Things Today's Kids Just Won't Get

Jerry Carroll, doing a Crazy Eddie TV ad, 1986.

Unfortunately, he kept getting confused

with company founder Eddie Antar.

Eddie was the crook, Jerry was just the pitchman.

Today, my nieces Ashley and Rachel turned 11. I have been much more successful in extending my taste in baseball to them (they are Yankee Fans) than my taste in most other things. Their younger sister Mackenzie is 2, and she doesn't even know the Yankees exist, even though she's seen the pictures of Yankee stuff at my place.

This past Friday, Toys "R" Us closed forever, after 70 years, including 43 years in my hometown of East Brunswick, New Jersey. It was at their Loehmann's Plaza location (which they left a few years back, moving down New Jersey Route 18 to take the spot formerly occupied by Meyer's hobby store) that I bought things ranging from superhero action figures to baseball cards, from that Mattel Electronics Football II handheld game I wanted so badly to game cartridges for my Atari 5200 SuperSystem (which I got a half-mile down Route 18, at Crazy Eddie, now also defunct).

Remember the commercial jingle? "I don't wanna grow up, I'm a Toys R Us kid!" Well, now, we have no choice: We have to grow up.

When I was their age, 11, "50 years ago" would have been 1931. Think about what TV was like back then. You can't, because there was no TV! Movies? Sound had just come to movies. It was very sketchy. Movies were black and white. And they didn't really look right. It was all shades of gray. (No, not that kind of Shades of Grey.) Even the movements didn't quite look right.

Today, go back 50 years, and it's 1968. You can watch TV shows made that year like The Ed Sullivan Show, Laugh-In, and others. Except for the hairstyles and the clothing, these are shows that could have been made today. It's color. The sound is right. I could tell you that, however silly they might seem today, Get Smart, Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, and others were made last week, and, for a kid who has never heard otherwise, it wouldn't be all that easy to doubt it.

I'm 37 years older than Ashley and Rachel. And 46 years older than Mackenzie. 37 years ago would be 1981. 46 years ago would be 1972. There were people on TV back then who are still on TV now. Ashley and Rachel know who Betty White is. They can watch old episodes of The Golden Girls, and see Betty playing Rose Nylund. They can watch even older episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and see Betty playing Sue Ann Nivens.

But try telling them that Roseanne Barr and Dennis Miller were once liberals. And funny. They're not going to believe that.

But there are some things they will never truly understand. Some of these have been remarked upon before. For example, the "Save" icon. Which represents a hard disk for your computer, which we nonetheless called a "floppy disk," because they started out as floppy disks. Typewriters that weren't also computers.

All those functions that your smartphone has used to be done by separate machines. A library. A notepad. A calculator. A map, made of paper, that you had to fold and unfold. A camera, a record player, and a TV. Essentially, a radio station and a TV studio.

An alarm clock. A regular clock. It's getting hard enough to find an analog clock, so today's kids can use the skill of "telling time," but they don't know about "tick, tick, tick," "Wind your watch" and "You can set your watch by it."

Lots of things related to telephones. "Hang up." "Collect call." Having a phone book with phone numbers and addresses -- or its office desktop equivalent, the rolodex -- instead of looking them up on the Internet. Using a phone book as a booster on your seat.

Explaining what Doctor Who's TARDIS is supposed to be. Explaining why Superman went into phone booths. Forever associating a dime with pay phones. Explaining the title of country singer Travis Tritt's song, "Here's a Quarter (Call Someone Who Cares)."

Or any other coin-related analogy. We still have coins, of course, but we have to explain penny candy. Penny-ante. "A penny for your thoughts." "Not one red cent" or "Not one thin dime." A plugged nickel. "Put another nickel in, in the nickelodeon." "Nickel-and-diming." "Five-and-dime" stores. "A dime a dozen." Dime novels. The Dime Savings Bank. Video gamers actually leaving the house to go to the mall, walking into the arcade, and lining their quarters on the bottom of the screen to reserve their place on the machine.

Indeed, even in my youth, the old term for a quarter, "two bits," had to be explained, in connection to the old Spanish dollar that could be broken into "pieces of eight." And calling something cheap could be done by calling it "two-bit."

Having to call the movie theater to find out what time the movie you wanted to see was playing. Loading your camera (not a phone with a camera app, but a separate device) with film, taking the film out to be professionally developed, because you couldn't edit it on the spot yourself and take a better picture, and discovering, days later, that most of the pictures were blurry and no good. And, by the time you found out, it was too late, because you'd already paid for it.

Taping songs off the radio. And, if a song you liked wasn't getting played, calling the station on the phone, and waiting on hold for 45 minutes to get your request played by the DJ. 

Record stores. Having to buy an entire album for one song, and ending up with maybe one other good single, two mediocre songs, and several pieces of crap that were just filling the album out. In 1981, an album cost $9.99 (converting that from 1981 money to 2018 value: $28.40), and a single was $1.15 ($3.27).

The albums were wax platters called "records." And, for singles, we had those three-pronged adapters. This was also how you heard (but didn't see) your favorite comedian, unless you got to watch The Tonight Show. Yes, from the 1950s to the 1980s, comedians made albums. Heck, up until The Beatles and Bob Dylan came along, most of the albums sold were classical music ("LP" did, after all, stand for "long-playing"), Broadway show and movie soundtracks, greatest-hits compilations, and comedians.

