The hit sitcom “I Love Lucy” aired throughout the majority of the 1950s and charmed everyone with the antics of a silly housewife and her comedic husband.
After it ended its regularly aired seasons, between ’51 and ’57, the legacy continued into 1960 in the form of 13 different one-hour specials, including “The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show.” These days, the show can be streamed on a number of platforms, like Hulu. But when boomers were young, they eagerly awaited new episodes each week.
Jell-No
Although there are some things that shouldn’t ever be served in gelatin form, boomers were in the experimental phase of Jell-O.
If you find a cookbook from the ‘60s or ‘70s, you can bet it’s going to have some weird type of ham, vegetable, or fish gelatin mold in it! Thankfully, our palates have evolved, and there aren’t as many cookbooks in circulation that are promoting ham and gelatin crossovers!
Using a Phonebook
Long before the invention of Google and other forms of instant searches, looking up a phone number was a little trickier and took some more time – especially if you weren’t near a phonebook.
Most families and businesses kept one of the thick volumes of local numbers on hand for when they needed to call someone whose number they weren’t familiar with. If you had to find someone with a name like Bob Smith, it could take you all day to get through them all to find the right one!
The Milkman
Today, many grocery stores offer their own milk delivery services (and a number of them are plant-based, like coconut, oat, soy, and almond). But when boomers were younger, they had to wait for their weekly delivery from the milkman, who’d come by and drop off their supply, and pick up any empty glass bottles his customers left out from previous trips.
In the 1960s, about 30% of milk was still being delivered. Now, in the age of online shopping and grocery delivery, that percentage has probably gone up again!
S&H Stamps
Stamps were a big deal when what’s now dubbed “snail mail” was still one of the more popular methods of communication. And, choosing what to do with those redeemed S & H Green Stamps was a boomer kid’s favorite pastime.
Would it be a comic book? A new toy truck, perhaps? The possibilities were endless! The stamps were incredibly popular throughout the U.S. from the ‘30s until the late ‘80s and were distributed as part of a rewards program by the Sperry & Hutchinson company.