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Bangalore in the early eighties?Sigh!Where should I begin?Okay, here you go. I am writing randomly whatever thoughts and memories flood my nostalgic mind.In the early eighties, I was a young man in my early thirties, a qualified structural design engineer, specialising in the design of steel structures in Industrial buildings, and working for a leading consultancy organisation in Bangalore.Transport in Bangalore:======================The excellent network of bus routes you see today, including Volvos etc, did not exist.You depended on the BTS buses (BMRTC buses were called BTS buses those days. BTS stood for Bangalore Transport Services)Japanese motorcyles were not available. They came during the nineties after the great economic liberalisation introduced by the Narasimha Rao/Man Mohan Singh Combination. Only Ambassadors and Premier Padminis (earlier called Fiats) dominated the roads. The 800cc Maruti came later. Autorickshaws were the only means for private transport but they were not allowed to seat more than two passengers. This was later relaxed to three. The ubiquitous horse drawn Jatkaas around city market, Malleswaram and Chamarajpet and Basavanagudi had just been withdrawn. No cycle rickshaws existed here as in Delhi.New Scooters were available only at a premium price. Vespa and Lambretta were popular. You had to wait for years to book and get a new one.So scooters had a fancy second hand price (More than the new one)Vijay scooter came later. Kinetic Honda made an appearance in the mid eighties and attracted a lot of attention due to the battery operated self starter and the gearless transmission.I used to ride a Yezdi motorcyle (250 cc two stroke engine) that gave me 29 to 30 kms per litre of petrol. I used to get a conveyance allowance of Rs 60 per month. Not bad! Petrol cost only Rs 3.11 per litre when I bought my motor cycle.Those who valued economy, chose the Rajdoot (175 cc, two stroke engine) that gave 40 kms per litre and started rather easily with just one light kick. The Yezdi wallas had to kick harder and more often to get it started. But the chaps say they loved the noise made by the Yezdi and had contempt for the sputter that Rajdoots produced. Most young motor cyclists had contempt for scooter riders and called them "effeminate". But most motorcyclists later switched over to scooters after getting married and having kids and becoming more mature in their thinking!I had bought a brand new Yezdi motor cycle from Haji and Sons at St Marks Road for Rs 6250/- (on the road price) in 1976 and sold it in 1984 for Rs 7000/-We envied the guys who went around on a Bullet. Other than Policemen and the house building contractors (also called "Bullet Maistries") very few ordinary young men rode a Bullet.It was expensive and the mileage was low.In 1983-84, I finally bought a second hand Bullet, just for prestige, not utility. I paid 8000/- and it was cheap because my brother who was emigrating, sold it to me at a discounted price under pressure from my mother. I sold it a year later for just Rs 10,000/- and it was a distress sale because I needed the money urgently. I inserted an ad in Deccan Herald and the day the ad appeared, right at 7 am in the morning, there stood a Bullet Maistry, outside my door with a thousand rupees in cash, and who offered it to me telling me not to sell it to anyone else and promising to bring the rest of the money before noon.The market price was at least 12000/- for a five year old Bullet that had already covered over 60,000 km.Real Estate:===========Banashankari, JP Nagar, and Indiranagar were developing localities. All these Hallis, Sandras, and Puras did not exist and they all remained villages, struggling to cope with modernisation. To be considered as living in a good locality, it needed to be some "Nagar" planned by the BDA.Multi-storied residential apartment complexes could be counted one one's fingers. The few that existed were all commercial. Unity Buildings at JC Road near the town hall was a prestigious landmark, till it was eclipsed by the Public Utility building on MG Road and later by the LIC building near the GPO.People never thought of buying an apartment. That was considered a Bombay life style. Malleswaram started the apartment boom sometime in the nineties. Large sites with owners dead and whose children had emigrated were sold to developers and a new trend started in the nineties and the old sprawling mansions with Mangalore tiled roofs were demolished to make way for Apartments.Till the eighties, people here liked to buy a small plot and build a house of their own. Most middle class homeowners bought a 30'x40' plot and built a small two bedroom, hall and kitchen house. Some put up a stair case outside the house, adjacent to the compound wall and built an upstairs portion usually for letting it out.Many of these houses did not have overhead tanks. Water pressure was sufficient to reach the first floor. BWSSB was doing a great job, supplying Kaveri Water to thirsty Bangalore when the Tippagondanahalli reservoir was found inadequate to meet the city's needs. The overhead tanks came later.Those with better resources opted for 60'x40' sites and built a larger house with a garage too.We had contempt for apartments. We could afford to do so. Plots were available and all locals (Kannadigas) and also outsiders who had lived here for 5 to 10 years were eligible to apply for and be granted a house site at greatly subsidized rates. Land acquisition problems did not exist. Farmers were glad to offer their lands to BDA and litigation was rare. They could see the city expanding towards their fields. They were growing old. Their children did not show interest in agriculture. They saw wisdom in selling when the prices were attractive and they could get in a lump sum much more than what agriculture yielded. Besides many were also given some plots of land after the development, as part of the deal, which they hatched for a few years and sold for much greater prices.In 1978, I had progressed sufficiently in my career to be able to afford to rent an independent house with a sit out, hall , two bedroom, kitchen, and single bathroom and toilet with an attached garage located on a 60'x40' plot in Jayanagar 7th block for Rs 450/- as monthly rent. The house could have fetched more if it had been better planned and if it had had a mosaic floor instead of the commonly used redoxide cement floor. A stair case from the sit out lead us to an open terrace.I lived happily there for 5 years and the rents increased from 450/- to 700/- when I finally vacated it. In 1984, I bought a site from the BDA at an auction in JP Nagar and built my own house. I spent Rs 5 lakhs totally(including the site value) on a two storied house with all modern amenities and finishings and with a built area of 1900 sq feet. HDFC financed a portion of it and the interest rate was 14 percent.Shopping:Malls did not exist. Most of us went to MG road and Commercial Street for fancy shopping and combined the shopping experience with an ice cream treat at Lake View or had our "tindi" at India Coffee house and watched a movie at Plaza, or Galaxy or Rex. You never needed to know Kannada in this part of Bangalore. The middle class locals went to shops around the Majestic area, Chickpet , Balepet. For daily needs the vegetable vendors brought them to our homes, pushing their carts and shouting out the prices of the individual vegetables. In South Bangalore where I have lived all along, those who had a fridge, went to Gandhi Bazaar for vegetables till the Jayanagar shopping complex was finally completed. Large families or groups of families who had cars would go directly to City Market and buy more at better prices and share the purchases.While Nandini Milk was popular, many families with elderly members, who were living with their adult children were not too happy with milk in plastic satchets and chose to get their milk from milkmen who brought the cow to their gates and milked it in their presence. You don't see that happening now.In 1974 when I landed in Bangalore the Jayanagar shopping complex was under construction. The Janata bazaar there (and also the one at Kempegowda Road) were the nearest we had that resembled a department store and it was a novelty for housewives with their kids when they could walk into a shop and explore the shelves, with a trolley and pick up what they wanted. But queues at the payment counter were long. They did not have modern methods of scanning bar codes and preparing and printing bills and of course no credit cards existed so the experience was not so pleasant. The vast majority still patronised the usual "Ganesha Stores" or "Manjunatha Stores" or "Raghavendra Stores" around street corners and each locality had at least one with these standard shop names. Their only competitors were the Muslim Malayalees from Kerala who set up their own chain (popularly called Kaaka shops) and you could identify them easily from the "secular" names displayed on the boards.Usually "National Stores", "Royal Stores" "Simla Stores" etc,Restaurants:None of today's Darhshinis, and Saagars existed. Eating houses were much lesser in numbers. The really famous ones had very modest interiors and were usually called "Bhavans" like Udupi Bhavan, Gopalkrishna Bhavan etc. The Kamaths, and Pais dominated and they monopolised the Grade II eating houses. Their only competition came from the chain of Janatha Hotels all over the city which served the same stuff at prices less than Kamat and Pai restaurants.Some modest and cramped eating houses had established reputations that they frankly did not quite deserve. I never understood why Vidyarthi Bhavan at Gandhi Bazaar and MTR near Lalbag north gate was hyped up so much. I have visited both and at MTR, after those experiences that taxed my patience, I swore never to visit them again. I had no grouse against quality. I admit the stuff they served was superlative and rich in "tuppa" (Ghee) and they served divine coffee in silver tumblers. The coffee might get cold but not the silver cups!But the waiting time to get a seat was killing. It would take more than half an hour sometimes to get a place to sit. What was more irritating was that as I sat enjoying my masala dosa with an appetite aggravated by the long wait, another customer would be waiting right behind my chair and also holding it with one hand as if to say, "This seat is reserved for me and I am going to sit on it as soon as this fellow gets up". While eating I could feel this waiting customer's glare on my back wondering how long I am going to continue sitting and why I was not hurrying up.Half the pleasure of eating out was lost due to these experiences.Theatres and entertainment.Multiplexes did not exist. We had superb movie theatres with great audio at Galaxy, Nartaki, Santosh, Rex, Lido etc and also cheap ones for desi films that did not need all the sophistication.I remember being greatly impressed by the Sound system in the movie McKenna's Gold which I saw at Galaxy.Majestic area had about 21 theatres, (I think) and most of them have been demolished.TV was introduced around 