Chain Links 1960's Trivia

I can remember the excitement of riding in my parent's Buick station wagon to McDonald's. My parents, four brothers, sister, and I would all jump into the car. There was no seat belt law or children cars eats back then. A meal of a hamburger, fries, and soda  was less than 50 cents.

Candy bars were 5 cents. Bazooka Bubblegum cost a penny and included  a small comic strip featuring the character "Bazooka Joe." There are over 1,535 different "Bazooka Joe" comic-strip wrappers to collect. You may recognize this candy bar from my story The Garden Raid.

 The price of a 6.5-oz bottle of Coca-Cola was set at one nickel. There was never soda in my house growing up. Milk was the drink. My brothers and I would wash down peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with a gallon of milk. 

A gallon of milk was approximately 40 cents. It was common to have milk delivered to your home by the milkman, just like the postman delivers the mail.

The crew cut and Princeton  were two classic haircuts of the time for boys and cost 50 cents.. I would climb up into the barber chair, look into the wall mirror and watch Buck talk away to my dad. My hair fell to the floor as Buck buzzed away.

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 Television in the 1960's was very different from today's T.V. There was only three channels available; ABC, CBS, and NBC. Nearly 98 percent of American homes did not have a color TV.  This is the cast of the TV series Leave It to Beaver. This show became very popular mid 1960's. Similar to  most domestic sitcoms of the 1960's, Leave It to Beaver was about an idyllic family life.  TVs actually went static at midnight. During this time, it cost too much for TV stations to run for small audiences. Generally, the TV came back on around 6 a.m. the next day. 

 At the start of the 1960's, home phones were generally the desk model with a rotary dial, in shiny black or possibly red. The payphone was a coin-operated public phone.    Before the 1950s the coin-phone charge throughout the country typically was five cents. In the 1960's it was 10 cents.  You could call collect, or person-to-person for your ten cents, or you could keep depositing change to pay for your escalating minutes. Long distance calling (anything beyond the city limits) was extra for each call, and would be at least $0.10 per minute. 

 The 1960s saw large mainframe computers  in large industries and with the US military and space program. 

 The first computer game is generally assumed to be the game Spacewar. Developed in 1962 at MIT by Stephen Russell. Spacewar originally ran on a PDP-1 computer the size of a large car. 

 The most common form of the vinyl single is the "45" or "7-inch". The names are derived from its play speed, 45 rpm, and the standard diameter, 7 inches. In the 1960's singles cost about 69 cents.

The Beatles had six number-one singles in 1964. "I Want to Hold Your Hand". was one of those number ones, It became the number-one single of the year.