Back in my day... (I think this qualifies me as a grandpa...)

Part One

If you’re younger than thirty years old, some of the things I have to say may shock you.  I’m sorry, but the truth must be told.

Cell Phones:

Imagine what it must have been like to live in a world where, if you wanted to talk to your friend who lived down the block, you did not text them, did not IM them, did not even call their cell phone, but rode your bike (which only had one gear) over to their house and (here’s the rub) talked to them. No. Really. You went over to their house and talked to them. Like, face-to-face!

If you were really lazy, or if it was raining (as was frequently the case in North Seattle,) you used the telephone (which was directly wired to the wall) and called them. If they were not home, nobody answered. No answering machine, no voicemail. Nothing.  Just ring, ring, ring, ring, ring… If you were really bored, you’d let the phone ring until they got home. And if you called, and they were on the phone, you got what was called a “busy signal.”

One of the things that was being phased out in my childhood was the use of the “Exchange Name” for a telephone number. I’m young enough that telephone numbers have always been seven digits, but I’m old enough to remember when people said names for phone numbers. “Exchange Names” used the corresponding letters (2=ABC, 3=DEF, etc) to spell words. I lived in the “SUnset” exchange (my phone number started with 78-…) Just a few blocks north of us there was the “EMerson” (36-…) exchange.

When people would ask for your phone number, younger people would say SU3-0000. Older people would still say “SUnset 3-5000.” On a side note, there were no Q or Z on the old telephone dials. Back in the 1970s, there was a hugely popular series of joke books that made fun of different ethnicities. I’m ashamed to admit I read my share of them. One such “Polish” joke book had a joke: “Did you hear about the Dial-In Polish Joke Line? The number is 555-POLZ.” The idea behind this joke was that Polish people somehow lacked the understanding that there was no Z on the telephone dial.

Thankfully, that sort of humor is just as outdated as telephones that don’t have Z on the dial.

When I was young I only knew one person who had a phone in their car, and it was built into the car. The family attended my church and was giving me a ride home from a Sunday night service one night. The father— whose job-title was unknown to me (he might have been a software billionaire, for all I know…except we didn’t have those, yet)—opened this small console between the driver’s and passenger seat to reveal a phone apparatus about the size of a PC desktop tower. (A desktop computer is the really cumbersome one that preceded the laptop you currently use.) He pulled the phone off the hook and with a mischievous grin, asked me “What’s your phone number?”

I told him the number, which he dialed, handing me the phone.

I thought it was a joke, but I heard the phone ringing, and suddenly my father answered, just as we pulled up in front of the house.

“Hello?”

“Uh…hi dad.”

“Paul?”

“Yeah, uh…they forgot to drive me home…I’m still at church.”

“For crying out loud! They just pulled up in front of the house…you’re still at church?”

I couldn’t keep my face straight. I was trying not to have my spleen explode while I refrained from laughing uncontrollably.

“Uh…that’s weird…can you come pick me …heh…heh…uhmmmm…I’ll see you in a second.”

“What?  Where are you?”

“I’m in the car.”

“No you’re not, how can you be calling me from a car?”

“They have a phone in the car.”

“What?  Nobody has a phone in their car!  Where are you?”

“I’m in the car…I’ll be in in just a second.  Bye, dad.”

I looked at the handset, but couldn’t make heads or tails of the buttons. My friend’s dad hung up the phone for me. And it only cost something like five dollars per minute.

This is not a science fiction/fantasy story. This is a history lesson about what everyday life was like in the 1970s and ‘80s.

My parents were not what you would call “early adopters” of new technology. They tended to wait until things had been on the market for quite a while, and then went all out to get a top-of-the-line version of the years-old tech. The few exceptions in this area are: the Home Video Game Console and our VCR.

 The game console

Before XBOX 1, before PS4, even before SuperNintendo, or Sega Genesis, we had very simple games. Even 8-Bit was too advanced for us back then.

The home gaming system was the best thing that hit the market in the mid-70s. The one my family purchased was brand-named Hanimex, (model 777) and it offered FOUR different games, all of which were variations of the now-classic “Pong.” The games were Pong, Squash (which was a “Pong” take on handball,) Hockey, (which had several paddles you could control) and “Practice” which was ostensibly one-player Squash.