1980 in Bangalore, years after Delhi and Mumbai. There was just one channel in Black and white, and the programs started around 5 pm and the transmission was in Kannada till 8:30 pm. The Kannada news was read out at 7:30 pm. After 8:30 pm, all the regional centers around the country hooked up with Doordarshan Delhi and the programs were in Hindi and English. This caused considerable heartburn in Non Hindi speaking states.TV was free. We had a crude looking antenna on our roof tops that received the signals. DVDs, VCRs, and cable television did not exist. The Ramayana and Mahabharata were telecast by Doordarshan and the streets used to be empty during the telecast and the only other time this happened was when India and Pakistan were playing a cricket Match.Dr Rajkumar was a stalwart who dominated Kannada Cinema. Vishnu Vardhan and the Nag brothers (Late Shankar Nag and Anant Nag also had their own following. Lokesh and Srinath were not so popular. Puttana Kanagal,GV Iyer and others were legendary and Aarti was the leading actress if I remember right.Electronics:Personal computers, laptops, tablets, cell phones etc DID NOT EXIST!Having a landline phone on your table with a direct line, in the office and not having to go through the switch board and having an extension number was a prestigious perquisite for senior executives only. STD calls were rare and expensive. Bosses locked up their phones fearing "misuse" by their subordinates. Even these bosses were required to maintain a register logging all their STD calls and recording the date, time and duration. Imagine if you youngsters were required to do all this today!You will never realise the value of these blessings. Old timers like me have had the rare privilege of being productive professionals who managed to get a lot of work done without these aids and slowly adapted to these modern devices and gadgets and learned to use them. Heck, during the first few years I did all my design calculations using a slide rule. Calculators came later.I was better off than most of my colleagues. I was a computer literate fellow, having learned the new subject called Fortran Programming while doing my engineering studies and I was among the handful of engineers in my organisation who could write a few lines of code to solve simple programming problems. But minicomputers, PCs, did not exist and we used the IBM 360 mainframe computer at Indian Institute of Science. I used to ride my motor cycle all the way from KR Circle (where my office was located) to IISc campus and punch the cards there and submit my deck of cards for processing. I would come back next day to collect my output. Any mistake of even one byte, in the code or in the data would render our effort and trip fruitless and I would have re-punch those cards and resubmit, and return the next day. IISc maintained a queue system for jobs submitted by their customers. They rented out computer time to us. All jobs that could be processed in less than two minutes were called Quick. Those that took more than two minutes but less than 10 minutes were called "Express" jobs and those that took longer were called "Jumbo". Even longer jobs were scheduled during the night shift.Jobs that take a fraction of second today, to process, used to take 5 to 10 minutes those days and sometimes even half an hour.We punched our code and data on cards, and fed them into the card reader of the mainframe computer to get printed output. It was only later that the VDU terminal was invented in the early eighties and soon it rendered obsolete punched card or paper tape input. It also obviated the need for printing the output and we would print on fast line printers only if the output seen on the VDU terminal appeared okay. Terminals displayed in black and white only. Only text and numbers, not images. It was a novel thing those days and the highlight was the introduction of remote processing where the inputs would be received from VDUs and keyboards located at the customer's premises and the processing would be done at IISc's DEC System 10, using modems and telephone lines. The speeds were nothing to boast about but those days we had not known what "broad band" or any band was and any speed was impressive as it saved us a trip to IISc.Slowly minicomputers invaded Bangalore but they were primitive compared to today's laptops. We had 8" floppy disks, (360K capacity) followed by storage mediums for PCs viz 5 1/4" disks with 360 Kilo bytes capacity followed by 3 1/2" floppy disks with 1.44 Mb storage capacity.Just as cars and mobile phones are being advertised today, the eighties saw the advent of the first personal computers in Bangalore and the computer culture spread here faster than at other cities. HCL and Wipro were the main contenders for the top slot and Siva PCs made by Sterling Computers at Chennai (sorry, Madras as it was called those days) who sold the Siva brand of computers, Eiko, Uptron etc offered cheaper competition. The machines were shockingly primitive with barely 64 K to 128K core memory. Our office paid Rs 80,000/- for the first HCL PC we bought. It was "state of the art", a PC-AT (Advanced technology, as it was called) and had a 'whopping" 40 Mb as hard disk storage space and a crude low resolution colour monitor and the memory was an "astonishing" 512K! There was no mouse those days. We used the arrow keys on the keyboard to navigate and called up drop down menus using hot keys. Software developers boasted that their software was "user friendly" and "menu driven" in order to beat the competition.The One Mega barrier took some more years to breach and the Giga was simply not even known as a word! Project that price (Rs 80,000/- ) during the early eighties and see it's equivalent in today's prices and you will get an idea how special a computer was. No wonder these PCs were housed in special air conditioned rooms and in my company, the systems department would not allow any of us to enter the computer room with our shoes on. They were the high priests in charge of the machine and treated it as a deity kept in some sanctum sanctorum and would discourage us from using them thinking that we, the country bumpkins, would damage them. Most of us were computer illiterate any way and were easily bluffed into believing all the hype that they trotted out. With just basic knowledge of word processing, and spread-sheeting (using Word Star, and Lotus 123)and an ability to churn out a few lines of simple code in Basic, they posed as systems experts and impressed the top management with tables and reports neatly printed out on the noisy dot matrix printers in vogue then. Our office used these PCs more as glorified typewriters than as computing machines. Bosses were impressed by buzz words like Lotus, Dbase and Wordstar and I lost count of how many times I explained the difference between bit and byte to my boss. He never understood till his retirement!Needless to say, the Internet did not exist. I got introduced to it in the late nineties and my first internet connection at home used the telephone line and the download speed was 4k per second. It was useless for anything except for email without attachments.Other office equipment:The photo copying machine was still very primitive. Xerox was becoming famous. Just as any steel almirah was called a Godrej those days, any photo copy started to be called a Xerox copy. Before their advent, the copying technique had just been introduced and it used some kind of oil that smelt of a mixture of kerosene and machine oil. You had to expose the orginal several times once for each copy and keep the copy sandwiched between two glass sheets with micro fine carbon balls and allow the balls to roll over the sheet to produce a readable copy that smelt for a day of oil before the smell died out. It was a messy affair.More popular was the stencil that could be used instead of plain paper and mounted on the roller of a standard typewriter and then mounted on a "cyclostyling" machine (The Americans called this the mimeographing machine) to produce any number of copies.Telex was the mode of communication between offices for urgent messages. The messages were often received in garbled condition and important words and figures would be typed twice to ensure correct reading. Full stops and commas were written as (STOP) and (COMMA), Figures would be repeated in words and digits to avoid miscommunication.Most of the routine standard communication was in typed letters and posted using Snail mail. The common man used Telegrams for urgent communication. They paid by the word. So standard messages like "Reached safely", "Congratulations" "Best wishes for a happy married life" , "May heaven's choicest blessings be showered on the young couple" etc were given code numbers and these numbers could be quoted to save on expense.The fax machine came much later and create a sensation. Today emails make even faxes look primitive.Routine letters were typed on Manual typewriters (later on electric typewriters) using carbon paper for copies and sent by post or special company couriers for large companies. College Boys and girls during the admission season would be frantically going around looking for "gazzetted officers" who were important because they had the power to "attest" a copy of their mark lists and certificates which were painstakingly typed out. A batallion of typists sat under trees near the Passport office, Registrar's office and other Government departments, typing out documents for customers.Games and socialising:Children played games.They were physically active. Video games were unknown.We, adults, went out and met friends and relatives at their homes and entertained them during return visits. There was no "social media" like Twitter, or Facebook. We spread rumours and indulged in Gossip the old fashioned way using our tongues and hearing gossip with our ears. We laughed cried, joked and quarreled directly not using a computer screen and the internet! TV and internet that has now replaced all live human interaction did not exist. A movie was a special treat to be looked forward to and talked about for days afterwards. A visit to a circus or zoo was a super special treat for the children. Drama had a market and a willing audience.Classical music during Ramanavami was looked forward to.You had asked me about the area near Pallavi talkies, Banashankari and Cubbon park.The present Kempegowda tower there did not exist. The large dome built by L&T housing the indoor stadium did not exist.The direction of traffic movement was totally different. Nrupathunga Road was two way, and so was District office road.Banashankari induced fear! So far away! I thought it was a forest area before I saw it for the first time and felt charmed by the ups and downs and the views of the landscape. The Banashankari temple attracted crowds on certain days and the Kanakapura Road and Bannerghata road was used by us for driving our motorcyles at high speeds for continuous long stretches to recharge our batteries in the motorcycles! Hardly any traffic existed on these roads once you left Jayanagar and rode further south.I could reach Bannerghata National park in twenty minutes from my house in JP Nagar.Cubbon park had practically no encroachments. All roads were two way . None of the entrances was blocked. The Seshadri Memorial library was always full of readers. My kids enjoyed the toy train ride and we often visited Bal Bhavan for attending the programs there. I wonder if any modern kid goes there now.The above is just a limited list of topics that I have chosen to write about.The list of topics I have not written here is even larger but I know your patience is limited and before you run out of it let me stopI thank Chetan Achar who asked me to answer this question.Feel free to ask me anything else you are curious about in the comments section and I will do my best to answer.RegardsGV

