through CDs, perhaps even LPs and cassette tapes if you are old enough? Remember actually paying for music? I was a DJ and I probably have 1,500 LPs and 12" singles. LPs were about $10 and singles were about $5 so let’s just multiply 1,500 x $7.50 and that is how much I think every fucking kid today OWES ME.
I worked shitty, menial jobs for minimum wage and probably spent 75% of it at the music store. Today losers in their 20s still living at home, who don’t even pay for their internet connection, download music libraries ten times bigger than mine for free. Assholes.
The Newsstand / Bookstore. This was another mall favorite. Growing up I might have had the greatest newsstand ever at the Broward Mall. Not only did the have a huge martial arts section of books, they had every martial arts magazine I might ever want and they sold egg creams. Do ya think the owner might have been from New York? So armed with my current issue of Black Belt, Inside Kung Fu and Soldier of Fortune I’d grab a table at the food court with my egg cream and do some light reading.
Must have been close to what my dad grew up with having a Ice Cream / Soda counter in the 50s and 60s. In later years at the newsstand I’d note the adult magazine issues that we’d pay a 100% markup to one of our 18 year old “associates” to purchase on our behalf. You had to be creative to get your adult content back then.
Going Off The Grid. Remember going outside to play? When I was a kid I had a bike, and once we left the block we might as well have been on the moon. If it was the weekend it was a good bet you wouldn’t see or hear from us until dinner time and we usually had to bust our ass to not be late. If there was some kind of emergency we could probably find a payphone and call home, but there was no tracking us. Sure when we were teens it was a safe bet you could find us and every other teenager in a 5 mile radius at the mall but still you had to find us in a sea of hundreds of teenagers.
There was also a time you couldn’t just google a persons name and find out everything you ever wanted to know about them. Every single address they’ve ever lived, when they graduated, every business they’ve been an owner of and their home address in case you feel like making some internet squabble personal. Used to be you had to hire a private investigator or really know your way around City Hall and various records departments to find half the stuff google will show you in 60 seconds. Thankfully my “trouble making” days were so long ago nobody was willing to enter that crap into a database.
The Drive In Theater - If you had a time machine and went back to 1985 and told us one day we’d spend the equivalent of a steak dinner to see a movie and buy nothing more than popcorn and a coke we’d have known you were on drugs. Not only did it cost just $1 per person at the drive in, we brought our own cokes and sometimes our own popcorn (although that real movie theater butter shit they had back then was hard to duplicate). But it didn’t matter, a huge tub was like $4.50 and you couldn’t finish it.
This was one of the huge benefits of having a car, no matter how dated and tired, when you were in high school back then. A date to the drive in was a lot more promising than a date to see a movie.
Being Invisible - It’s hard work being a ninja today. Last fall I made a trip back to Iowa and one night decided to walk all the old haunts and trails of my past. As a teen I was a fucking ghost and under certain conditions you could be within four feet of me and have no idea I was there. Now those paths and alleys are loaded with motion detector spotlights and I noted more than a few home security perimeter cameras. I might as well have had a blinking strobe and IR around my neck.
Thankfully the days of visiting catastrophic vandalism on those who seriously wronged me are over.
I miss our country store. It was a husband and wife and they lived there. I would pick up soda bottle and turn them in for I think I dime a piece. The old timers sat around the stove that sat in the middle of the store. Had the big cooler you reached and got your soda with the bottle opener on the side of the chest. Had one soda machine outside put the money in and small door opened and you pulled your soda bottle out. When his wife passed away it wasn’t a month the husband passed. The floor had cracks in it and when we tore it down there was old change, letters, (it was our post office as well), etc. Would like to see small country store like that again.
Had something similar growing up in Iowa, a Mom and Pop grocery store that was a house.They slept upstairs and the downstairs was the meat counter, dairy case and some shelves of basics. Being around the corner from my grandparents house meant I had a regular supply of chocolate milk and candy bars. Being only a block from the local Junior High meant they did a brisk business before and after school hours.
It was sad to see it get torn down when they retired the shop. Another place where I spent a good part of my life and have fond memories gone forever.
Did they make sandwiches there right on the spot? Our’s they made was so thick they couldn’t have made any money. I remember we would trade like bushels of corn for potatoes or whatever Grandpa and Dad needed. If one neighbor had a bad crop of something and good with another neighbors would trade around. My grandpa plowed with a team of mules till 82’ and Grandma cooked on a wood stove till the 90’s. It was a good child hood and was lucky to see some of the old ways before it was gone.
