When you’re a kid, Grandpas will happily buy you ice cream or candy. Grandpas know that you know that your parents would say, "No, it’ll ruin your dinner." Grandpas will teach you how to fish when your mother might worry that the sharp hook with the wicked barb could poke your little fingers. And grandfathers (bless their hearts) will sometimes explain things to you that your parents, for reasons you don’t understand, don’t want to discuss.
Most importantly, grandpas will tell you stories about a time before you were alive. They even remember a time when your parents weren’t alive. When I was a child, they told me about a land of no TV and no radio and no automobiles. My grandfathers remembered World War I and polio and The Great Depression, although most of their memories seemed to involve small things like getting a nickel to buy cotton candy on the Fourth of July or picking out clothes from the Sears-Roebucks catalog or poisoning the rats who lived in the water well. It was important to poison the rats when the water smelled too much like rat piss or rat shit.
Grandpas sometimes talk funny and use outdated words, like "cock-eyed" or "yay-hoo" instead "crazy," or "dungarees" instead of "blue jeans," or "davenport" instead of "couch."
A few years ago, I realized that I was old enough to be a grandpa. I was born in 1956, so I’ll be 53 years old on October 18. If I had fathered some children in my early 20s and then my kids reproduced in their 20s, I might have a grandchild or twenty. I’m ashamed to admit that I share my October 18th birthday with both Jesse Helms and Lee Harvey Oswald (same date, different years).
If you weren’t born yet in the 1960s, let me tell you some stories about the old days when I was a kid in Fargo, North Dakota.
There Was Hardly Any News (really, there wasn’t)
My father was a college professor, so he was a smart man who knew a lot of stuff (and a liberal Democrat in a mostly Republican city). But here’s where we got our news:
The Daily Newspaper (which was – and still is – basically yesterday’s news). We got the newspaper delivered to our door every day. Everybody got the newspaper in the old days. It had the news, and the sports, and the weather, plus comics and a crossword puzzle and obituaries and movie times (if you wanted to see a movie) and want ads (if you were looking for a job). Believe it or not, in the 1960s, there were separate sections with ads for Men’s Jobs and Women’s Jobs. After my Dad finished reading the paper, the rest of us were allowed to read it.
The TV News. There was no such thing as cable TV (and satellites were still pretty new). Everything came from broadcast TV. We had four channels (and they quit broadcasting around midnight with a picture of an American Indian). We had NBC, CBS, ABC, and NET, which was"Educational TV," which only broadcast during the day. Educational TV was used in schools. If you were in 4th grade, maybe you’d have an art class at 3:00pm on Thursday and you’d watch a show on NET about folding paper into origami. The whole show would be a lady showing you how to make an origami swan. For a whole incredibly boring hour. I don’t think adults watched the channel and kids only watched it because they were forced to. Sometimes the teacher would drag a TV into the room and we’d watch a rocket launch. During the day, the commercial networks showed soap operas, game shows, and some live shows.
In our house, we watched the Huntley-Brinkley Report (not Walter Cronkite). But we didn’t watch it every day. On normal days, that was the only national news on TV (30 minutes worth). I remember that the Saturday morning after Kennedy was killed, all the Saturday cartoons were cancelled. When I was a kid, my favorite show was "Man From U.N.C.L.E."
On weekends, my Mom had a rule that we could only watch one hour of TV per day. So we were forced to play outside and ride our bikes and do non-TV stuff. In the 1960s, videogames didn’t exist, so if the temperature was 20 below, we could stay inside and play Monopoly or card games or chess. I played Scrabble against my mother and won a lot (she would let me win, to build up my vocabulary). I played Chess against my father and lost a lot (which helped me become a better Chess player, I think).
News Magazines. My parents subscribed to Time Magazine, which came in the mail once a week. Later, in the early ‘70s, my parents also subscribed to The New Yorker and Psychology Today. And if we went to the doctor’s office or the barber shop, we’d sometimes see other magazines. What’s the name of that horrible magazine they used to have in doctor’s offices? Highlights for Children. There was a cartoon about a good kid and a bad kid. Goofus and Gallant.
But basically, when I was a kid, I had a daily newspaper, the 30 minutes of TV news, and Time Magazine (once a week). Plus, we had a really old set of encyclopedias my dad used when he was a kid (from the 1940s). And if I wanted to know more about a subject, I could ride my bike to the library.
Long Distance Phone Calls Were Very Expensive
In the 1960s, there was only one telephone company and everybody had a land line. Long-distance was expensive. I suppose I could do the math, but with inflation, it was probably the equivalent of ten or twenty bucks per minute. It was more expensive if you had an operator-assisted person-to-person call. If you wanted to send a long-distance message, it was cheaper to send a telegram. My Dad ran for the North Dakota House of Representatives and lost. My uncle on the west coast sent him a telegram saying something like "Next time you’ll win." In the old days, people still sent telegrams.
