I Remember

As the new year gets underway, let’s reflect on how dramatically things have changed during our lifetime – especially for those of us whose years stretch back longer than we care to admit.

These are some of the things I remember from some very different times:

Going out unsupervised as a kid.

It’s unthinkable now, but at age seven or eight I would head out after school to wander wherever I wanted. I’d put on my Daniel Boone coonskin hat, head down to the creek and just make sure I was home by dinner time. (Yes, my mom had a dinner bell.) It’s sad that parents now have to worry about kids being abducted and molested. The days of unsupervised wandering are over.

Hardly any structured activities.

When weekends and summer vacations rolled around, we didn’t have a full schedule of organized commitments to pack our days. We made up our own games and activities. And sometimes, like young Calvin in the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, we just laid in the grass and looked up at the sky.

Our bikes took us everywhere.

Bicycles were a natural extension of our bodies. We rode them everywhere – to the store, to the playground, to our friends’ houses. We thought nothing of pedaling two or three miles to get where we wanted to go. Where have all the bikes gone? Now I see young kids riding motorized scooters around the block in our neighborhood. They're missing a great opportunity to get a little healthy exercise.

Weeds in the lawn were okay.

Years ago, no one used commercial lawn pesticide services. People wanted a nice-looking lawn, but they didn't fret about seeing the occasional weed or dandelion pop up; that was considered a natural part of lawn growth. If the weeds got too bad, our dads sent us out with a hand tool to dig them up. It was one of the ways we earned our allowance.

Silence was golden.

Remember rakes? We used them instead of leaf-blowers to clear leaves from the yard. Raking was slower work, to be sure – but it was a quieter, more meditative experience. Now we have gas-powered blowers that sound like motorcycles roaring through the neighborhood. If I’m trying to enjoy a bit of quiet reading or writing time while the blowers are going, I slip on a pair of noise-cancelling headphones to drown out the din. I miss the quiet swishing sound of rakes.

Thirty-two cents a gallon for gas.

As a kid, I'd ride my bike to the gas station to fill the gas can for our lawn mower. Thirty-two cents was all it cost for a gallon. I also remember the price my parents paid for the four-bedroom house I grew up in – it was a sum that would barely cover a single year's rent for a modest apartment today. I'm saddened to read that an estimated 75% of American households are currently unable to afford a median-priced home.

We were free to roam in airports.

When was the last time anyone thought of an airport as fun? Before they became impenetrable fortresses with security checkpoints and body searches, airports were fun places to visit – even if you didn’t have a plane to catch. As kids, my friends and I would ride our bikes to Buffalo’s airport where we’d ride the escalators up and down, walk right up to any gate and watch the planes take off.

45 rpm vinyl records ruled.

The first record I remember hearing was a 45 rpm single that belonged to one of my older brothers or sisters. I was maybe five years old and I’ll never forget listening to that song, Chuck Berry’s “School Days.” It wasn’t just the music that held me in its spell. It was the sound of the needle dropping, the sight of the deep blue label spinning around on the little 45 rpm record player, the smell of the vinyl record that still lingers in my memory. Chuck’s lyrics captured it perfectly: “Feelin’ the music from head to toe … ‘Round and ‘round and 'round you go.” 

We appreciated what we had.

In the dinosaur days back when I was in college, the only writing tools we had at our fingertips were pens and typewriters – word processors hadn't arrived on the scene yet. I couldn’t afford an electric typewriter, so I headed off to journalism school with a big, heavy, used vintage Royal typewriter that dated back to the 1940s. That old machine got quite a workout as I pounded the keys to write countless papers and news assignments. It wasn’t sleek or new, but I knew my parents made sacrifices to get it for me and to send me to a good college – and I was grateful for it.

Fruit tasted like fruit.

My taste buds remember when strawberries and other fruits were smaller but more flavorful than they are today. Now we’ve got strawberries the size of softballs, and they're no longer bursting with the sweet juicy taste that made them so irresistible in the past. That's because the produce aisles today are stacked with genetically modified fruits that are clearly grown for maximum visual appeal, not taste.

Quality was more consistent.