Note: all currency is in 2016 dollarsThey would marvel at our televisions, computers, internet, reliable cars, immodest clothing, and more.Here’s what life was like then. Surmise from this what a 1950’s person would think about America 60 years in the future.One of the things I most notice as I look back is we kids were never bored even though we didn't have, or perhaps because we didn’t have, a TV. We wandered the neighborhood and sometimes into a large wooded park a half mile from our house. We could spend hours in the backyard. We sewed our own Winnie the Pooh dolls, created our own Clue game from memory after playing it at a friend's, wrote poetry, put on magic shows, and more. Our imaginations knew no bounds. On Saturday we would listen to The Lone Ranger and Dragnet on the radio. These shows could be quite violent. I remember once Sgt. Friday of Dragnet said he crossed the plain to get to a crime scene so I pictured him walking across an airplane. The plane lay on the ground because he didn't say anything about climbing over it. Then later in the show he crossed it again but the rains had caused grass to sprout. I visualized an airplane covered in grass. I wondered about this for years before I finally got it.When we did get a television in 1957 it had no remote. That meant getting up to change channels, of which there were only two, and being forced to listen to the commercials. Black and white of course. The modern remote was decades away. Father Knows Best, I Love Lucy, Lassie, I've got a Secret, and Your Hit Parade were some of my favorites. Televisions weren't the reliable self-adjusting units of today. Tubes burned out and the picture might start "flipping" meaning it would move up and return from below over and over. We had adjustments on the back. It was an art to get a stable picture. Don't get me started on adjusting color televisions. You were likely to have to settle for green faces. And they were extremely heavy. Moving larger TVs might take two or more grown men and these sets were expensive costing much more than a modern television set. A 1954 15" color set cost nearly $9000. Screen sizes were no more than 12" and often round at the beginning of the decade but grew. Today’s young people don't know how good they have it. Modern TVs are lightweight, troublefree, and have large screens with beautiful pictures.$5000!I Love Lucy set. I Love Lucy was the biggest show on television and is still fun to watch. The show blazed the trail for all future sitcoms. Ricki's innovations revolutionized how television programs were broadcast. Some of the techniques he pioneered are still in use.Children's programs were fairly unsophisticated with the most popular being The Mickey Mouse Club and the original children's show, the Howdy Doody Show starring Howdy Doody, a puppet. The studio audience was called the Peanut Gallery. There was the beloved mute clown Clarabell who had a horn he honked and a seltzer bottle he wasn't afraid to use, and Buffalo Bob. Clarabell broke his silence on the last show saying "Goodbye Kids". Getting a picture of Clarabell's real face by pesky photographers was an ongoing threat but they all failed.The original Clarabell went on to host the Captain Kangaroo showMeet the Peanut GalleryCaptain Kangaroo had a 29 year runThe upbeat Mickey Mouse Club. On Friday we were sung a special goodby song: M-I-C see you next week, K-E-Y why? because we love you, M-O-U-S-E. The charismatic Annette Funicello (can you find her?) went on to star in a series of Beach Party movies in the 60's and released several successful singles. A single was a single song on a 45 rpm record with a throwaway song on the reverse side.Annette Funicelleo was the first Micky Mouse Club breakout star but not the last as the likes of Britney Spears followed in her footsteps.Britney and JustinAmerican Bandstand, possibly the longest running TV show ever, was on daily for decades hosted by the ever young Dick Clark.Movie serials were popular. They were about ten minutes long and followed a hero from week to week and always ended in a "cliff hanger". I once saw one that left the hero actually dangling over a cliff hanging onto a branch. I was very worried so it was a relief when he saved himself the following week. They played at the Saturday matinees for several decades until television replaced them.All movies opened with a cartoon. The Disney characters along with Woody Woodpecker, Porky Pig, Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, and the ever popular Roadrunner were my favorites. Popeye the Sailor Man was big but not one of my favorites. This was before CGI so each frame was hand painted then photographed.The Tasmanian Devil may think he's got Bugs but he be wrong.Bugs Bunny was an irrepressible smart aleck who was always one step ahead of whoever wanted to eat him. Here he is, once again, about to outsmart Elmer Fudd.The Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote were favorites that sometimes got a round of applause when they appeared on the screen. The irony is coyotes can outrun Roadrunners and Roadrunners can fly short distances.There was no way to watch a movie at home so theaters boomed. The modern multiplex theaters we have now had not been dreamed up so a movie came to one theater in town and stayed as long as it was popular. You might have a double feature meaning two movies for the price on one. Many movies were still in black and white at the beginning of the decade.Weekends at the moviesOne convenience that was killed by daylight savings is the drive-in theater. These were very popular and convenient. Once I could drive it was great fun loading up the car and going for a romp at the drive-in. A small speaker was hanging on a pole. You would hang it from your window and crank the volume to the desired level.There was also this. Normally it went no further. It wasn't until the 60's that mores began to change.Elvis Presley debuted amid controversy that may be difficult to understand today. He was universally disliked by adults because of his below the waist gyrations but the kids loved him, their crazed reactions to his shows was repeated when the Beatles hit our shores. He was dismissed as talentless but in actuality he was a very good singer with a very good voice. He was a giant who dominated the music scene for a long time. He changed popular music forever.As preschoolers we had a simple little record player that used steel needles. My mother would buy us the needles in little bags for us to change out as needed.There were no battery powered watches. All watches were powered by a mainspring that had to be wound daily. I wound mine first thing in the morning. There were some self-winding watches. It was not unusual for me to have a watch that kept poor time. Watches came in varying qualities from, inflation adjusted, $10 for a watch with just a few jewels to $200 for a good 21 jewel watch. The jewels, rubies, were installed at high wear points to increase the life of the watch. My parents would buy me a Mickey Mouse watch annually although I did get a Hopalong Cassidy watch once. He was my cowboy hero.The white haired cowboy hero, Hopalong CassidyMy first camera was a Brownie box camera passed down from my mother. It was made in the 1930's. It only took eight black and white pictures so I had to be careful. The pictures were excellent quality due to the huge negative. I used it for around 20 years carrying it into the Army with me. The case finally broke so I bought one of those new inexpensive Pentax 35mm imports from Japan. $600 at the PX. German cameras were the standard at the time but the Japanese cameras turned out to be truly excellent. Mine was in good condition when I sold after 20 years of hard use.Cameras don't get much simpler. I had to hold my breath when snapping the picture.Flash photography required the use of a flashbulb, a bulb filled with magnesium. Flashbulbs were around for quite a while. Cameras had a special setting for flashbulbs of around 1/50th of a second. The bulbs would be very hot so needed to cool before being replaced. As the electric flash has become affordable it has replaced the flashbulb on modern cameras so that most young people probably are not even aware we once would stock up on flashbulbs if we were serious camera buffs.At night the fireflies came out so we caught them to put in bottles and watched them light up.Refrigerated air conditioning was expensive. I didn't even know there was such a thing so we didn't miss it even though we lived in the Southwest. 100 degrees was not considered hot.Can openers were awful. The modern sprocket type weren't available so we had to work the opener until the can finally surrendered.Coke and beer cans had to be opened with "Churchkeys" that stores provided for free:Cokes were 6½ ounces and there was no such thing as unscrewing the top. The other end of the "Churchkey" was used for removing the top or you could use this:That cap will take the skin right off your fingers if you try to unscrew itTelephones were primitiveAffordable home answering machines were a long way off as was voicemail so if someone called when you were out the call was not answered. There was something peaceful about that especially since there was no other way someone could get in touch with you so if you left the house no one was going to bother you.Long distance calls were a big deal so were rare. If you needed to call someone long distance you told the operator who would then call down the line so each operator could connect the call until they finally reached the party in question. Then the operator called you back and the call was connected. Next you received a huge bill from Ma Bell, the only game in town. With the advent of direct dial the system was streamlined but operator assistance continued to be a requirement in some areas into the 60's.Because long distance calls were prohibitively expensive and there was no email most communication out of the immediate vicinity was done by letter. It was the only way I had to communicate with "Granny". We kept a stash of stamps and envelopes on hand. If you had a problem with a retailer who wasn't headquartered in the city you had to work it out through the mail. Everything was slower. At Christmas I had to sit down to write thank you notes and get them in the mail. This was still my MO on staying in touch into the 90's even though long distance calling was more