If the phone rang and it was long-distance, it usually meant someone was dead. And after you heard the news (Great Uncle Victor died and the funeral is Saturday), people would start getting nervous. "Well, I know this call is getting expensive, so I’ll hang up now. I love you. Goodbye." Later, when I’d call my mother (in the 1980s), she’d get antsy after about three minutes. The price of LD calls had gone down, but she was always worried that I was spending too much on long distance.
In the 1960s, Computers Were Gigantic and Very Expensive
Have you noticed the size of the computers in the original Star Trek? In the ‘60s, all computers were like that. In the 1970s, computers were slightly smaller.
I graduated from college in 1978. I took two classes in computer programming and learned how to program in BASIC. My college had one computer (a DEC PDP-11 minicomputer) and it had ten or twenty terminals. The really cool terminals had monochrome video screens. But most of the terminals were teletypes with paper and ink (they were sort of like typewriters attached to a computer). No internet, no Facebook, no Google, not even word processing. If you wanted to use a terminal, you had to wait in line. Or you could go in at midnight, when there was no waiting list.
In college, I wrote all of my essays on a typewriter. And all of my quotations were hand-written from books! If I wanted a book that wasn’t available in the library, I had to fill out a form for an interlibrary loan.
After college, in the early 1980s, I got a Commodore VIC-20 (3.5K of memory plus an 8K expander) with a cassette tape drive for data storage. I wrote a database program from scratch and it took 12 hours to alphabetize a list of 1200 names (and addresses and other stuff). I wanted an Apple II, but it was too expensive (Apple Computers have a long, long history of being too expensive). Later I got a Commodore 64 with a disk drive, a Commodore 128, an Atari ST, and then a PC-compatible 386 (and I’ve owned PCs since then). Now it’s 2009 and Apple Computers are still too expensive (they’ll be too expensive when I finally die). Kilobytes became megabytes and gigabytes and now I own a computer with a terabyte of disk space.
Here’s another grandpa story: back in the 1980s, my first modem was 300 Baud. That’s 300 bits per second (about 40 bytes per second). I had to dial the phone number and when I heard the phone squeak "CooCooCikCikCuk wheeeee! Cuk . Cuk. Wheeeeee," I’d have to unplug the cord and stick the plastic plug into the modem. I signed up for local BBSes (Bulletin Board Systems) and later became a sysop on CompuServe. When I got a 1200 baud modem (four times faster than 300), I thought I was in heaven. Then I got a 9600 baud modem (eight times faster than 1200). It took 20 minutes to download a picture of a pootie and we were happy, damn it! You kids have it easy. In the old days, we sent text messages with pure ASCII! And GIF picture files were a new invention! And they took 20-30 minutes to download! But GIFs were cool because they used LZW (Lempel-Ziv-Welch) encoding, which was a much, much smarter way to compress graphics than Huffman encoding (which used to work pretty good for crunching text). But LZW uses one pass, whereas Huffman uses two passes.
Top-40 Music Was Unified in the 1960s.
The Beatles were popular in the 1960s. Also the Supremes and the Rolling Stones and various other bands. Magazines told everyone what the most popular songs were. We listened to the radio, which played the most popular songs. Then people bought the most popular songs, so they could play them on their record players (or "stereos"). Magazines had power. Record labels had power. Radio stations had power. And the masses followed the power.
In the 1960s, you could only hear the new music on the radio. And the radio people decided what you could listen to.
There were no iPods or CDs or Walkman tape players. If you were in your car, you listened to the car radio. If you were tanning on the beach, you listened to the transistor radio. You could switch stations, but that was your only choice. Your choices were "Hey, this is a great song" and "Oh my god, I hate this song, let’s see what song’s on the other station." Most cities only had two or maybe three rock and roll radio stations. If they had three stations, the third station sucked.
If you liked someone odd like Frank Zappa, you could buy his records and play them at home. For your friends. But you probably wouldn’t hear his songs on the radio. So he wouldn’t sell a lot of records.
There Used To Be Liberal Democrats Everywhere
In 1980, when Reagan won the Presidency, there were a bunch of great Senators who lost their seats:
George McGovern (SD) – one of the greatest liberals of all time
Gaylord Nelson (WI) – from Wisconsin, home of Fighting Bob LaFollette
Birch Bayh (IN) – who lost to Dan Quayle – and yes, Evan’s dad was a million times better than Quayle
Frank Church (ID) – believe it or not, Idaho used to elect liberal Democrats
---
And that’s the end of this diary. If you’re young and you have a grandfather who’s still alive, go visit him. Bring a microphone and ask him to tell you some stories about the old days. You won’t regret it. Stories are important.
One of these days, you should ask me about researching my Norwegian ancestors on the internet. If I’m in a good mood, I’ll tell you my grandpa story about the Norwegian digitalarkivet.
Now get to bed, you damn kids!