What are you remembering?

[icystorm]

This is a new thread for anything you've been remembering lately — people, places, things, moments from the past, or similar memories. The theme is nostalgia.

Recently, I've been thinking about telephone sounds and recordings from the 1970s and early '80s. There are numerous videos of these on YouTube. Back then, recorded telephone voices and sounds were ubiquitous in the U.S. The familiar female voices behind messages like "Please hang up..." and "The number you have dialed is not in service..." were usually Jane Barbe and Pat Fleet. Hearing them again is like stepping back in time. 😂🤣

[icystorm]

Jan Shepard was a very talented, charming, and lovely actress who guest-starred in numerous supporting roles in the 1950s and 1960s, including The Virginian, Bonanza, and Gunsmoke. She was among my favorite actresses of the era. The image below is from her role as Ellen Denning in The Virginian episode The Brothers from 1965.

[icystorm]

Faith Domergue was a lovely and talented actress who guest-starred in a couple of episodes of Bonanza in the early 1960s. The image below is from 1961 when she played a widow, Lee Bolden, in the Bonanza episode The Lonely House. She also appeared in many other shows in the 1960s and 1970s.

[icystorm]

I vividly recall reading Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact by ufologist Jacques Vallée in 1988. I was 21 years old at the time and believed in UFOs. The book presents numerous stories from reported eyewitnesses and claimed abductees spanning centuries. It draws parallels between what individuals reportedly experienced during personal or mass sightings, as well as during claimed abductions.

Vallée concluded, based on all the evidence he had gathered and studied, that the beings associated with UFOs are here with us on Earth and originate from another dimension, with the ability to pass back and forth between their realm and ours. It was the most unsettling book I've ever read. The idea that these beings could be from another dimension and observe us undetected was deeply disturbing. It's a thought I had never previously considered. I remember sleeping with the lights on for a few nights as my mind processed the eerie stories and analysis Vallée presented.

Fortunately, I no longer believe in UFOs or related phenomena for many reasons, primarily because there is not one iota of evidence that they exist.

[icystorm]

I vividly recall a UFO encounter during 1976! Actually, it wasn't real, but it seemed very real at the time. I was 9, and my paternal grandmother was driving me and my younger sister home. As we passed through a heavily wooded area at dusk, we saw a huge glowing orb through the trees that appeared to move along with us just above the ground. We were convinced it was a UFO.

Many years later, when I was in my 30s, I saw something very similar through the trees, just above the ground, appearing to race along behind the trees as I drove. This time, I realized it was the moon, which can appear unusually large when it is low on the horizon due to the Moon Illusion. I then realized that what I had seen years earlier from my grandmother's car was also the moon. In both cases, the motion of the car past the trees created the additional illusion of the object (the moon) moving.

That realization is part of the reason why I no longer believe in UFOs or ETs.

I can add that we now live on a planet covered by billions of cameras, radar systems, and satellites.

Despite this, there are:

1. Zero verified photos, videos, radar data, physical materials, or biological evidence of UFOs, extraterrestrials, Sasquatch, or Yeti.

2. Routine, well-documented recordings of rare natural events like tornadoes, large hail, meteors, and other uncommon phenomena.

Reports of UFOs vastly outnumber reports of rare natural events, yet only the natural events have strong physical evidence.

In a world saturated with sensors, repeated physical phenomena do not leave zero evidence. That is why I no longer believe.

[icystorm]

I'm remembering the evolution of entertainment media!

For much of the 20th century, movies were distributed on physical film reels and largely experienced in theaters. In some homes, 8mm or Super 8 reels were popular for showing home movies.

In the late 1970s and 1980s, Betamax and VHS emerged and competed to become the dominant home videotape standard. Although Betamax offered slightly better picture quality, VHS won out due to longer recording times, lower costs, and broader industry support.

By the late 1990s, DVD replaced VHS, offering better video quality, instant chapter access, and a more compact, durable format.

DVDs were later succeeded by Blu-ray, which supported high-definition video, before physical media itself began to fade as digital downloads and streaming services became the primary way people watch movies and TV today.

Fun side note: For years, many VHS (and later DVD) players displayed a perpetually flashing '12:00', which was a familiar, quirky sight in grandparents' living rooms because setting the clock was a convoluted, boring chore that most people didn't bother with. 😂

[icystorm]

Vera Miles was a sophisticated, talented, and adorable actress who enjoyed a long, distinguished career from 1950 to 1995. She is one of my favorite actresses from the 1960s. The image below is from her role as Mrs. Wallace, Betsy's governess, in The Virginian episode The Man Who Couldn't Die from 1963.

