Gotta have the best
Radio took a big step forward in the 60’s. Stereo sound meant that ‘high end’ radios could be sold as must have devices for every house so you could play the music at higher volumes without signal loss or crappy AM signals. Dad bought a large radio that was about three feet long in a real wood cabinet, guaranteed to pull in far-off stations from Istanbul with its cutting edge technology. This was problematic, as there was a stereo record player in the living room, as I mentioned. So this huge contraption went on their headboard, where it gathered dust.
There were three local AM stations and one FM station. The FM one played classical, so that meant any ‘good’ stations had to be pulled in from afar. But the bedroom was on the first floor, and the radio was against an interior wall, so the radio suffered verbal abuse from my father for not getting multitudes of channels. My mother would turn it on when she sat in the bedroom marking schoolwork. By far, I used it the most–I had bouts of sickness as a child, and I would sleep in my parents’ bed when I stayed home from school. When I discovered rock and roll, I would pull in Philadelphia’s WFIL for hours of recuperative music. More on that much later.
As a brief footnote, one of the AM stations went to a call-in/talk format at night. I know this is hard to believe, but only the host spoke (he called himself ‘The Night Mayor’, pronounced ‘Nightmare’). He would repeat what his callers said, as all you could hear of a caller was a far-off scratchy noise. So it was “You’re saying the city has stopped picking up trash on your block?” <long scratchy noise> “And they’re sitting smoking cigarettes for two hours?” Get the drift?
The Dixie cup was a classic 60’s invention, birthed in a haze of environmental ignorance. Buy this dispenser and glue it to your bathroom wall. Then you stock it with little plastic cups, so everybody got a fresh clean drink. “Get rid of those ugly kitchen glasses–they’re unsanitary!” Bathroom trash cans all over the US overflowed overnight with single-use cups. And when the fad died, the dispenser still hung on the wall, gathering dust. The small ‘hook’ that held the dispenser was still hanging on the bathroom wall when the house sold in 2015.
And now–the dishwasher. It was not conceived as an in-cabinet appliance. It was three feet square, four feet high, weighing in at over a hundred pounds. It was wheeled to the sink, where you loaded dishes and soap, then attached two VERY stiff rubber hoses. Any flaw in the Faucet connections and you wore hot water. The noise could be heard in the backyard, especially when the dirty water was expelled into the sink. It was so bad that my parents had to discuss when to run it, so my father could hear the tv in the nest room. The hoses eventually cracked and were wrapped in yards of duct tape. In the late 70’s, they returned from errands to find the kitchen an inch deep in water. The dishwasher was demoted to a table to pile papers and phone books. It took three men to haul it away in the 80’s.
Next: Kindergarten