affordable. Email?Payphones were a nickel and rotary because touchtone hadn't been invented. They could be found almost anywhere.All phones were rotary and had to be supplied by Ma Bell. You couldn't install your own phone or even buy one. They were all black. Ma Bell sent out a technician to hook up the phone wherever you wanted. If you wanted two or more phones you paid extra every month. Long distance rates were high and subsidized local service so that local service was affordable. Ma Bell was reliable and took care of things. It was one of the best companies in the world for service but being a monopoly it was eventually brought down resulting in the profusion of options we have now. Phone numbers came with a prefix. We lived in the Lynwood area so our phone number was Ly1-2345. Smaller town might only have the last five digits: 12345.Direct dial was introduced in the 50's but wasn't available everywhere, some places still did not have it well into the 60's. It was a huge deal. We no longer had to have an operator connect us but long distance remained expensive.Touchtone was introduced in the 60's making it easier to dial the long numbers. Playing tunes with the touchtone numbers such as "Mary had a Little lamb" was a popular pastime for a while. People would publish the numbers to press to play a song.Mary had a little lamb:6,5,4,5,6,6,6,5,5,5,6,9,96,5,4,5,6,6,6,6,5,5,6,5,4Besides pencil and paper there were two ways to do calculations. An expensive and bulky mechanical calculator or a slide rule. I opted for pencil and paper and was good at doing arithmetic in my head. We were a long way from the handheld digital scientific calculators that replaced the slide rule. I once worked as a repairman at the Monroe calculator company. Adding machines were our main product. They were all gears and levers.Pull the handle.Cash registers were also manual.Toy cars were steel with rolling rubber wheels and that's it. You might have a sheet metal wind up toy that could move but no battery operated or radio controlled cars. I once had a windup bulldozer that fascinated me but I dropped it and it wouldn't work anymore.We could buy balsa wood airplanes for a dime that would glide when tossed but not well. I once made a plane with a rubber band motor that would fly but it kept running into things.We spent a lot of time with our View Master. We could click through stereophonic pictures of various landscapes. Ours was a much older version of the one in the picture but the 3-D realism amazed.Lionel trains were a popular postwar item. I loved the one I got. It was solidly built of metal with realistic detail. It had a working headlight and pills I could drop into the smokestack that produced puffs of smoke. The only problem was the track would tend to slide on the linoleum floors.I went through all the normal childhood diseases. There was mumps, whooping cough, measles, chicken pox, and maybe some others. Once I caught something that laid me out for weeks but I didn't die. The fear of polio, we didn't know what caused it, always hovered around the edges of our lives. There were 20,000 or more cases annually. Articles about this dreaded disease were ubiquitous. Salk's invention of the polio vaccine in 1955 was HUGE!FDR was a Polio victimSome people were so paralyzed they couldn't breath and spent their life in an "Iron Lung" in order to stay alive.Cigarette smoking was ubiquitous. It wasn't seen as the health risk it is today and at the beginning of the decade cigarettes generally weren't filtered. By the 60's filtered cigarettes were the standard. 50's cigarette ads would offend us and even seem irresponsible today.The 5 & 10 cent stores, Woolworth's and Kress, were popular. They had a lunch counter for snacks and sandwiches. The stores were filled with neat stuff. Outside of Sears and JC Penney this is where many of us shopped. If we went to a shopping center it was just a line of small stores or what we call a strip mall today. In 1962 a covered mall came to our town. We were blown away as we walked through it. It's still in existence.Woolworth lunch counter. It could get crazy at lunchtime.Automats were around for a long time. I saw my first one in New York and thought it amazing. You view your selection through little windows, put your money in a slot and open the door and remove your lunch. I was amazed at buying a pie and seeing a hand reach in from behind and replace the one I just bought.Sears was a force to be reckoned with and a forgotten item may be the Sears Catalogue that arrived by mail. Its hundreds of pages was great fun to peruse and an American staple. There was little you couldn't buy including a car, the Allstate. The Allstate was a rebranded Kaiser Henry J. and very basic but essentially a good car.At one time Sears even sold prebuilt house kits. The precut materials along with instructions were shipped to you to be put together by the contractor of your choice. They were of excellent quality. Many are still with us today and are considered desirable because of their quality.Sears began as a catalogue company selling to the homestead frontier market in 1886. Farmers and their the isolated families lived near small towns. With the advent of reliable train service it was possible to order whatever you needed from Sears knowing you could trust the Sears name. When it came in the farmer might hook up his buggy that he bought from Sears ($25, $700 now) and drive into town to pick it up.There wasn't a lot you couldn't get at Sears. Your car could be serviced, repaired, and Allstate batteries and tires were for sale. The Allstate brand insured quality. At one time or the other Sears sold appliances, clothing, guns, luggage, watches, musical instruments, tombstones, typewriters, tools, cameras, toys, baseball mitts, bicycles, motor scooters, pianos, horse drawn sleds, shoes, boots, jewelry, well pumps, insurance, the list is nearly endless. If the farmer needed it or his family wanted something they would look in the Sears catalogue. I once bought a motorcycle jacket through the catalogue and it arrived by mail. I drove Sears scooters for years. I even owned a Sears cowboy hat. All were excellent. If Sears sold it you knew it was top quality.The scooters were rebranded Cushmans and Vespas.The 1953 Henry J Allstate car. White sidewall tires were the thing back then but hard to keep cleanThe rebranded 50cc Vespa was a reliable and fairly quick scooterYou supplied the land and the builder, Sears provided all materials and directions. Each piece was stamped with a number so you could find it on the plan. Sears stopped offering them when WWII broke out.Can you believe it? Cradle to grave, Sears was there.After 130 years Sears is struggling to keep up with the times.Banker's hours is an expression that refers to the 10am to 3pm hour the banks were open to the public back in the day. After 3:00 you were out of luck. The industry had been heavily regulated since the depression and this mean few, if any, branch offices. In my town there were no branch offices so all banks were downtown with the traffic congestion and bad parking associated with that. We could mail in checks but cash meant a trip downtown. In the 80's the regulations were largely lifted and the frenzied competition for your money began.Although there were oil company and department store credit cards there were no general use cards available to most people. BankAmericard (Visa) changed that in 1958. Now anyone could go in debt and we've been on that ride ever since.An odd fashion statement of the time was the veil woman sometimes wore formally. Unlike the MidEast veil it was see through. I once saw my mother wearing one.We used pencils in school. The only pens in general use were fountain pens which were filled from a small bottle of ink called an inkpot. You stuck the tip in the pot and pulled a lever to suck the ink up. Someone created refills that could be popped in making the fountain pen portable. Ballpoints were coming online but the pencil still reigned supreme. Paper Mate came up with a dependable and affordable ballpoint pen sounding the death knell for the fountain pen then Bic invented the long lasting disposable ballpoint that took its design from the pencil. With it's clear plastic barrel you knew how much ink you had. The pencil began to settle into its current secondary role.A Paper Mate innovation so you wouldn't be caught with a pen that wouldn't write. By the way that pen cost $18 in 2016 dollars.The 1950's was the decade of the Ballpoint pen. The first retractable ballpoint pen was introduce in 1949. Ballpoint pens had a long history of development with countless failures along the way primarily because of problems with the ink. Paper Mate, followed by Bic, finally marketed a workable pen.These were around for a whileAs ballpoint caught on such standard desktop items as the blotter became obsolete. The blotter was needed to dry up fountain pen smudges. Fountain pens were needed for signatures since pencil could be erased. You had to allow your paper to dry before folding or stacking it. Refillable they could get quite fancy but most of us had to settle for strip of blotter paper. Turning out a smudge free letter or report could be a challenge.BasicDeluxeReports were done in pencil and if it was a “term theme” that meant doing your research at the library. I had to take a bus into town and spend the day at the library. We would go through the card catalogue that had every book in the library cross referenced. A report might involve perusing several books, making notes on 3x5 cards, organizing them then writing out the report. The internet changed everything.In college I typed my reports. An invaluable skill I learned in High School. Since the home computer hadn't been invented there was no other way to turn out an attractive looking report. Now it's easy, then it could be laborious. It would take me three attempts to turn out something with a finished appearance. Typing a twenty page report over and over...you get the idea. If I decided add a sentence on the first page then the whole report had to be retyped.I picked this office machine up at a thrift store, it was an oldy but a goody. It took me through my University years and I carried it with me all over the country as I moved about. Then I scored this one:The IBM Selectric. The typewriter reached its epitome when IBM came up with this beauty. Its rotating ball replaced the strikers. If you accidentally hit two letters at the same time on a manual they might jam on the page when the strikers both met. I got years out of this beauty until it finally died in Dallas. I never had one better. My computer with a printer changed all that. My first 386 computer was $4000 and my Dot Matrix printer was $800. What's a Dot Matrix you ask?Make a mistake? I went though many bottles of this:The modern ambulance with its abundance of lifesaving equipment and trained paramedics hadn't been dreamed up yet. Ambulances were made by Cadillac and looked like colorful hearses with windows. I went to a hospital in a green one after a scooter accident.Ether was the preferred anesthetic for operations and it was an unpleasant way to go