Most of us live pretty hectic lives these days, don't we? We seem to be running around like chickens with our heads cut off most of the time. Can you remember when the conveniences weren't quite so modern as they are now, and we were forced to live our lives more slowly and sanely?
It doesn't take long to look around my home and note the huge differences. Let's start in the kitchen.
In the 60's dishwashers did exist. I don't remember knowing anyone who had one though. If a housewife was lucky enough to own one, it was usually a portable model that had a hose you would attach to your sink, and you'd roll the dishwasher out of its usual cubbyhole so it could be close enough to the sink for the hose to reach and also to let it drain. Instead of having a dishwasher, we WERE the dishwashers! Children routinely took turns, one washing the dishes in the sudsy water, and the other drying them with a towel. The dryer usually put the dishes away. We all learned how to do dishes, and it involved time and effort.
We had a nice oven while I was growing up. One of the back burners consisted of a big hole, and a huge pot could fit into that hole. There was a heating element in the bottom of it. My mom made gigantic pots of spaghetti, navy bean soup, or stew, and dinner would be whatever that pot made for three nights in a row. The controls were at the back of the stove top, and they were push buttons.
Every warm thing we ate was heated with that oven in one way or another, either inside it or on the stove top. We didn't have microwave ovens in the 60's. It's hard to imagine now! Dinner almost always took a long time to make, and as I'm writing this I think I understand why Mom made those big pots of food. If you had a few days' dinner already made, you wouldn't have to slave away every single night. No, you still couldn't "nuke" it in the microwave to warm it up the next night, but you could put a portion into a skillet or pan and heat it on a burner. That took much less time than making it the first night.
In the 60's, refrigerators didn't have water in the door, and our ice came from ice cube trays we stored in our freezer. There was no digital display to tell you what temperature your refrigerator or freezer was operating on. The freezer was almost always a fairly small compartment on the top--not the bottom. Refrigerators were pretty basic, but our freezer almost always had ice cream in it, and that was all we cared about!
Maybe the biggest change has come about in the office arena. Computers were just being heard about when I was growing up. They were huge, room-size things. Consequently, no one had a computer in their house. No one would know how to operate one, even if they did have one! We either wrote our correspondence in longhand, or used a typewriter. There was no backspace key. If you made a mistake, and wanted a perfect page, you had to start over. Have you seen the old movies where someone is sitting at a desk typing, then looking over their work, and finally wadding up the paper in consternation and throwing it into the trash can? That is no exaggeration--typing was often a frustrating experience if you wanted to be neat and tidy, without any mistakes. Typing was also horrible when it came to composition. If you were composing what you wanted to say right then, you would often change your mind about how you wanted to say it. Again, a lot of paper was thrown into the trash.
We didn't recycle in the 1960's. I think for most of us who were raised during those times, it has taken a little longer to get used to the idea of separating everything we want to get rid of. Soda cans, coffee grounds, catalogs--where does it all go? We ARE teachable, but we just didn't do that kind of thing as children.
I think I will leave entertainment convenience for another post. It's a big area, deserving of more discussion! I hope you have had fun thinking back on your "modern" conveniences in the 1960's. Did you have something that you loved, and wish it would come back in style again? Did you have something you detested, and bid it good riddance long ago? One thing we can be sure of is that modern conveniences will continue to get more modern as long as people keep inventing new ways of doing things.
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