Many years ago, I started ordering clothes from the catalogs of companies like Territory Ahead. For a long while, the quality was impeccable. The sizing was consistent, the fabrics were premium quality and you could always be confident that you’d get exactly what was shown in the catalog. Not anymore. With companies cutting costs and so much production being outsourced overseas, quality has nosedived. And customer service has gone right down the tubes with it.

Things were much simpler to operate.

When I got my first SLR film camera (a Canon AE-1) back in 1980, it came with a simple manual that was about 70 pages. By contrast, my newest camera (a Sony A7RV mirrorless) has a 538-page manual. It’s a technical marvel, this 61 megapixel beast of a camera, and it's loaded with advanced features that were unimaginable in 1980. But understanding and using all these features requires a steep learning curve. And that's how it goes with just about everything we buy today: Lots of sophisticated features, lots of time and life energy needed to make sense of them all.

Cashiers said thank you.

Once upon a time, it was taken for granted that we’d receive a smile and a word of thanks when we bought something in a store. Nowadays, it’s actually surprising when that happens. The more typical scenario is this: We’re handed the bag with our purchase, and the store employee never bothers to make eye contact or mumble a single word. It wasn't always like this. When I worked in a pizzeria during my high school and college days, we were expected to be friendly and courteous to every customer, or we wouldn't have a job the next day.

We had just three TV networks.

ABC, NBC, CBS. Years ago, that’s all we had to watch. There were no VHS tapes, DVRs or streaming services – so if we wanted to watch something, we had to be sitting in front of the small TV screen at a specific time or we’d miss it. We didn’t have the programming choices that we have today, and we couldn’t watch things on any device, any time we wanted. But there was something nice about the whole country sitting down to watch a popular show on a Saturday night, and then talking about the shared experience at the water cooler on Monday morning. TV was something that brought us together.

Newspapers were big.

If you watch a rerun of one of the old TV shows, you’ll see how big newspapers used to be – literally. The TV dad would sit at the breakfast table, unfolding a giant newspaper that dwarfs the little papers we have today. For many years, newspapers were our lifeline to the world, and every family read them. Unfortunately, page size isn’t the only thing that’s shrunk considerably; newspaper readership has fallen off dramatically, too, resulting in huge layoffs and closures at many papers. People aren't as interested in print media anymore. As a clear sign of the times, research shows that about half of Americans are now getting news from social media.

TV news anchors gave news, not opinions.

Those of us who can remember the legendary TV news anchors like Walter Cronkite saw a brand of reporting that’s quite different from what’s on the screen today. Walter and his contemporaries believed that their job as journalists was to present the full story as fairly and accurately as possible, untainted by any trace of personal opinion or political agenda. That’s a far cry from what we see on many news shows today, and this applies to stations blatantly championing either side of the political fence. In the quest for ratings, they rile up their audience with incendiary name-calling and a biased, selective presentation of facts. I went to journalism school, and I can assure you: That’s not what news is meant to be. That’s a talk show.

Drivers actually stopped for red lights.

In my high school Driver Ed class, we were taught that if we were approaching a distant traffic light that had turned yellow, we should be prepared to slow down and stop; under no circumstances should we drive through an intersection after the light had turned red. Unfortunately, that commonsense rule of the road has been kicked to the curb. Today, a red light means “gun it” and no one stops, even if they’re 50 yards back when the light turns red. What happens if you choose to play by the rules and you DON’T drive through the red light? The person in the car behind you will be furious. The roads are an angry, crazy place these days.

We weren’t tethered to our phones 24/7.

There was a time when we weren’t expected to be available every minute of the day. We didn’t have email or text messaging, and our bosses and co-workers wouldn't think about reaching out to us at night or on weekends about work-related issues unless it was an absolute emergency. We weren't checking our phones 50 times a day (yes, that's the average frequency found in a recent study) to answer texts or see if we've gained another “Like” on Facebook. It's not surprising that many people today are resorting to "digital detox" methods to take a break from their phones and protect their mental health.

Those are just a few of the ways our lives have changed over the years. As we head into 2026, I'm grateful for the fact that life has improved in so many ways thanks to breakthrough technological advances – but it seems to me that we’ve lost some valuable things along the way.

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Photographer’s Footnote: My photo at the top of this post was taken in a hilltop restaurant in Granada, Spain in 2010.