Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
We walked to the National Archives to see the original Declaration of Independence and other historic documents. Ahead of us was a large group of high school students. We thought about leaving, but the line vanished in just a few minutes. The kids spent just seconds in the rotunda, rushing past the most sacred documents in American history to get back to the hypnotic glow of their cell phones.
Teenagers always look for the latest in idle entertainment. We did too, but it took a little more effort, and a few skills aside from clicking an app on your screen to find a little distraction.
In an age before XM, or even FM in most places, the AM dial on your car radio was the only music you could find. After dark, you could tune in to stations in Los Angeles, Denver, or Minneapolis, but most of us, that is “Us” as a generation from Iowa to Oregon, and Wisconsin to Arizona, tuned in to 1520 KOMA, 50,000 watts from Oklahoma City.
We couldn’t wait for nightfall to listen to the best in 1960s and ’70s rock and roll. Sometimes, even the local stations that a few of us listened to were filled with static.
In the days before digital radio and FM, AM stations sometimes raised and lowered in static level depending on the RPM of your engine.
It wasn’t rocket science, then, and it isn’t now for owners of classic cars with distributor caps instead of electronic ignition.
Inside the distributor cap was a small metal cylinder, about the size of an AA battery, with a single wire. If the condenser was worn out, you got that annoying static that rose with the engine’s RPM. The fix was simple: replace it. My last one cost $1.79 for my ’62 Chevy Nova. Five minutes later, problem solved. KOMA was back on the air, clear as crystal.
Television was another story. We didn’t have remotes, why would we, with only one channel, KWRB Channel 10 from Thermopolis? Still, it took finesse to get a clear picture. Sometimes, the screen would begin to scroll for no reason, and you had to adjust the vertical control knob. If diagonal lines rolled across the screen, that meant a horizontal adjustment. Kids today would go nuts. Their screens either work or you buy a new one. There’s no tuning knob for life anymore.
There is a nationwide trend of teenagers refusing to take a driver’s test and avoiding getting a driver’s license as long as they can. That’s something my friends and I from the 1970s could never understand. That license meant freedom, a chance to go to town, drag main, meet girls, get in trouble, and make a few memories.
Most of us drove a manual transmission. When my daughter Staci turned 16, I found a Saturn for her first car. It was a five-speed manual. She hated it and resented me for choosing that car for her. I had an ulterior motive. Staci learned to drive a stick and can still do so today. A few weeks later, she thought it was cool to drive a stick. It’s a skill that few people under 40 can master. Car thieves avoid manual transmissions for that very reason.
We all carried a pencil on the dashboard (there was no center console or cup holders) inside every car or truck. That pencil was an integral part of our sound system.
If your 8-track tape dragged, you shoved that pencil under a corner of the tape until it played at normal speed. The 8-track tape was perhaps the worst invention ever created to play music, but they were easy to slap into the tape deck, nearly indestructible unless you left them on the dash in the sun, and then they warped into an unusable plastic mass. Cassette tapes were a big improvement, CDs exponentially better, and now streaming online digital music lets you listen to hundreds of thousands of artists.
Boys today will never know the thrill and excitement of getting a girl or a group of girls if you had buddies in tow coming over to “listen” to records.
It didn’t matter if they were LPs (long playing) records or 45s; your turntable had an adjustable switch for 45 or 33 1/3, and some of the older ones still had a setting for 78 RPM records. You put a little insert on top of the center spindle to play 45s. The record player had a cool feature that dropped the 45s onto the turntable automatically, slid the stylus arm out, and then dropped the needle onto the perimeter of the next record. We never stacked more than 10 45s, and with LPS, it was usually three or four, but that meant an hour and a half to two hours of music.
Album rock was all the rage in the dorms at UW. Memorable times for an aging teenager.
The final assault on the senses of the current teenage generation was the phone. It was attached to a coiled wire and either hung on the wall or on a table. Texting was impossible; you had to answer the phone and talk to communicate (oh, the horror.) Adding to the terror, you never knew who it was on the other end. There was no way to ignore the caller. Either you answered or you didn’t.
Going back even further to my early high school years, you had to know your ring. That is the pattern of long and short rings on a party line.
A party line was no party; it was a shared line with neighbors, and those neighbors could live miles away.
Our ring was two longs and a short. When that pattern rang on the phone, we had an incoming call. When it was three longs, three shorts, or any other combination, it was a call for the other people on the line.
Yep, there were nosey people who waited until the rings ended, then delicately lifted the receiver with their hand over the mouthpiece to listen in on the conversation. It was great fun for quite a few of the “Karen” type ladies we shared the line with.
Times change, technologies improve, and life goes on. The nostalgia of the past is always rose colored.
No, it wasn’t better, but it was our time, and they are our collective memories.
The youth of today will have their own, but they’ll never understand ours.