under but it worked. It's what they used when my tonsils were taken out. Because of the lack of pain killers they fed me ice cream several times a day. They must have scheduled all the tonsillitis cases for the same day because there were a bunch of us in the ward and we all cheered when the orderly rolled in the cart full of ice cream. I was very excited telling my mother about my good fortune.After my scooter accident all I got for the pain was the occasional aspirin so I writhed.Steam locomotives were still pulling trains so if you lived on the "wrong side of the tracks", meaning the prevailing winds blew your way, any laundry drying on a clothesline was doomed should you lose the mad dash to get it down. Diesel trains were making inroads but steam was not obsolete.Steam was much more powerful but you could gang together diesel locomotives until you had enough which is why you will see several locomotives pulling a train. With steam if you needed more power you built a bigger locomotive. They could be ganged but it was undesirable. These locomotives could get massive, 85' long, 132' with the tender, and weighing considerably more than a million pounds. Steam is suited to pulling trains but is high maintenance and expensive to operate compared to diesel.As diesel became more prevalent the union insisted the obsolete jobs remain so a diesel locomotive would have a fireman even though no coal needed to be shoveled into the boiler fire. Reader's Digest got into the act writing outraged articles about "featherbedding". Out of Steam“Big Boy”, the largest steam locomotive of all time. That’s how trains were pulled over the RockiesTwenty-five "Big Boys" were builtThese behemoths were capable of pulling a WWII destroyer along with a train of boxcars over steep mountains like the Rocky Mountains by itself.I remember sitting in class being introduced to Dick and Jane who were to be my friends for a long time as I learned to read. See Dick run. See Jane run. See dick and Jane run. Run, run, run. It worked.A few people were still using washboards but washing machines were taking overWashing machines worked okay but there were very few dryers so clothes were wrung out with the motor driven wringer on top of the machine. The clothes were then hung out to dry. A friend of mine had his thumb severely crushed when it got caught in the wringer. Then came the ironing. Since we didn't have a steam iron the clothes had to be sprinkled with water. A cork with a top with holes in it could be bought and put on a coke bottle for sprinkling. Washing clothes was a major ordeal. Cotton clothes, artificial fabrics hadn't been invented, had to be bought oversize because they shrank when washed until "Sanforized" cotton was introduced.Our sewing machine had to be pumped by foot. It seemed to work fine but what do I know? The machine folded down converting the unit into a flat table.Although the concept had been around a long time the dishwasher didn't take off until the 1960's. Until then we stood at a sink and handwashed with our bottle of Joy, something I still do.Joy introduced an automatic dispenser for a while. It would give just the right amount of detergent.The modern coffee maker with it's timers and filters was a long way off. Most people made coffee in a percolator. Maxwell coffee grounds (Good to the last drop) were poured into a basket and placed in the pot. The boiling water was forced up the tube in the middle and spilled onto the top of the basket. I was fascinated with watching the water beat against the glass stopper as it slowly turned brown.The soles of shoes were leather and would wear out before the uppers. Heels had to be replaced and holes would appear in the sole. It was a nuisance. I'll take today's Nikes with their rugged soles and care free uppers over the old leather shoes that required frequent polishing. If you wanted a high gloss you wet a cotton ball and used that to apply the polish. In the Army we called that "spit polishing".Even Adlai Stevenson, presidential candidate, wasn't immuneYour average car basic with a manual shift. It didn't come with a heater, air conditioning, radio, or power steering. Most, but not all, had turn signals. Turn signals were standard by the end of the decade. If your car didn't have turn signals you were required to stick your arm out the window to signal your intent.Failing to signal might get you a ticket.Power steering was introduced in 1951 on some luxury cars. Manual steering effort was substantial. I heard a couple of women saying they wished they had power steering. I asked what that was and they told me it makes steering easier but were unable to tell me what that meant. Cruise control was first installed in 1958 but was also a luxury item. Very few cars had cruise control. Automatic transmissions had been developed but were out of the range of many car owners and might only have two speeds, modern cars have at least four and some have eight. Modern air conditioning was introduced in the 60's although primitive systems were available in the 50's.We got our first car with a radio (AM only) and heater in the 60's. The radios were all vacuum tube so required a minute or so to warm up.Besides having a heater our new car could go 70 mph! Even faster downhill. 70 was the Beetle's top speed.Cars didn't have seatbelts. They were beginning to show up by the end of the decade but were resisted by many. Ford introduced them as an option in 1955 but they weren't popular. The thinking seems to have been that Fords must be dangerous or they wouldn't offer seatbelts. A popular scenario was what if you end up in a lake and couldn't get free. I thought that was silly. How often do you end up in a lake? I got it right away and always wore mine, thank God. I had an accident in which I might have died without it. Reader's Digest published articles detailing accidents in which someone's life was saved. Because they actually saved lives so were eventually accepted.Cars back then had steering wheels often with horn rings that could easily impale your chest. Without a safety belt I would have merged with my steering column. As it was I bent the top of the steering wheel over 90 degrees. Before belts people often were severely injured by their steering columns, chests were crushed and passengers went through the windshield. People would be thrown out of their cars to slide down the street or bounce around the interior slamming into one another or hard interior parts. Dashboards were metal and less forgiving than modern dashboards. Airbags, what?Many cars had vacuum operated windshield wipers that operated using the engine vacuum. Electric windshield wipers were catching on through the 50's and became the standard in the 60's. Vacuum operated wipers, although better than nothing, were quirky and didn't operate well under acceleration. In a downpour I periodically let up on the accelerator allowing the wipers to speed up so I could see.Cars often didn't come with side mirrors unless you went upscale. When they had mirrors they were often just on the driver's side. If you wanted a mirror on your basic car you had to add it yourself. I purchased aftermarket mirrors and added them to some of my cars. They were hard to adjust. You usually loosened a screw to adjust the mirror which might go out of adjustment as the screw was tightened.No mirrorsAftermarket mirrors. Adjustment screw is facing the front of the car.Windshield washers were almost non-existent. I didn't even know such a thing existed. White sidewall tires were ubiquitous.Cars were not reliable. They were pretty well worn out by 60,000 miles. Speedometers only went to 99,999 miles. I only saw one car break a 100,000 and it was very tired. By 60,000 you might have gone through five sets of tires and even more tuneups. A tuneup required new plugs, points, and maybe even more. Tuneups needed to be done every few thousand miles. Most people didn't do it as often as needed so the car's performance suffered. I did a tuneup on a friend's car that was barely running. It ran like new afterwards. I was a hero. I tracked my gas mileage and when it began to fall I did a tuneup. They were simple to do if you knew how and took an hour. The points had to be carefully set and the timing adjusted using a timing light. I bought the necessary equipment and saved a lot of money doing my own. The carburetor was a beast best avoided by most DIYs. I learned to overhaul them but there were pitfalls galore for even the best mechanics. I got so adept at tuneups I set up a mobile tuneup business and made a few bucks.Chiltons published an excellent service manual for all American cars. Everything you needed to know about doing your own work on a car was in them along with valuable hints such as how to "power tune" an engine and all the specs you needed to do a tuneup. They would tear down an engine and then tell you how to do it, step by step, complete with photographs. In later years they no longer took these extra steps so I stopped buying them.By 60,000 miles you might have made some repairs and replaced shocks and brakes a number of times. Drum brakes were high maintenance. They required periodic adjustment so the car wouldn't pull to one side or the other when you stepped on them. It could be tricky. Modern disc brakes are superior in every way except peddle effort.Engines quickly wore out and began burning oil on top of the oil they invariable leaked. Roads back then would have a black streak down the middle from all the oil the engines put out. Motorcyclists were cautioned to not drive in the center of the road because of the oil slick. A car spewing white smoke was a common sight, sometimes it came out in clouds. "Ring and valve jobs" were commonplace and a part of owning a car.Engine oil was crude relative to today's oils. It was a "single grade" meaning there was a difference between winter and summer oil. "Multi-vicosity" oils changed that so we could use a single oil both winter and summer.Multi-viscosity, 10W-40Single-viscosity, 30 weightDetergent oils also changed things. One problem owners faced was the development of "sludge" on engine parts. This gooey substance is acidic and can ruin an engine. It is one reason for prescribed oil changes. Detergent oils suspend foreign products in the oil and protect against sludge buildup. In the 50's this was a major concern. Articles were written educating people about the phenomenon.Sludge buildup can happen to modern engines but is no longer the common problem it was in the 50's.Modern oil has played an important role in allowing today's engines to develop so much power and last so long. Synthetic oils are even better and an economical choice if you plan to keep your car. The 40,000 to 70,000 mile expiration date for your engine is a thing of the past.Upholstery was generally cheap plastic and would begin tearing and splitting before the end of the useful car life. There was a market for aftermarket seat covers.Those who could afford it traded in their car every two years. A car loan was generally for two years. A new car warranty might be for six months and 4000 miles. Cars frequently came out of the factory with problems so