Man the memories this thread has brought back. Here's a few more from my youth. When Saturday rolled around it was up at the crack of dawn to mow the "yard", that yard consisted of a pasture and mowing it old school with a push mower. Once chores were done then I could blast off with my buddies, usually this was sometime around noon. My dad had an old Volkswagen beetle and I used to lay on my back on the front passenger floor board. I'd put my legs up on the seat and pretend I was a ball turret gunner.....once a week without fail I'd sit on the back bumper of that old car right after my dad would come home and burn the back of a calf muscle on the tail pipe. Buster Brown shoes and corduroy pants, family camping trips to lake hemit in the pinto station wagon, my mom giving me a quarter to play pac-man at Bob's Big Boy while we waited for our meal. Dr. Pepper tasted different and better than it does today, flying to Catalina Island in a Cessna with my dad and calling out "bandits" for him and him always sneaking in a stall or a spin just because he knew it was better than any roller coaster ride I'd ever been on. Changing the channel meant getting your rear up off the couch and having to adjust the "rabbit ears". Missing a holiday Charlie Brown cartoon special meant waiting til next year to see it. My mom standing on the back porch hollering "dinner is ready" and racing my dogs back to the house. I remember the gas shortage, blue chip stamp books and catalog stores(used to get some really cool stuff from there). Tearing up the neighborhood on my mean-green-machine and rolling around the property on our big wheels pretending we were rat patrol. Man I miss those times. 
Wow.....sounds pretty much like my childhood. Rabbit ears on the TV initially, then the rotary antenna on the roof and the ChannelMaster antenna control on top of the TV set... remote control? My brothers and I were the remote! We didn't get cable where I lived til I was almost in high school. Our first VCR loaded from the top, and I remember the thing cost over $800, and that was a lot of money then! Rat Patrol and Blacksheep Squadron were the coolest shows ever put on TV.
We (my brother and I) used to make money by walking the roads for miles around our house collecting glass bottles from the ditches to each side of the road so that we could take them to the old country store and get $0.05 each for them. We couldn't have been more than 10 and 8, respectively, and just roamed the countryside with no one worried about child abductions. That was the '70's though, when mom could go in a store to shop and leave us in the car, and not worry about being arrested for doing it.
Cars from childhood were an old Ford station wagon then had the fold-up seats in the far rear area where we rode, with no seat belts that I can recall. Later on it was a blue '62 VW Beetle that had an oil leak somewhere, so when the heat was opened up oil smoke came from the heat vents on the edges of the floorboards. I remember my big-wheel, mowing with the push mower, and my dad's black & white instant camera. I had Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots, GI JOE was a foot tall and I had his helecopter, and my younger brother and I used to love it when it rained during the summer because we would take our model USS Missouri battleship and our aircraft carriers to the dirt drive where we'd sit in the huge puddles in our underwear and recreate the Pacific War. I saw Star Wars when it first came out, in the Main Street theater in Conway. One screen, and part of the way through the movie the projector operator obviously hit the projector and knocked it off the table or to the side because the movie image went flying off the screen, then came back and it took him a few seconds to get it back where it was supposed to be. I think I was 6 years old or so...
My dad had bought a 1967 Corvette new and sold it right before I was born for $3500. 327/350, factory sidepipes, Marlboro Maroon with black leather interior and headrests and shoulder harness seatbelts (both optional accessories). That car is still around and my dad met the current owner in Michigan a few years back while on one of his cross-country motorcycle trips (must be nice being retired
) and the car still looks just like it did when he had it, except for the Bloomington Gold certification and the fact that is now is worth well over $100K. I remember when the 1984 Corvettes were unveiled to the public and the price tag of over $20,000 caused dad to just about have a stroke.
I still have my Atari 2600 and all of the games and controllers. My parents got it for us for Christmas when they first came out. Other than a few switches that stick, it still works. I upgraded from the 2600 to my first computer, and Atari 400. Membrane keyboard and 4K of RAM. We 'hot rodded it' with a full-stroke keyboard and upgraded it to 16K of RAM. I had a cassette drive, so games were a bit of a pain, I'd put the tape in, type "CLOAD" in BASIC, then wait for the game. most games took long enough to load from tape that I could go outside and play for a while. I was a real bad dude when I got my first floppy drive, 5.25" RANA Systems 1000. No more tape drive for me.
damm where has the time gone........
