I'm a 30-something, and havent experienced much more than the general membership here, I'm sure, but I get the most amazing "stop and think about this for a second...." moments when I consider how much our world has changed over the lives of us all.
For me - I've lived without a cell phone. I was in high school when people who had pagers were considered to be drug dealers. I grew up with Oregon Trail in my teens. Most people didn't have computers at home. The mountain I lived on didn't have cable TV, so we had only 3 channels. Our roads weren't paved, and Saturday afternoons were spent jumping into the river swinging off vines. Call waiting and caller ID were a really big deal, but we didn't get them because they cost more money.
My grandma tells me they didn't have wheelchairs. She was a nurse in her white cap and skirt and tights. She had an alcoholic, abusive husband at a time when that was shameful to even mention. My grandpa tells me no one on his street had a TV. It was a really big deal when someone got one, and everyone whispered about it.
My 90-something patient told me about how so much of healthcare took place at home because you really, really had to be messed up for mom to go get the horses and carriage ready to go to the doctor. She got in big trouble once when she broke her arm falling from a tree.
What have you lived through? What pieces of history stay with you?
Jellie shoes in every color of the rainbow, banana clips, best friend necklaces, Guess jeans with the legs rolled up, TCBY frozen yogurt, shopping for tapes at Tape World store in the mall, frosty pink lip gloss, Coty Wild Musk colonge, stonewashed denim, OMG! Anyone remember Club MTV with Downtown Julie Brown in the late 80's? Remember Dippity Do hair gel?
Specializes in Med nurse in med-surg., float, HH, and PDN.
Everything that BrandonLPN said in his post (#5,Pg.1) and everything milfordmom said in her post (#20, above me), plus:
Pay toilets going up in price from 5 cents to 10 cents.
A pack of cigarettes cost 25 cents and I, at age 8, could run down to the store and buy Grampa a pack of Pall Malls.
I remember when you cranked the handle on the phone box and held the ear piece and spoke into the speaker on the box; our operator was Kay and she had a British accent. If I called her and she wasn't busy, she would sing "How Much Is That Doggie In The Window?" with me.
The two old ladies who lived across the street from us had a two-seater inside 'outhouse' in a small room that connected the house to the barn. No taps in the kitchen, water pump over a slate sink.
Some other old folks I loved to visit had a high-back chair in its own little room, with a white china pee-pot that slid in place under the seat in which there was an oval opening. When you were through you placed a board covered on top with a quilted cushion to cover up the chairs true purpose.
My Nana lived in a fourth floor walk-up apartment building, and her toilet was in her kitchen; you had to walk UP four cement steps to get to it, and it had a curtain you pulled around it.
If I seem excessively interested in toilets, well, it's 'cause my dad was a plumber!
Mom was a nurse and she worked night shift private-duty, complete with white hosiery w/ a girdle, white uniform, white 'Clinics' shoes, and her linen cap required soaking in a thick starch-laden water, shaping to dry and then dampening it again w/ water to iron it, so it kept its shape.
Specializes in Med nurse in med-surg., float, HH, and PDN.
@ No Stars In My Eyes, approximately what year was it when you, as a child, bought cigarettes? That is incredible! I would genuinely like to know!:)
I didn't buy them for me, but at age 8 I could go to the store 1/4 mile away and ask for a pack of Pall-Malls for my Grampa, give the guy a quarter, run back home and give 'em to Grampa.
My sister got caught smoking with our aunt who was jst a couple years older, I think 15 to my sister's 13 (I was 11) and our step-grandmother washed their tongues with a couple of strokes of a bar of Fels Naptha soap. I was so impressed by that that I wouldn't dream of trying to 'sneak a smoke' with Aunt Jerry. She was tough, the Fels Naptha wasn't enough to make her stop.
Specializes in Case mgmt., rehab, (CRRN), LTC & psych.
We couldn't walk up to a sales person for cigarettes, but cigarette vending machines worked just fine for that.
In the mid-1990s (ages 13 to 15), I frequently walked to the local convenience store with a signed note from my parents to purchase cigarettes for them.
I cannot imagine a shopkeeper or convenience store clerk knowingly selling ciggies to an underage person in 2015.
I remember my brother showing me where his number was on the draft list in the newspaper, and it being so far down he wasn't going to have to go to Viet Nam. I remember the college riots. I especially remember our POWs coming home, and how disgracefully our nation treated the returning soldiers.
-getting a black and white TV so we could watch the first moon landing. And later finding out that the Star Trek uniforms were color coded, and Johnny Carson's stage curtains had striped colors!
-learning to drive my dad's Jetstar 88Oldsmobile, which he measured and told me many years later, was actually an inch longer than his Ford 150 pickup truck in the 80s.
-wearing white polyester pant suit uniforms, with heavy white nursing shoes. I made the long neck lanyards that we attached the narc keys to, because they kept getting lost in people's pockets and going home with someone. Using black ink for days, blue for evenings and red for night shift charting.
Specializes in UR/PA, Hematology/Oncology, Med Surg, Psych.
I was born in the Nixon years, a Gen-Xer. Last child of the family, my siblings are Boomers. Remember having much more freedom out in the world than kids today, home for lunch and dinner only. Now and then I wonder how this lack of early independence will effect the generations after mine. My mother said she took me to one of my early Dr. visits as a baby and the Pediatrician stating I was the first baby he had ever seen in disposable diapers. I remember working on 9/11 and the patients in shock and tears, along with the staff. I remember being in the parking lot a few days after 9/11 when they opened up the airspace again, heard a plane and was scared to death it would crash down. I remember the Cold War drills at school.
fawnmarie, ASN
284 Posts
Jellie shoes in every color of the rainbow, banana clips, best friend necklaces, Guess jeans with the legs rolled up, TCBY frozen yogurt, shopping for tapes at Tape World store in the mall, frosty pink lip gloss, Coty Wild Musk colonge, stonewashed denim, OMG! Anyone remember Club MTV with Downtown Julie Brown in the late 80's? Remember Dippity Do hair gel?