the warranty was important. We bought a car that had no oil in the transmission. A friend bought one with none of the chassis bolts tightened.There was a big market for retread, or recap, tires, they were good for maybe 5000 miles. The modern radial tire, a European innovation, didn't begin to catch on in the US until the 70's. I remember a Sears display of a radial tire that pitched rubber after 40,000 miles. I could barely believe it, nobody would because everyone knew it was impossible for tires to last that long. Sears jumped on the Radial bandwagon right away and was an important retailer for these modern tires.Willys (Jeep) got into the new car market after the war trading on the Jeep's wartime reputation. We owned two of their station wagons. They weren't bad. I once noticed our Jeep had 40,000 miles and commented. My mother told me that it's been a good car as we rattled down the street. The car was near the end of its useful life.This is what our second Willys-Overland Station Wagon looked like. It had a single seat in the very back which was my favorite. The flathead four cylinder engine could propel it to upwards of 60mph on a flat road but it slowed down on hills. It was the first American station wagon with an all metal body. 60 or 70 was about all most cars could do. Upscale cars with their V8s were much faster. A modern Honda tour bike has considerably more horsepower than your 1950's basic car.Modern paint can last for years but back then paint would begin to "oxidize" and fade after a few months so people needed to wax the car. People would drive to the lake and spend the afternoon rubbing wax on and then off leaving a protective film.There is a story of a policeman driving to work when a Cadillac blew past him at 85. He floored it and got up to 70mph. He caught the guy at a light and gave him a ticket. His engine blew up a couple of days later.There was an amusing song about a Nash Rambler that outran a guy in his Cadillac.Nash also made a subcompact in an age in which the Beetle was the popular small car. It was a neat little car and got around 30 miles per gallon. It could hit 60 in 30 seconds. Most modern cars will hit 60 in fewer than 10 seconds.BMW was not yet the automotive powerhouse it is today. In the 50's it began marketing its version of the isetta in the US. Competition with the Beetle killed it.Vespa also got into the minicar craze in the 50's with a cool little car powered by a two stroke rear engine. My mother had one. It was a true, fully equipped car. We both liked it although I had to install a right side aftermarket mirror on it. For its size it was quick and it was easy to drive. My mother took my sister and friends swimming once. My sister told me as she walked by a mother and son she heard the woman telling her son "You saw them all get out of the car".My mother got hers up to 70 onceHowever the smallest American car had to be the King Midget. A couple of war veterans began marketing them in 1946 and was in business until 1970 when the new owners mismanaged the company into bankruptcy. They sold for $5000 in today's money. I owned one. Mine, a later model, had an air compressor engine, a 2-speed automatic transmission, and was peppy enough to hold its own in traffic. At 8½' it was the same length as a decked out Harley-Davidson which weighed almost twice as much as this 500 pound package.Engine in back, feet in front, no trunkThe VW Beetle began making inroads into the America market. There was a hunger for inexpensive and reliable cars. Compared to the big, thirsty, unreliable American cars it filled a need. We were all sensing something was rotten in Detroit. The phrase planned obsolescence entered the vocabulary.At $17,000 with a 1200cc engine that got 30mpg the Beetle filled a niche and provided a warning shot across the bow of the bloated American car companies that they ignored allowing the Japanese to come in later and blow them out of the water.The Harley Davidson twin was the king of the road. Big, comfortable, and with an engine the same size as a Beetle it reigned supreme. It leaked oil and kept the owner busy working on it weekends but it was a labor of love. It was all the police drove. The earlier ones had controls that would confuse a modern rider including a hand-operated stickshift for the transmission complete with a pedal operated clutch and a manual timing control. Note the stick shift on the right side of the tank and running board for the feet. Running boards were infinitely more comfortable than a foot peg particularly on a long trip.Manual transmissions were about all most people could afford and the shifter was not on the floor like they are nowadays, it was on the column. There are jokes that the best anti-theft device you can have is a stickshift but there was a time when everyone could drive a three speed manual shift car.The little 8 ball on the steering wheel was nicknamed the "suicide knob". They were a popular item for helping people to steer. They are still available but are not legal everywhere. They can be dangerous.You would leave the car in first gear when you parked. The engine would stop the car from rolling. When you wanted to drive away you would push in the clutch, start the engine, let out the clutch, and go. If you forget to step on the clutch and turned the key the car would jerk forward.Before refrigeration you might be able to cool your car with one of these. The air would enter the car through wet pads and in dry country would provide some relief. We had one of these during a cross country trip but I didn't notice any difference.The triangular "wing windows" were an important part of ventilating the car. You could adjust them to divert air into the car. It was a big help.The only dependable way to make your way about town was with a map. If you were going across country it was even more essential because this was the age of the state highways. Gas stations were generally a dependable source of maps.AAA was another source and they would plan your trips for you with a customized "Triptik" in which the trip was unfolded for you from one page to the next. I've ordered a lot of these in the days before GPS.Since the miracle of GPS I haven't owned a map. The GPS took me from door to door on my last cross country trip which included many stops in between.I owned a stack of these.AAA Triptik. For the frequent traveler these alone made the membership worthwhile.I'm in loveSchwinn was the most popular bicycle brand. Bicycles were heavy and had a single speed. They sometimes came with a "tank" and might have a horn inside. You stopped by pedaling backwards to engage the brake.The horn button is the silver button on the tank. They weren't shy about packing on the weight back then especially JC Higgins.Here's another. Note the whitewall tires.There were special bicycles for girls with a gap in the frame for her skirts. A boy wouldn't be caught dead on one.The "English racer" was lighter than American style bikes and had brakes that clamped on the wheel rim that worked much better than the American style. Some had three speeds.Lights were ineffective battery operated affairs with a short battery life. They did little more than hopefully alert a car driver to your presence. "Generator lights" would take care of the battery problem but the lights were still dim.The wheel turned the generator but also added a substantial drag so was tiring.Automobiles aside trains and buses were how you traveled long distances, if you crossed the ocean you went by ship. I've done all three and spent many a night on a "sleeper" train in a fold down bed. I especially like ships, crossing the Atlantic twice on one. I loved the rhythmic pounding of the engines at night. We spent a night on board a ship in the New York harbor when a hurricane came through. I was impressed by the huge trees that were lying around next morning.Although not the first commercial service, Pan American had been flying the Transatlantic route for a couple of decades with the Clipper flying boats, the Boeing 707 paved the way for affordable long distance air service in 1958. It was fast, traversing the ocean in less than 8 hours vs more than 20 for the Clipper, and reliable. In addition you could carry on a conversation with your neighbor, something you couldn't do in a piston engine plane.This? 180 mph for 20+ hours to Europe spending more than $10,000?Or this? 6-8 hours at 600 mph for a few hundred dollars?The home entertainment system consisted of a vacuum tube AM, no FM, radio with a 4" speaker and a tube record player. Primitive Hi Fi and stereo was just catching on in higher priced systems. The long play LP 33⅓ record was introduced but most pop music was 45 RPM with one song on each side. Teenagers might have a stack of 45's. By the way it took a while for vacuum tubes to warm up, perhaps a minute, so when you see someone in a movie turn on an old radio and it comes right on...didn't happen. Instant on is the result of transistors followed by printed circuits.Transistors made their debut in the late 40's. The Japanese developed them into a commercially viable item with Sony introducing the astounding portable radio that could be carried in a pocket in 1957. I got my first one in 1963. This product was an unbelievable departure from what we were accustomed to.This was how teenagers built their collection of favorite songs. There was one song on each side. Usually the other side was a throwaway. At the modern equivalent of $8 a record could be a sizable investment. LPs were closer to $40. An adapter could be bought to push into the large hole so it could be played on a 33⅓ record player. Record players generally had three speeds 78, 45, and 33. 