There were two dial-controllers that allowed you to move your paddles (which looked like a giant lower-case letter “L” in a sans serif format) either up and down the screen, or left and right, depending on the game. The “ball” was a small white blip that was about the size of a period to the two letter-Ls.

Author's recreation from memory. ©2015 P.J. Creelman

 This game console kept me busy playing games against my sister, parents and occasionally even my friends…for about two or three months. Then one of my neighbors got an Atari 2600, and suddenly the Hanimex had run its course. My parents never spent another dollar on a single game console again, and I went back to reading comics, watching schlocky Sci-Fi on the television and begging* my neighbors to let me come over and play on his Atari. (By “begging” I meant, “casually referring to how fun it would be to play video games that are in color, hoping that the manipulative ploy would work, convincing him to let me come over.” (It seldom did.))

Personal Home Computer

We were the first family on the block to get a computer (Commodore 64,) for educational purposes, and Mom and Dad did purchase such revolutionary video games as “Fraction Fever,” “Frogger™,” and “Popeye®.” (OK, Frogger™ and Popeye® were actually pretty awesome. In retrospect, I’d say that Popeye® was ostensibly a cross between Donkey Kong™ and Chutes and Ladders.)

Commodore 64, baby! This was a massive upgrade for me, the family’s budding computer programmer. (For the record, the “64” referred to 64kb Memory. That’s right… Sixty-Four Thousand Bytes of memory. Let that sink in while you’re deleting forwarded e-mails (on your smartphone, no less,)that are ten times that size.

When I was in middle school, I was in the computer club, and we worked with Commodore PET 2001 computers (“PET,” I just learned, from my extensive research on Wikipedia, is an acronym for “Personal Electronic Transactor.”) Programming in BASIC, I wrote text-based “Choose-Your-Own-Adventure” Science Fiction games. I even experimented with rudimentary keyboard-based “ASCII-Graphics.

Every day, after school, I would adjourn to the computer room at my middle school and program on the old PET 2001s or the more modern PET 4032s. Programs were saved on the built-in Data-sette drive. (These were simple audio cassettes upon which you recorded (VERY SLOOOOOOWWWWWLLLYYYY) your programs. A simple program took a while to load. Mine got big enough you had to flip the tape.) The true nerds of our era actually would listen to what their computer programs.

This picture taken from the Wikipedia page.

(If you’re wondering what it sounded like, think of it like this… Simultaneously listen to: the “Emergency Alert System” during an Amber Alert; a fax machine connecting; an old dial-up modem connecting; your friend blending a fruit smoothie in an old blender set on “frappe.” )

When we got the Commodore 64 I was completely overwhelmed with the sudden uptick in colors and programming capacity. I was no longer limited to the monochrome blue and or green monitors. This machine had 256 colors, it had panache, and it had power!!!

Furthermore, unlike the built-in “Data-sette” drive, this computer had an external Data-sette, and eventually we upgraded to 5 ½” 720kb floppy disks. I spent a lot of time and energy writing useless programs in BASIC, but it never progressed beyond that. As a result, I am a lower-middle class guy with two useless degrees instead of a “MetroSoft Millionaire” with a bajillion followers and a foundation in my name.

The VCR

VHS (Video Home System… with another tip of the hat to Wikipedia, which, ironically, depicts a VHS tape that someone did not rewind.) Mom and Dad judiciously waited until the battle between the video tape sizes was mostly won. Henceforth, we didn’t jump onboard with BetaMax. Our VCR (Video Cassette Recorder) was a humongous silver-ish monolith that was good for 12 channels of recording and viewing, (one at a time)  but it could be any twelve. If you popped open a little door on the front of the VCR, you could actually adjust each recordable channel to pick up whatever you wanted it to.

Once, as a joke, I set up each of the twelve to only pick up (see: Broadcast Television, (R.I.P.)) the same channel (KSTW 11, out of Tacoma, as I recall.)

