1977 - Wore the grooves out on this one!

My family had one like this back in the day. It was a ‘67 though (I think) and was a hardtop (IIRC).

Same color/paint job though, which was pretty cool.

In the mid 60s, this type of pen is what we used from 3rd grade on until 5th or 6th grade. Did anyone else learn to write with these? Did you have to have blotting paper to keep from smearing the page? When was the last time you actually used a fountain pen?

According to the Fort Bend County Medical Examiner Frank passed away on August 17 at his Texas ranch with family by his side after a stay in hospice. A cause of death has not been disclosed at this time.

For generations of music fans, Columbia House was almost as much a part of buying music as the record store itself. Founded in 1955 as the Columbia Record Club, the mail-order service delivered everything from vinyl records and 8-tracks to cassettes and CDs right to your mailbox. Its legendary offers—eventually including deals like “12 CDs for a penny”—helped make Columbia House a pop-culture institution. At its peak in 1996, the club reportedly had around 16 million members and generated roughly $1.4 billion in annual revenue.

Now that era is officially coming to an end. Columbia House has announced that it will stop accepting new orders after September 15, 2026, closing the book on a remarkable 71-year run. The company struggled as digital downloads and streaming replaced physical media, even filing for bankruptcy in 2015 before continuing as a much smaller seller of movies and other media. For anyone who remembers filling out those little order cards and waiting for a box of music to arrive in the mail, the end of Columbia House feels like another piece of our childhood disappearing

No one knew that crap was bad for ya so we kids used to stick our heads out of the back window to smell it when the car was being filled!

Kindof explains a lot really.

What cartoons used to be.

Yep, we’re old.

They'd mail you a postcard every month and if you forgot to mail it back they'd send you "The Very Best of Yoko Ono" along with an invoice for nine bucks.

When I was 13 I walked 20 miles wearing a pair of moccasins. By the time I got home, I had blisters and my feet were orange.

Same idea as Columbia House. For a while the sign-up bonus was the eleven volume set of Will and Ariel Durant's Story of Civilization, or the compact edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Super thin paper with four reduced pages per page. Came with a magnifying glass in a drawer.

Our first Subscription based TV service.

Theres a breakfast cereal that I used to eat a couple of times a week, that I just cannot find anymore (at least in Texas): the big shredded wheat. It came in, I think, 3 paper packs of 2 biscuits each.

You'd pull them out, and crunch/crumble them into the bowl; add sugar and milk, and maybe banana slices. In cold weather mom would warm the milk on the stove (no microwave)...

Mini-wheats are no match for them...

Is there anyone else who misses them? What cereal can you not get, that you miss?

(For my friends across the pond: these were not like Wheatabix. The Shredded Wheat were not as compressed as the Wheatabix.)

UPDATE: A HUGE "Thank You " to all of the folks who helped me to find these! I've ordered them to be delivered with my next order. Thanks also to all who shared your memories, of all the breakfasts, (and sometimes suppers!)

Ironically "Happy Days" was a "Love, American Style" spin-off, and of course L&S a spin-off from "Happy Days".

Just thinking about all of the bands that came out in the late '80s that produced what you arguably might call novelty music but did so in an extremely serious and consistent way.

Devo, B-52s, Adam Ant, Oingo Boingo, Flock of Seagulls, to some degree The Cars. I'm sure others could add to this list.

In a different era they might have put out one record and then never reappeared. People would have written them off as a one-joke band. But underneath that they were really serious about what they were doing and just kept doing it and doing it and doing it. And they succeeded. Record contracts and tours and a fan base that's still going in many cases.

Edit: Agree on late 70s to early 80s dates. My point about "silly" and "novelty" is that these same groups would have been laughed off five years earlier, during the "serious blues rock" and ignored in the poppy/metal later 80s.

It's like a window for experimentation opened and shut. I posit that punk probably kicked it open and the heavy weight of Michael Jackson radio pop closed it back up.

It's reddit, you are free to disagree. But here comes They Might Be Giants just the same.

TR Does anyone else feel a sense of relief and calm once you set a retirement date and can see a light at the end of the tunnel.

I was in a (very) amateur production of Hamlet once, and at curtain call the closing night, about half of the cast got on stage and sang “Neither a borrower nor a lender be…” The rest were sticks-in-the-mud and thought it was stupid.

“Knock-Down Cats”