45's were 7" and 33's were 12". A full album could be recorded on a 33. The 78.26 was mostly obsolete in the 50's and had a playing time about the same as a 45. My mother had a collection of 78's.This was the solution to playing all those 45s. We all had these record changers that we could stack our records on. At the end of the song the tone arm returned to the side, a new record fell and the tone arm set down at the beginning of the new record automatically. What more could you ask for?Recording music is easy now and we can download from the Net but back then there was no practical way for the average person to record music. Commercial tape recorders were available but were too expensive for the average person. Tape recorders didn't come into their own until the 60's after problems with the tape itself were solved although the late 50's had some showing up. Hi Fi stereo also came into its own in the 60's with the advent of affordable amplifiers, tape decks, record changers, and separate speakers. With the availability of high quality components you could build your own system.My dream speakers were the AR5. Acoustic Research made some of the finest speakers in the world and at $2000 a pair was within reach of the serious audiophile.10" woofers. I picked up a pair at a thrift store at a ridiculous price. They didn't know what they had.In the early 60's Sony introduced one of the first affordable home use tape recorders, the Sony 500, if you call $2000 in current money affordable. It was a nifty unit with speakers that folded in to make a compact portable unit. The amplifiers were vacuum tubes, not transistors. I bought one, subscribed to a tape club, and began building a collection of prerecorded music. The nice thing about the unit is I could record records from a record player. Never before had I dreamed of such a luxury.This folded into this!I built my own system and an amusing incident resulted. I recorded some piano music and because of a miscalculation I had a long lead time before the music began. Friends were over and my 3 year old daughter sat at the piano to pretend to play. We forgot I had a tape on and just then the music began and to all appearances my daughter suddenly could play professionally. One of my friends was actually shocked into standing up staring at her open mouthed. We were all stunned until the reality sank in when my daughter stopped "playing" to check out the sudden stir of activity behind her. See what Acoustic Research speakers can do for you?Postage was 3 cents, for an extra 2 cents you could have your letter air mailed which was considerably faster. Otherwise it was sent by train which might take a while if it was going across country. If you sent it ground to another country it went by ship and could take weeks. When I was in Germany a friend mailed a letter ground from Japan. It arrived three months later.Now all mail is airmail.If you didn't have enough postage a stamp for the amount due was put on the letter and the recipient had to pay to get his letter. This practice came to an end because people were mailing their bills without postage and the bill collectors were spending a lot of money paying the postage due. Today it's no stamp, no service.Of interest but off subject is one of the most valuable American stamps is the upside down or inverted Jenny stamp issued in 1918. Somehow the stamp slipped by inspectors and a single sheet was sold. The buyer, realizing what he had, asked for more but the clerk instead tried to get it back. The buyer refused and examples now go for hundreds of thousands of dollars.Long distance driving was more difficult as cities were connected by two lane state highways. These highways would go right through a city. Signs would guide the traveler through the city streets, traffic lights and all, and back into the countryside. On the highway one might get stuck behind a slowpoke unable to pass for miles and miles as a dozen cars stacked up. There were other hazards. We once topped a hill and suddenly found ourselves barreling down on a farm tractor doing perhaps eight miles an hour while we were doing seventy. It was close.Eisenhower launched the country into the modern interstate system in the fifties and it was a huge project. Lives were disrupted as the right of way would mean old family dwellings being torn down to make way for the freeway. Rockwell did a touching painting of a family watching their family home being destroyed. Entire towns died as the traffic they depended on was rerouted.Some construction workers would haul mobile homes behind trucks as they moved from city to city attempting to minimize disrupting their children's lives.The interstate had an unexpected side effect as a small industry, relative to today, over the road trucking, took off. Trains were no longer the only way to move large quantities of goods between cities. The problem was the interstate was not designed to handle so much weight creating unanticipated maintenance issues.A typical 1950's semi.

Buckle up. This is a really, really long answer.I’m in my 50’s, undiagnosed, but likely aspie.I’m guessing I’m at the higher end of high-functioning. No one in my life ever suggested I might be autistic … though almost everyone in my life would consider me “different.”I believe my high-functioning was aided by having a childhood surrounded by older siblings and having lived a rough-and-tumble 1960’s and 70’s small town neighborhood where I had to sink or swim among older children. I got my balls busted a lot but everyone was picked on so I figured it was normal.I also spent a lot of time on trips with my parents as “the invisible child” at the table with publishers of newspapers large and small, including major big city newspapers. This helped me understand that “powerful people” aren’t terrifying and I have a huge vocabulary from being raised in a family that ran a newspaper.Skip to adulthood.I matured late. I got a degree in Computer Science (with bad grades) and kinda coasted until I was in my 30’s while I was going through a divorce. I had a decent amount of income from earnings from our family newspaper but as the golden-age of newspapers actually making money ended in the 1990’s, I knew that supply was going to run out and I’d be on my own.Also, going through a divorce I made a commitment to never miss a child support or alimony payment … and that was going to be expensive to the tune of over $500k over 15+ years. It adds up really fast over time.Quick summary: Take classes, learn graphic arts, get a poor paying job with good experience, get fired after being shifted to cold-call sales (something I loathe). Freak out. Teach myself, with help from my astonishingly talented girlfriend, how to do web design and database programming. Get another job. Work happily in a quiet cube. Didn’t get promised pay raise from $13–$15/hour and tell bosses “I’m looking for other work.” Get a new job in a large organization doing web design and such.This is where the aspie-side killed me.I’ve always felt different and have been known to be horrifyingly naive at times.I’m also very bright. I learn some things a little more slowly than others but everyone thinks I’m a really quick study. (Irony of being aspie is all of the contradictions that Neurotypicals do not understand. “But you are so smart? Why don’t you understand this?” <sigh>Anyway, the real problems started when a superior got jealous of a friend of hers who was promoted over her head. Then the gaslighting, lying, manipulation, more lying, crazy-making and total bullshit started.My aspie superpower: Ability to grasp large systems including the people who work with those systems. BUT my superpowers only work if I get accurate data.My superior lied about everything. All the time.Sometimes telling three different lies in about 15 minutes: One to her staff. One to the higher ups at a meeting. And a third lie when she came back down and told us that she hadn’t told us what she told us 15 minutes ago!I hated this person. I couldn’t think straight around her. And … I called her out on her lies. Even though I didn’t know I was aspie, I now realize that I feel a need to stand up against injustice.And I truly believed I could win.Fuck.It can be very difficult for someone on the spectrum to survive in an environment where lies and half-truths and lies of omission are all you ever hear.Neurotypical culture is full of small lies.Neurotypical corporate culture can be downright toxic due to useless levels of infighting and backstabbing middle and upper management. Worse, this was in a political environment so there was essentially no “product” and no measures of success and accountability was limited to “I said it is true so it is true.”Double fuck.I got angry. I dropped f-bombs. I fought the system with logic. I faced the tiger figuring I’d be eaten (fired) or not eaten (win an argument) … and it never occurred to me there was a third option:I was chewed up and spit out and told “do not help.”’Another middle manager approached me later that week and said, “so, you’ve been lead on developing a plan to do this huge system conversion. Could we meet and …”Me: “I was told I can’t help.”Manager: “No. She must have been kidding.”Me: “I was told … I … can … not … help. On anything.”Manager: “That can’t be right, I’ll go talk to them.”Twenty minutes later, this manager comes in looking like she had been run through her belly with a spear. “She said … you can’t help.”That “do not help phase” lasted for several years. I had tasks but was largely pushed to the side. I stuck it out. I needed the work.Lessons:The workplace is frequently not rational.People lie. A lot.There is no dealing rationally with irrational people.Sometimes you just plain lose.The ugly influence of this superior went on for a decade. I eventually lost it completely because of the constant sabotage. One day I snapped.My superior said, “If you need help. If you need me to stop something so you can finish this project. Just ask.”Me in my head: “Right. Yeah. Whatever.”A day later I got several projects dumped on me all at the same time one afternoon and I had to do them all simultaneously.Me: “I can’t do this. Please tell X that we can’t do that this afternoon.”Superior: “X? No. If that’s what they want then that’s what they get.”Me: <slack jaw … rising anger. BOOOOM!>I was standing in front of her office, in front of the secretaries desk and within earshot of the whole department.“GAAAAGHAGAGAH!!!! You will never fucking help us under any fucking circumstances, ever!!!”Superior: “That’s not true.”Me: “GAHHAHGAAGH! BULLSHIT.”And I stormed off. I had been dropping f-bombs for a long time but this was getting fucking old.A while later I got shit on one last time and I lost my fucking shit. I don’t even remember exactly what the last straw was but I was broken. And loud.I apparently scared the shit out of someone 100 yards away in some other department who reported me as “High Potential of Going Postal.” Fuck.Superior sits me down with my shop representative.Superior: “I’m worried about you. You need counseling.”Realizing I was defeated I played the game. “Yes, I do. I need counseling.”Superior: “I’m putting you on mandatory employee assistance leave.”Me: “That is fine. I will do what I need to do.”I ended up in what was essentially anger management with an utterly incompetent young psychologist who kept flinching whenever I told her how toxic the work environment was. If you constantly flinch at a patient’s reality … the patient will lose confidence!I actually had to chew out the therapist. “All you do is talk! I need some freaking tools! Give me some tools to use so I can not explode today at work.”I got a few tools, survived and the superior eventually “retired” after she got wind she was going to be fed to the wolves. Bosses since then have been complex and confusing but not complete and total lying douchbag fuckwit asshole … <ahem>Since then I’ve prioritized my personal life and sanity over “doing everything perfectly.”What I learned, from the perspective of having recently discovered I’m ASD?You truly have to find a way to let the fuck go of your innate sense of fairness and caring in order to function in many work environments.It is okay to not care. “I will do what I am told. I will bring up concerns but I will then say that I will do whatever I am told to do.” Apathy (in limited quantities) can be your friend. “I don’t care. I do not need to fix this. I will let it go.”I’m not religious but the serenity prayer is good here.God, give me grace to accept with serenitythe things that cannot be changed,Courage to change the thingswhich should be