Tech We Grew Up With (That My Grandkids Will Never Understand)

This month’s topic for my writing group was to write an essay about our youth. I decided to focus on technology. I hope you enjoy my ramblings about eons past.

The year was probably 1993. Our 4-year-old daughter, Caitlin, was busy doing something at our mid-century modern teak wall unit (which we still have, of course).

“Watcha doin’ Cait?” I asked.

“Giving Barbie a ride!” she replied, turning towards me, a huge smile on her face. Behind her, Barbie was spinning round and round on our rarely used turntable. “She’s on the Merry-Go-Round!”

Once I finished laughing, I explained. “That’s a record player, Cait.”

“What’s a record?” asked the confused child.

Fast forward to present-day. It’s 2025. I have just turned 70. I have four grandchildren. Some say that’s old. I don’t feel old. Until I think about stories like that one about the record player! I’m so old, record players have now come back into favor!

As I enter my “twilight years” (oh, brother – how cliché!) it seems a good time to reflect on the technology advances during my lifetime. This will not be an exhaustive list, but perhaps it will give my grandchildren a taste of what it was like for me growing up in the 1960s.

Let’s start with the most obvious – Television. My first memory of the advances in TV technology involves the movie, The Wizard of Oz. We had a black-and-white TV in our living room. It was a Philco that my stepdad probably got at a “good deal” from the  Firestone shop he managed. But the neighbors diagonally across the street had a color TV! We would sit in front of our B/W cube and then… right before they cut to Dorothy arriving in the Land of Oz, we would run to the huge picture window and watch… oh that green glow emanating from the Lendroth’s window! I didn’t get a color TV  until 1978. But that’s a story for another time…

Telephones. Another obvious change in technology. I could probably write this whole essay on my phone today… and then print it out. Or send it to someone in Timbuktu. (Do people still say that??) Growing up we had a yellow wall phone in the kitchen. Mom exchanged the original cord for an extra-long one. I remember twirling around while chatting and trapping myself when the cord twisted around me! There was also an “extension” in my mother’s room. Rotary dial, of course! At some point, an extension got added to the “family room” in the basement, which actually served as a bedroom. (Four of the five of us children occupied that space over the years.) I was so proud the day my pink Princess phone got installed! I drilled through the wall some years later so I could move the phone into the new space I created in the other part of the basement! (Mom never found out about that…)

Let’s talk photography. I had a Kodak Instamatic. It used size 126 film cartridges. I went through a phase in the late 70s when I actually developed my own film. I can still smell those chemicals! We were a photo-taking family. Mom took pictures of every event, every trip, every bird that visited her feeder on the deck. And then she put them all in albums. After she passed, I spent days (weeks?) going through the albums and sending pictures to siblings—who often responded: I have that already. Why? Because Mom had duplicates made every time she sent off a film cartridge for processing. OY—the cost!! You needed to take each picture several times to ensure it came out okay. But wow, that added up. Nowadays, we may take several shots of the same image, but then we can delete the ones we don’t want. And then no one ever sees them because we never print them out!!  But we now can happily annoy our friends with 46,292 postings of our grandkids’ comings and goings. Every day.

Music. There was always music in our home growing up. Records spun on the turntable in the living room. If the TV wasn’t on, the radio was. Actually, they often were both on simultaneously. Pop-Pop (my father’s father) gave me a paper transistor radio – it was so cool to pretend with… and then I got a real one!  AM radio, of course. That reminds me, I remember waiting for the vacuum tubes to warm up on the big radio my father built. (And the TV, too!) The transistor radio eliminated that delay. Decades later, we used that same level of patience waiting for the modem to connect our computer to the World Wide Web. (The Internet, kids.) I felt I had “made it” music technology-wise, when my father gave me a Playtape machine for Christmas. I saw it in the 1969 Sears catalog. It was portable! You could buy these pre-recorded cartridges to stick in the side and take your music anywhere you wanted! Too bad, I could only afford 2 cartridges. I remember some of the songs to this day—Red Rubber Ball and Lou Christie’s Lightning Strikes.

Oh, and I guess I should mention my 8-track player. It came installed in my 1965 Ford Galaxie 500, which, with its faux leopard upholstery, was already pretty cool. Even 50 years later, I can still hear that unmistakable clunk when a track changed—so much so that, in my mind, it’s now part of those songs themselves.

I could go on and on. Maybe I should write a book—Crap They Don’t Make Anymore, But I Loved. For now, I’ll just keep telling my grandkids stories they roll their eyes at… until they realize I was right all along.

Do you have fond memories of technology from bygone days? Let me know!!