Doctor Grandma

I have been on this planet 66 years, as of yesterday. Here are a few things that tell me how much I have experienced and what changes have occurred in those years:

• When I was a little girl, we had one phone in the house, near the kitchen. I even remember some of our phone numbers. One was HA 31931. Numbers now have 10 numbers to a phone number. Ours had 7.
• When we wanted to call someone, we would pick up the receiver and listen. If we heard someone else talking, that was the people sharing our “party line” and we had to hang up until they were done, then make our call.
• I remember when calculators first came out. I was starting college. They were expensive.
• My first car was a VW bug, original, green, with clutch and shifting gears. I did everything I could do to avoid stopping on a hill. If you shifted and “missed” the next gear, it could just roll backwards into the car behind you.
• Certainly, there were no computers, no video games. I remember computers coming into peoples’ homes. I remember some kind of HUGE computer being rolled into Purdue libraries. I remember the taking down and dismantling of the card catalog. I took the 3X5 cards with my dad’s Masters thesis and PhD titles.
• For my 15th birthday, I got a polaroid “Swinger” camera.
• I used to put curlers in my hair and sleep on them. When I was a little girl, my mom wound my hair into little curls and pinned them to my head with bobby pins. We took them out in the morning.
• The Beatles came out when I was about 13 yrs. old. I had a huge picture of Paul McCartney on my bedroom wall. For my 15th birthday, my dad took my sister and I to a Beatles LIVE concert at Kennedy stadium. Thunderstorms threatened all evening and John Lennon pointed his guitar toward the clouds and acted like he was shooting at them. I screamed through most of the concert. My dad was so embarrassed, he moved my sister and himself away from me and another girl who decided to scream together for the duration. We bought their music on “record albums”.
• I was sent home from high school one day when some girls and I decided to wear jeans to school, to protest not being able to wear PANTS. Even in the coldest of winter days.
• Saturday mornings were the only time we could watch cartoons on TV. We would wake up and camp out in front on the television all morning until lunch-time. The final shows were Sky King and My Friend Flicka.
• The Wizard of Oz movie came on TV once a year. There were no home movies, no DVDs.
• I was not allowed to see Cleopatra in the theater because it was too adult.
• Candy bars were 5 cents. Cokes were 10 cents.
• In a drugstore down the street, they sold penny candy. One of the candies was in the shape of a baby, we called them “Tar babies”. They used to be called something else.
• Pres. Kennedy was shot when I was in 5th grade. Our teacher came into the class upset and said he had been shot. A little later she returned, saying, “The President has died,” and we were all sent home.