[Vicki]

Remembering telephones: my family and I bought a house in about 1983 or so and we decided to get a special phone. It hung on the wall and it had a blackboard (chalkboard) on it and a place to put phone books. The handset had a very long cord, so you could stand quite a ways from the phone while talking on it. It seemed so modern at the time. It looked a lot like this one, but the whole thing was the color of the trim around the blackboard part of this one. For some reason, they didn't take a picture of the end opposite the handset. That's where the phone books were.

[icystorm]

@Vicki — Excellent memory! I enjoy nostalgia. The phone you shared looks cool. I remember those super long cords you described, too. In my original post, I shared some old recorded telephone messages with the familiar voices from the 1970s. The same poster apparently worked with telephone companies back then. He has lots of videos about old telephones and the old recordings, which you may enjoy.

Kind regards,
Joseph

[icystorm]

When I was a young lad in the 1970s, I enjoyed learning about the planets in school. Back then, Pluto was still considered the ninth planet. I was fascinated by the relatively clear color images of the first eight planets. In contrast, tiny and distant Pluto was always shown as a small, magnified cluster of white and gray pixels against the blackness of space. I wondered whether we would ever really know what Pluto actually looked like.

In 2015, my decades-old question was finally answered. NASA's New Horizons spacecraft approached and flew past Pluto, sending back stunning, high-resolution images of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon. Suddenly, Pluto was no longer a fuzzy dot, but a real world with mountains, plains, and a complex surface.

Along the way, in 2006, Pluto was reclassified from a planet to what is now officially called a dwarf planet.

The two images below show the contrast in our visualization of Pluto. The one on the left is a grainy image of Pluto from 1994, which is very much like what I saw in encyclopedias as a kid in the 1970s. The other shows what Pluto looked like when we finally saw it up close in 2015.

[icystorm]

Casey Kasem's American Top 40 was a weekly ritual built around the Billboard Hot 100 in the US. In my area, it aired late Sunday afternoon, and ran for about three hours into the evening.

The show debuted on July 4, 1970, and Casey hosted it continuously until 1988. Its peak popularity came during the 1970s and early-to-mid 1980s, when it aired on hundreds of radio stations and felt like must-listen radio every weekend. Casey's familiar delivery, chart trivia, and Long Distance Dedications made it more than just a countdown. It was part of the rhythm of the week.

When Casey left in 1988, that original era of American Top 40 effectively came to an end, along with a time when enjoying music and the weekly countdown were ubiquitous in the US.

[icystorm]

In 1977, when I was 10, Eight Is Enough debuted on American television. I wasn't a fan of the show itself, but I was definitely a fan of Nancy Bradford, played by the very beautiful Dianne Kay. I watched the show weekly just to see Nancy! Interestingly, Dianne Kay was 23 when the show began, even though the character she portrayed was 18.

[icystorm]

I'm remembering my first CD player in my car. In 1995, I bought and installed a new car CD player. Then I used my PC to burn my 200 favorite songs onto a CD to play while driving. Of course, I had a car cassette player long before that, but the cassettes were limited to only 12 to 15 songs.

It felt cool to play my favorite 200 songs on my new CD player, all from a single disc, while driving. But after a month or so of constantly listening to the same songs, I discovered that they weren't really my favorite songs anymore. I'd burned myself out on them due to overexposure! LOL!!! 😂🤣

So, I burned my second favorite 200 songs onto a new CD, and burned myself out on those even faster! LOL!!! 😂🤣

For many years now, I've had thousands and thousands of songs on a single flash drive that I can play in my SUV on random rotation. I'm burned out on those too. So these days, I rotate through various genres such as new age, classical, jazz fusion, silver screen, and golden oldies, and eventually make my way back to my favorite pop and rock songs from the 70s and 80s. Plus, I enjoy finding cool new artists to listen to on YouTube. 😃

[icystorm]

I'm remembering the "More Cowbell" comedy skit on SNL in 2000. It was a parody of Don't Fear the Reaper by Blue Oyster Cult. LOL!!! 😂😂

[icystorm]

I'm remembering Fran Drescher from The Nanny (1993-1999). Adorable!