This caused my father no end of apoplectic fits and grief as he continuously tried to record Seattle SuperSonics basketball games (See: Seattle NBA, (R.I.P.) but continuously wound up with recorded reruns of “Gilligan’s Island” and “The Brady Bunch.”

Interestingly, while most of my friends had cable television, but no method of recording, we had broadcast TV and the VCR. This meant if anyone wanted to see Sunday night’s episode of “Fawlty Towers” because their father was watching “Battle of the Network Stars XVIII,” then they came to my house on Monday after school.

Broadcast Television

I loved science fiction and superhero stories. I loved watching The Adventures of Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman and Shazam!on television. I watched the semi-SciFi/semi-Superhero shows like The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman. I watched Battlestar Galactica (The original series,) Jason of Star Command, Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century and Star Trek (The Original Series.)

I will admit, in my childhood, I often found the “Cerebral Science Fiction” show occasionally difficult to follow, but I enjoyed watching Captain Kirk and his crew getting into melees, punching interstellar villains in the stomach and then hitting the doubled-over combatants on the back of the skull.

Of course, in the 1970s,Star Trek, Adventures of Superman and Batman were reruns in syndication. I don’t know how long it was before I learned what “reruns” were, and it didn’t really matter. There was always something entertaining to watch.

Wonder Woman, Battlestar Galactica, Six Million Dollar Man/Bionic Woman, and the Saturday morning shows Shazam!, Isis and Jason of Star Command were enjoyed in their first runs. (I will admit, I have had the opportunity to catch up on some of these shows on DVD and various nostalgia channels. While some have aged gracefully, some have become difficult to swallow.)

I would be remiss if I didn't give a mention to my absolute television idols in the 1970s: J.P. Patches, and Gertrude. J.P. (Julius Pierpont) Patches was the titular host of a daily, live children's television show on KIRO-7 Television from Seattle. Gertrude was his cohort. The show was largely improvised, and kept children entertained across the Pacific Northwest and into Canada's ... well... Pacifc Southwest. The show was one of the first- and last of a dying breed of live, local children's broadcasting.

 J.P. Patches (the late Chris Wedes) was the mayor of the city dump. His show was co-hosted by Gertrude (Robert Newman) and was largely improvised every morning and afternoon for several years, before dropping to just the morning show. Each day, J.P. and Gertrude would look into the ICU2 TV Set and tell talk about whose birthday it was. It seemed like ever "Patches Pal" in the Northwest fell under J.P.'s watchful eye, and apparently every kid's birthday present was "in the dryer." 
Every morning episode ended with J.P. putting his "daughter" Esmerelda (a Raggedy Ann-like doll,) onto the school bus. 

The show (which was the first show broadcast on KIRO TV, ran from 1958 to 1981. In fact, "J.P. Patches" was the very first show aired on KIRO-7 Television.

J.P., Gertrude, PJ and my baby sister.

 

My sister and I met J.P. and Gertrude in the mid-to-late '70s at the opening of Art's Food Center in North Seattle (now a QFC.) J.P. and Gertrude were my first autographs.

I credit J.P. with making me not completely Clown-o-phobic, and in fact, I once served as a fill-in clown, calling myself "PJ Patches" until my former wife told me she was afraid of a lawsuit. Then I became PJ Clown.

I miss J.P. I do feel honored to be a Facebook Friend of Gertrude.

The hardest part of watching first-run television shows in the 70s was that if you missed an episode, you missed it. There was no DVR, no “On Demand,” not even VCRs in the general population.

There were times when I would be sent to bed early, or my father wanted to watch a competing show.

“You can catch the rerun in the summer,” he’d say nonchalantly.

Of course, there was the difficult problem of number of episodes during the regular season versus the number of weeks in the summer. A typical season of a show would produce between twenty and twenty-six episodes. There were between twelve and sixteen weeks in the summer. It was a crapshoot, and I distinctly recall some times of venomous anger when I didn’t get a chance to see the one episode of Six Million Dollar Man that I missed in December. And let’s face it, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to do the single-eyebrow-lift like Lee Majors and Leonard Nimoy.

Nailed It!