At least with a record, if you couldn't make a lyric out, you could pick the tonearm up and put it back down on an earlier part of the record. With a tape, you had to rewind, and guess when to stop.

You went to Sam Goody for records. Crazy Eddie for electronics. Blockbuster Video for movies. Two Guys for pretty much anything. Goody got it, but Crazy Eddie's prices were in-sane! (The commercials with Jerry Carroll were considered edgy at the time.) Blockbuster Video? Wow, what a difference! We save money for you at Two Guys... naturally! 

Woolworth. Woolco. McCrory's. Newberry's. Grant's. Those were 5 of the "five-and-dimes" I mentioned. Kmart was the same style. In East Brunswick, it replaced S. Klein On the Square.

Department stores that used to anchor malls, like Bamberger's at Brunswick Square here in East Brunswick, and at Menlo Park in Edison. Caldor at the North Brunswick Shopping Center. Alexander's at Menlo Park. A&S (Abraham and Straus), Stern's, Ohrbach's, Steinbach's and Hahne's at Woodbridge Center. Korvette's. We didn't have Gimbel's or TSS (Times Square Stores) in New Jersey, but New York City had them.

KB Toys. Child World. Meyer's hobby store. Pergament Home Centers. Channel Home Centers. Waldenbooks and B. Dalton's. Now, Toys "R" Us has joined all of these companies in that great mall in the sky. At least I don't have to explain to Ashley and Rachel what Toys "R" Us was, because they'll remember it. Mackenzie won't, any more than I remember S. Klein (or "Klein's").

Kids today won't understand how television worked back then. Seven channels and nothing on. Not seven hundred, not a hundred and seven, not seventy, not even seventeen. Seven. Rabbit ears. Foil on the antenna to improve reception. Test patterns. Please stand by. Film at 11.

Having to wait until 6 or 11 PM to see the news. (Which, itself, helped to phase out an institution that I never really saw: The evening paper. The Newark Evening News, my parents' favorite paper, folded in 1972.) An hour-long show meant 50 minutes of programming and 10 minutes of commercials, not 44 and 16 like it does today.

Having to get home by a certain time, because VCRs didn't hit stores until the mid-1970s, and didn't become common until the early 1980s. In our house, we didn't get one until 1985. Reagan's 2nd term. (We weren't rolling in dough, but we weren't dirt-poor, either.)

The only time you could see a baseball team was when your local team was playing them, or else wait for the NBC Game of the Week on Saturday or ABC Monday Night Baseball. And if you were a fan of an NBA or NHL team, forget it: They were shown on tape delay on an "independent" station at 11:30 at night.

Truly being shocked by an event on TV or in movies. Henry Blake dies in a plane crash before he can go home. J.R. Ewing gets shot, and we have to wait until September to find out if he lives -- and November to find out who did it. (It was his sister-in-law, also his mistress, Kritsin Shepard.) Darth Vader tells Luke Skywalker, "No, I am your father!" Spock dies... and comes back.

No Internet meant you had to go to the bookshelf and look things up. I remember taking Ashley and Rachel to the East Brunswick Public Library, and showing them the most recent edition of The World Book Encyclopedia, 22 volumes strong, and telling them, "When I was your age, this was what we used to look things up for school, instead of the Internet." Ashley wasn't impressed. It takes a lot to impress her. But Rachel said, "Wow!"

The library also had the card catalog, to find books, instead of a computer terminal. At home, I used The World Almanac and Book of Facts and The Baseball Encyclopedia every day. That's not much of an exaggeration: On pretty much any day as a kid, I used at least one of them.

As a kid in the late '70s, up to the mid-'80s, the best day of Spring wasn't Opening Day, it was the day the new Topps baseball cards hit the 7-Eleven. 15 cards for 49 cents, a 3-pack for 99 cents. (In 2018 value: $1.39 and $2.81.)

The World Almanac, The Baseball Encyclopedia, and baseball cards. I used them so often, and loved them so much. They're all still around, but they're kind of pointless now, having been made obsolete by Wikipedia, Baseball Reference and Google Images, respectively.

If you lived in the Eastern Time Zone, and your local team was playing on the Pacific Coast, and the game started at 7:30 local time, but it was 10:30 your time, then you had to go to bed not when the game was over, but while it was still in progress. Unless your mother was mean, in which case the game could have started at 7 your time, and you still had to go to bed before it was over.

Thus, you thanked God for the invention of the little transistor radio that could be kept under the covers with you. But if you didn't have that, you waited until the next morning, and you looked in the newspaper. Which was actually printed on paper. And had actual news, instead of "infotainment" like Fox "News" does.

If your team was playing at home, you might see this under "AL SCORES":

Yankees 6, Oakland 5

The Yankees and the Mets were always listed in bold on the score list. If it was the other way around, if the A's were the home team, you were outta luck, Jack. Instead, you saw...

Yankees at Oakland, n.

N for "night game." It didn't get finished in time to meet the paper's deadline.

No, the Internet wasn't invented so that teenage boys (or grown men who act like them) could talk trash to those like them in New York, Newcastle or New Dehli. Or so that teenage boys could find naughty pictures and movies. It was so that people of any age could know the score of last night's game before they left for school or work the next morning.

If you're under age 21, I know what you're thinking: "smh"

I'm shaking my head, too. But from the other direction.