“Boy am I glad to have this cell phone!”

Well, I nearly cried. I’d talked Dad into buying a mobile phone well over a decade ago. It took until the other day – and the aftermath of Hurricane Isaias – to hear him praise the handiness of this new-fangled option to his trusty land-line phone.

Gary and I sometimes ponder this question: What gadgets will our sons want us to use in the future? My husband is incredibly technology-adverse (although I have caught him tuning in to YouTube on our TV lately, ever since he heard about Logger Wade). I do okay, I guess, but draw the line with that Alexa robot voice listening in to my every word around the house.

Growing up, Dad welcomed new gadgets with far more gusto than Mom did. Since he worked for General Electric, he’d occasionally bring home kitchen-appliance prototypes. Mom eventually came to love the toaster oven. That Water Pik gizmo, though, no way.

Back in Pittsfield in the 1960s, it felt like there were new discoveries all around just about every day.

Here are a few that stand out in my memory:

1. Color television

Oh how clearly I remember the first time I saw a color TV.

My brother Dave announced to us one day at the dinner table that his friend Bobby Ford had a color television at his house.

“Wow! Can we go see it? Please … PLEASE?!”

It was like something out of A Christmas Story. We gave Mom no peace until she relented.

The above photo looks like a bunch of kiddos Central Casting sent over for Leave It To Beaver. Bobby Ford fit right in – that him, far right; it looks like he’s the only one who saw Dad there with a camera.

Here’s a photo of the same party from the other end of the table. With cake, ice cream sandwiches, and other goodies, it looks like Mom gave us enough sugar to last a week!

Back to the color TV story: Mom called Mrs. Ford and made sure it was okay for us to come by. We hopped on our bikes and headed that way.

It was no surprise that Bobby was the first to have a color TV. His family was just … advanced for the 1960s. He was the first to break out Cap’n Crunch Cereal for everyone to try, too. (It’s been a bit alarming to read the history of this cereal – it introduced a new cooking process, “adding an oil coating for flavor.”

The color television was amazing, as expected. It wasn’t more than a few months later that Dad brought one home for us, too.

The big console set (General Electric, no doubt) is out of frame in this photo, but you get the general idea:

2. Chewy children’s vitamins

Back in the 1960s, not every community had started adding fluoride to drinking water to prevent cavities, Pittsfield included. So our dentist prescribed tiny fluoride tablets for us to take daily.

Dear heavenly father, how I hated those things. Now that I’ve looked it up, I see they were Sodium Fluoride, which I guess explains why they tasted like pure salt.

And what to wash down that heinous, ever-dissolving pill with? Orange juice, of course! In a hobnail milk glass:

Have I mentioned I hate orange juice to this day? It’s probably a carryover from the days of gagging on the pulpy sweet/sour/salty concoction that seemed to expand in my mouth the harder I tried to swallow.

So imagine my delight when, while visiting my friends Laina and Pammy, they offered me a chewable vitamin. Of course, I said yes.

It was a bit of a clandestine operation, as Laina dragged a chair over to retrieve the glass bottle of Flintstone’s Vitamins from a high shelf and little Pammy kept watch for their mom, whose attention was probably taken up by her other children.

Well. We liked that first vitamin so much that we tried another. After all, if one vitamin was good for us, then how healthy would we be if we chewed up a dozen? We decided to give it a try, sampling Fred, Barney, and all the gang.

Sidenote: Apparently, Barney’s better half – Betty – was not included in the original selection back in the 1960s. From 1968 until 1995, poor Betty was left out. It took a grassroots effort to convince the vitamin makers to add Betty (removing the Flintstone’s car in the process). Talk about your Stone Age mentality!

When I returned home later that afternoon, I confessed to my mother that we might have overdosed on these delicious new vitamins. The bottle was empty, after all. She stayed pretty calm, but called Mrs. Niarchos to check out the story. Sorry, Laina and Pammy – hope you didn’t suffer too great a punishment for our transgression.

Meanwhile, Mom explained that those tiny white pills weren’t going away, as they weren’t multi-vitamins, but fluoride tablets. Fred, Barney, and Dino weren’t to be my saviors after all.

3. Pants for girls in the 1960s

Back in the 1960s, girls wore dresses and slacks. Pants were for boys.

Case in point, this photo. Bare knees, even in snowy weather!

In Pittsfield, we belonged to St. Theresa’s parish, but they didn’t have a grade school. The neighboring parish, Sacred Heart, had a new school so St. Theresa’s paid our tuition to go there. (Dad told me he and Mom put considerably extra into the collection basket each week to make up for it.)

Sacred Heart’s bus routes didn’t include our street, so my brothers and I trudged daily more than a mile for our blessed education from the nuns.

Pittsfield is in Massachusetts. Western Mass. It snows there from October until (sometimes) May. And we’re talking feet, not inches.

But good Catholic girls didn’t wear slacks to school in the 1960s.

When I was in 4th grade, it was a particularly cold winter. It would take several class periods for my frozen knees to thaw out. Even as a 10 year old, I knew this was a ridiculous. Those heathen girls over at Dawes Elementary wore them, after all!

I spoke with Sister Joseph Charles, who was fairly modern in her thinking, as nuns went back then. There may have been a phone call from Mom, too. After, no doubt, long conversations with Sister Superior (that’s what we called the school’s principal), the following was decreed:

Girls who no longer had the holiness to offer up to the Lord the suffering of frozen kneecaps would be allowed to wear slacks under their uniform. However, they must arrive early enough each morning to remove the slacks before class started. And that removal could not be in the restroom, but had to take place while standing next to one’s desk.

My frost-bit brain was thrilled at first. But each morning, I got more irritated. Standing next to my desk, surrounded by 10-year-old boys, and trying to wiggle my pants down without the slacks grabbing my underwear along the way was nothing short of ridiculous.

Through it all, though, I managed not to complain out loud. I decided to “offer up” my discomfort to Jesus, who was probably averting his eyes, just in case.

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