Generations of kids from my fathers time, to me and to the lucky few who came after spent lots of quality time on those front steps drinking sodas (pop in the local vernacular) and eating 25 cent candy bars.
If my friends and I had planned to go camping or something like that, we did a final top off of goodies for our packs at Bacino’s. I was really lucky that Marshalltown retained some of it’s traditions from my fathers time. There was still a genuine ice cream soda counter on Main Street that serves sandwiches and such. Of course with the influx of illegals and the related narcotics issues the town was forever destroyed during the 90s. Now main street is mostly bars and low grade Mexican cantinas.
The Arcade. While I have had pretty much every home console since the Atarti 2600 nothing use to beat going with my boyhood pals and playing Double Dragon and Operation Wolf at the local arcade. There use to be one in every shopping mall.
Tobacconist/Cutlery Shoppe. Every shopping mall I went in growing up use to have at least one. What I miss the most is the fragrant aroma of various pipe tobacco. As a youngster I had quit the fondest for knives and wasted plenty of time window shopping at these stores. Now both knives and smoking are “politically incorrect” and would not be caught dead in a “family friendly” environment such as a shopping mall.
Hardware Stores. No I don’t mean the big box warehouse bullshit stores that now have self checkouts. But the small mom and pop hardware stores that sold ammunition and firearms and smelled of fresh cut lumber, I wished I could bottle that smell and wear it as a cologne.
I can travel 30 min in any direction & hit either a drive-in theater, VHS video store, arcade or mom & pop hardware store. In fact, I frequent the hardware store quite often. It still has the creaky hardwood floors and all. That’s my honey hole for reloading supplies, I’ve even scored a dusty, old restricted 6920 from there.
I know what you’re saying, Steyr, about being off the grid. My buddy’s & I would hop on our Redlines & Haros and peddle 5 miles out to another town for popsicles, jumping every driveway culvert on the way. We’d be gone all day & it felt like we were soooo far away from home. Oh, the good 'ol days…
Growing up in Detroit, there was Boblo Island, and amusement park that was around for 90+ years, where you took a steam ferry for a 1 hour trip down river to the island. It was relatively inexpensive, closer than Cedar Point, and used to go there 2 -3 times every summer. Great times and found memories…
The local barber shop. When I was a kid I got my hair cut down the block at a barber shop called Brunos. Run by John Bruno, old Italian guy. I miss that place.
I had the good fortune of being exposed to wood and metal shop starting in Junior High. My son who is a high school freshman this year will never get the opportunity to learn the basics in wood shop, metal shop and automotives.
My mother still has every project I ever made. That being said, its 5 o’clock somewhere…
To my shop teachers Mr. Bennett, Mr. Berkshire and the man himself Doc Drescher, cheers!
Just seeing kids playing around the neighborhood. We used to all hang out at a vacant lot down the street where there was a big tree that had half a dozen different tree houses in it. The little kids had a pallet nailed to a branch six feet off the ground while the older kids had veritable “sky mansions” twenty feet up. We walked or rode our bikes everywhere … with our dogs running alongside. We knew everybody in the neighborhood. They might be the grumpy old guy or the local “Boo Radley” house, but we knew who they were. We would have neighborhood games of “kick the can” with twenty-five kids playing. We’d put together backyard “carnivals” where we’d build our own game booths and snack stands, selling cookies and cupcakes our moms baked to each other and then spending whatever we made at some other kid’s game. The same five bucks in change would get passed back and forth ten times in an afternoon.
There was a very real neighborhood “community.” It wasn’t Walton’s mountain … not everybody got along and we weren’t all bosom buddies. But we knew each other. We knew who drove what, we knew whose kids were whose, we knew which dog lived where.
I’m fortunate to live in the same town where I grew up. I live within a half mile of where I’ve lived (in three different houses) for fifty years of my life. And I know most of my neighbors. But it’s a different vibe. All those kids running around together were kind of the social lubricant that opened up channels of communication. There was a neighborhood elementary school and the kids were all in the same class. Families grew to know each other because their kids were hanging out together.
My parents are elderly. A lot of their contemporaries have passed. And when there’s a funeral, the majority of folks showing up are the kids. The old kids from the neighborhood. And most of the conversations generally end up shooting the shit about our childhood hijinks back in the “old neighborhood.”
Now I drive through these new neighborhoods with all little McMansions and the manicured yards and the drawn shades. And not a kid in sight on a sunny Saturday afternoon.
