A New Year Makes Me Reflect On Old Days

As we begin 2025, I find myself reflecting on how time flies, and how different the world is from my childhood and adolescence. So I put pen to paper and wrote the following, then decided to share it with you. Those among us who are Baby Boomers and older Gen Xers will certainly relate.

I grew up in a different world, at a different time. A period in history that will never repeat itself, never return again.

My childhood wasn’t filled with screens, digital content, and electronic gizmos. I was raised with Tonka trucks, Hot Wheels, G.I. Joe, bicycles and dirt bikes, baseball bats and gloves. My parents didn’t hand me a tablet or video game if I was bored. They sent me outside to play in the neighborhood or explore in the woods behind our home.

I grew up in an analog world.

During my childhood in the 1960s and 1970s, there was no Internet/World Wide Web, and our homes were not filled with digital devices, personal computers, WiFi or streaming content. We had no cell phones, iPads, or laptops. It was a time before YouTube and social media. We watched 4-5 local television stations with antennas up on the roof or on the TV itself, switching channels by turning a dial on the set. We listened to the radio by pushing a button for FM or AM, then manually dialing in the signal for the radio station we wanted. We bought music on vinyl records, 8-track then cassette tapes. There was no iTunes, Spotify, or Pandora.

We took axes, saws and shovels, and cut trails back in the woods for our bicycles and motorcycles. I got my first pocket knife by 4th grade, a BB gun in 5th grade, a pellet gun by 6th grade, and a Marlin .35 cal lever-action hunting rifle by seventh grade. My dad took my brothers and me hiking, hunting, camping, and fishing, oftentimes with our mother accompanying us. We built forts and tree houses in the woods, and spent endless hours in the great outdoors.

We played outside with the kids on our street pretty much all day long, back in the woods or at someone’s house, with our parents having to shout for us to come home for dinner. Tackle football with no pads, Kick-the-Can, bicycle races or backyard baseball were our go-to games. No sitting inside on a screen, playing a video game against strangers on the other side of the globe.

It was a different world.

We mailed or personally delivered hand written cards and letters to each other, with no electronic email. Text messages were index cards or later Post-it notes, and comments were either hand written and given, or spoken face-to-face. We read articles and stories in books, newspapers and magazines, looked up topics in a card catalog system at the library, then went and plucked the book or periodical off of a shelf to read at a table in that library, or checked it out to take home for two weeks.

At home, we had no Google, no Bing, just Encyclopedia Britannica, all 24 volumes, and Webster’s New World Dictionary. We’d grab a volume off the family bookshelf, search a topic in the index, then flip over to the page and start reading. No search bar, no typing with instant results. If you wanted information and answers, you had to literally go look for them.

Our two telephones hung on a wall or sat on a table stand in the house, plugged into the wall. In my early childhood they were rotary dial, then later push button. If you wanted some privacy in a conversation, you had to stretch the long handset cord in the kitchen/dining room around to the front family room, and hope your siblings didn’t pick up the phone in Mom & Dad‘s room and eavesdrop on your conversation.

The keyboards we used were on manual typewriters, and we had to manually feed sheets of paper into them to tap out letters and words. They weren’t digital, but were generated by ink strips stamping letters onto paper pages. The first computer keyboard I ever saw was in college, in the mid-1980s. We used hardcover textbooks in school, and literally wrote our work out on lined paper pages with no.2 pencils.

We even knew how to write in cursive, more than just our signature.

When we road tripped, we used fold-out paper maps, spread them out before us, and traced our routes with markers. We didn’t have GPS, no Google Maps or Waze, just those paper maps that were hard to fold back the same way they opened up. But we loved them, and learned how to navigate with them, not a digital voice linked to a satellite, telling us turn-by-turn where to go.

The cartoons we watched on Saturday mornings on our cathode ray televisions were all hand drawn and colored, frame by frame. They weren’t created digitally or using AI. The kids shows that we watched taught us our “ABCs and 123s“, the colors and shapes, and character qualities like respect, responsibility, and sharing. They weren’t trying to “groom” children with agendas of gender fluidity, pan sexuality, and hatred/jealousy between races.

When I went to school, the Bible was not a banned book. We could bring ours to school, read it and talk about it over lunch, and form student-led clubs around our Christian beliefs. That began to change as we moved into the 1980s, but I still remember groups like the Gideons and Campus Crusade for Christ coming to junior highs and high schools, and making presentations.

That doesn’t happen anymore.

I wasn’t raised in a digital world. I was raised in the physical world, the real world, in contact with real people and exploring real nature. I didn’t exercise my thumbs tapping out text messages or toggling video games, and I didn’t spend hours scrolling and swiping screens with my fingers. My fingers got dirty in the woods, got scraped up when I fell off a bike, skateboard, or motorcycle, and got nicked, cut and grimy wrenching on everything from bicycles to automobiles with my dad.

I grew up in a different world. And to be honest, there are times I really miss it.

Rob

*Top photo: Rob (front row far right) in Khoury League Baseball, Perrine, Florida, 1971 or ’72.