changed,and the Wisdom to distinguishthe one from the other.Serenity Prayer - WikipediaLearn what you can and cannot change.Get everything in writing. Do not allow liars to lie without documentation. Send an email: “I’m just confirming that in the meeting you said I am to do X and Y but not Z. Please confirm.” If they walk down the hall for verbal confirmation, politely say, “I really need that in an email so I can be sure I’m doing what you want.” You may get pushback. Be persistent. Find someone else on the project to include as a “cc:” so at least that person will know you asked and that you stated that your superior had assigned this asinine, will-fail assignment. ;-)Accept that working sucks for neurotypicals, too. It isn’t because you are on the spectrum that work sometimes sucks. Everyone is fucked with by superiors, coworkers and clients at one time or another in their jobs. It is hard but you must find a way to not take it personally. “I am doing this for my paycheck. I am doing this for my sanity. I will get this stupid fucking ass-backward fuckwit job done and I will do what I need to do next.”Don’t correct everyone all the time. The number of ass-backward illogical thoughts that you have to deal with on a daily basis is astounding. It is not your place to have to fix stupidity, arrogance, etc. Just suck it up, go home and write awful things in your journal to get it out of your head. Learn how to listen politely and keep your opinions to yourself … unless those opinions are critical for the current situation. I had a hard time with this one. I hate when “things are wrong” or “there is a better way.” That does not always matter.Give yourself time to process. Learn to say, “That sounds pretty good. I need to look up a few things and I will give you a response (by a set time in the future.)” Managers need to know you will get back to them. This tactic is important in relationships, too. Unless there is really an immediate time deadline, if someone says to you, “You need to give me an answer right now” that is generally a form of emotional blackmail.Managers can also be bullies (even unintentionally) and you will need time to process what you heard and how it makes you feel and whether or not it is logical.Find a place for timeouts. You will need to be able to “excuse yourself” from situations. Neurotypicals are largely immune to polite half-truths so if you say “I need to go to the restroom” you don’t have to mean “I have to take a shit.” You may just need to go lock yourself in a stall for five minutes to get your shit back together. You are not lying … you do need to go to the restroom! Finding “true statements” that can be misinterpreted is a good aspie trick I’ve learned. (Don’t start smoking but smokers have a built in excuse to go outside.)Doodle if you need to! I’ve found I need something to keep my mind “tight” when I’m sitting in long meetings. I doodle. Not draw, just make lines, shapes, whatever. People can think you aren’t listening but if you doodle at every freaking meeting it will fade into the background. Having paper for notes is good in any case so pen and paper are normal at meetings. If someone complains say, “Actually, I listen much better if I have something to do with my hands.” People don’t need to hear “I’m aspie. I need to do this.” You are human and you need to do have coping skills.Thank people for good behavior. It will help your relations with coworkers. If you find a coworker you really like working with and they say “Oh, thank you so much for doing that so quickly” … you can say back (usually in email) “You are easy to work with! I like working with you. Always glad to help.”Leave a dish of candies or something on your desk. On occasion, bring a treat in for your coworkers. People love food! They will find you more trustworthy if you give them something. If you love and are obsessed pickled herring … don’t bring that in as a treat! Try to find something simple/neurotypically normal ;-)Keep lists. If you have trouble staying organized, keep a list of tasks. If you don’t finish everything on the list and it gets cluttered … copy it to a new sheet of paper. Physically cross off what you get done. That seems silly but psychologically it helps. I’ve even written something down just to cross it off!Empty your email inbox every day of everything except currently incomplete tasks. Damn, this was a hard one. My list is now my email inbox for most items. Create a set of folders for things that repeat at your job. Flag items with colors related to different task types. Whatever works … but at the end of the day try to file as many emails as possible. When you finish an item, file all associated emails. Keeping an empty inbox can help reduce stress. I was only able to do this after I found a routine at work, what types of projects I do, things like HR and Personal, etc.Have something at home in your personal life that can fully take your mind off work. I go home and play an online tank game, play guitar, study quantum physics, or play a game with my family. (Quantum physics is one of my special interests and I’ve been learning for 30 years so that’s why I say “study” since I’m actually reading textbooks and such!)Don’t answer the phone on the first ring. This was probably the only really good advice I got from my less-than-competent therapist. Phones are “ambush traps.” When the phone rings, take a breath. Breathe in and out. Calm your mind for a second, then pick up. Quickly picking up leaves you half-into whatever you were doing and if it is That Asshole who always tries to throw you off balance you will be slightly more prepared.Ask for a raise or promotion. This is true for anyone but if you have been a place for a while and have not had a wage increase you will not get a raise or promotion without asking. Keep it formal and polite. “Since this is my second anniversary, I wanted to check in to see how you feel about my performance. I am very happy to be working here and want to be able to give my best. I would also like to be considered for (a raise and/or promotion) based on the extra work I have voluntarily been taking on.” Etc. Don’t be disappointed if the answer is no, even a grumpy or excuse-filled no. This will help you understand where you stand with the company. It can help you decide whether or not you should stay or start looking for other employment.Find a mentor. Saying to someone “I really admire your work. I want to do well here. I was wondering if it was okay to stop in to ask for tips or suggestions.”Say names back to a person when you are introduced. Write them down as quickly as possible right away if during a meeting, possibly with notes “Red hair. Glasses. Tall. Likes tennis.” Anything to remember their name. If you forget, walk up to them when you see them again and be honest, “I am terrible with names, I’m Jane, I’ve forgotten your name already.” Most people respond with great grace, often saying “I’m terrible, too!” To cement their name in your memory … say their name out loud when you see them in passing. “Hi Todd. How are you doing?” People love to hear their own name and it will help you get in their good graces.Admit to faults and failures and fuck-ups quickly. Be “that guy” or “that gal” who is unafraid to address a problem. Blame is a corporate game. Accepting blame quickly throws people off balance. “Hey. I deleted the Bristol account. I take responsibility. What can I do to fix this situation?” This will be especially helpful if you suffer from Being Overly Honest.Fixing screwups is a place where you can be honest. Also, don’t get caught up in some asshole managers witch hunts if they are looking for someone to blame and hang out to dry.I have even said, to that horrible superior when she came fishing for people to throw under the bus, “You are looking for someone to blame. Blame me. I don’t care. I don’t know how this situation came about but that doesn’t matter. I just want to fix it.”Shoot straight with straight shooters. This is where aspies really shine! You will find in any substantial sized organization that there are people who “folks don’t like very much because they are hard-asses.”What I’ve discovered is that hard-asses don’t like liars. Hard-asses don’t like ass kissers. Hard-asses like people who get to the point and don’t fuck with them!I have found that hard-asses like me very much. My honesty and directness are an asset with these folks. Often these are people at the center or a fair amount of responsibility and project coordination and they just don’t have time to waste being sugary and sweet and not getting pissed off at long-winded suck ups.Learn how to dress appropriately. Put a mirror by the front door if necessary. I hate dress codes. I dislike wearing a tie every day. I wear a tie every day.If you don’t have a lot of money, Good Will and Salvation Army are great places to find business clothes, including suit jackets, cheap. My wife spent $5 each on two used suit jackets that I wore at work for years and people gave me complements!And then I realized that if I wear a tie but not a jacket, everyone thinks my jacket is on the back of a chair somewhere. I haven’t worn a jacket (except on professional outside visits and at conventions) in at least 5 years!Ask someone at work you trust if you look okay. Say, “If I ever have a booger, spinach in my teeth or my tie is tied on top of my collar (which I do all the time) please let me know.” Guys … ask a woman. A bit of stereotyping here, but I find they are generally more observant and generally like to help people look nice. (Women, I can’t give you advice on how to dress. I’m clueless there, sorry!)Eat well. Sleep well. Avoid hangovers. Take sick days (if you have them). Plan vacation days well in advance (if you have them). As someone on the spectrum it is even more important to avoid accumulated stress than for most people. This can help with avoiding meltdowns … or in my case Storms of Screaming F-Bombs.Wow. That was long.I guess there is a lot to being a person in the workplace that can be really hard to understand. As someone on the spectrum … you can face challenges and get better at things over time!I’ve been at my current job for … 14 years … yesterday? Wow. I am largely well respected. I have learned to manage my temper (in public). I still haven’t gotten that promotion but I did ask about a month ago. BTW … during the reign of Superior From Hell I stopped asking and gave up for my own sanity. Sometimes “letting go” of a desire is the only way to survive.As I said, I’m a high-functioning aspie, so my your mileage may vary on how useful my tips are. I am definitely “battle hardened” by my experiences … but still none of my coworkers thinks I am ASD. I am just a very quirky person that is very loyal, enormously cynical and sarcastic at times and generally known to have a bit of a dark sense of humor.But, I am also respected. You can be, too.Find a workplace that works for you. It doesn’t have to be glamorous. It just has to not drive you insane and still pay the bills.—Question as originally asked: How does an autistic spectrum disorder affect one’s adult life, specifically in the workplace?