After writing last week about my trip to my hometown and the memories it stirred, I looked through old photos trying to recall how our house looked inside. With Mom and Dad both gone, I have no one to ask, with the exception of my big brother Doofus.
But many things in our old house in Warner Robins, Ga., I could still picture in my mind and I wanted to share some of them for those of you who love nostalgia. I lived in the house from age 2 to 11 (1967-1976), when we moved to Alabama.
Click here to read the post about my trip home.
Here are 10 things you would have seen if you visited us at 123 Lake Drive:
1. A console stereo, much like the one above, with the turntable and radio inside and the speakers covered in gold fabric. I know it had an 8-track cassette player inside at one point but I think it was an add-on that plugged in to the system.
2. This plaid sofa — that’s my mom at far right. I don’t know who the woman at left in the groovy pantsuit is. The sofa was, of course, green, gold and orange plaid.
3. Notice the paneling behind the sofa. It covered nearly every wall in the house. (Sorry for the quality of the photo.)
4. Mom had a hair dryer just like this one. The plastic bonnet went over the hair and the air blew through the tube. (That reminds me of the tiny folded plastic bonnet my grandmother always carried in her purse in case it rained. It tied beneath the chin and protected her heavily sprayed ‘do from potential collapse. Did your mother or grandmother have one of those?)
5. It’s difficult to see in this photo of a birthday party (I think for Doofus who is wearing the sunglasses) but we had an oval formica-top table in our kitchen. The chairs were covered in vinyl.
6. Notice in the corner there’s a black dial telephone on the wall.
7. A TV like this one. Doofus and I had to change the channel when Dad asked because there was no remote.
8. A gold hanging globe lamp like this one. Notice the cord “hidden” in the chain.
9. Saloon doors like these that hid the kitchen from view of guests in the formal dining room beyond. I think ours were unpainted when first installed and Mom may have painted them later. As a side note, I found this photo on a site called “Ugly House Photos.”
10. This sun lamp that Mom would lie under on a blanket on the floor. I used it as a child, too, before anyone knew it could be dangerous.
11. A brass flower clock just like this one in the den.
12. Notice the pedestal drop-leaf dining room table in the corner. The adorable kid with the baby doll on the left is me and the kid at the toy gas pump is Doofus. This was taken Christmas of 1967, which would have been our first in the brand new home that was built earlier that year.
Did you have any of these things in your home? What do you recall most from childhood?
KellyKazek.com 
Growing up at the same time, in California, we had the wood paneling, the console stereo, and a console TV. My mom would call for me to come all the way downstairs from my bedroom to turn the channel for her! Our kitchen was painted yellow and the refrigerator was brown. “Avocado” was a popular color too. My mom had a hair dryer on a short stand with a hard shell hood. Both of my grandmothers had weekly appointments at the hairdresser and somehow protected their ‘dos for sleep every night. We also called our TV room the “den” – I don’t hear that term anymore.
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I think the open floor plan and high ceilings did away with “dens.” Now there’s just one big family room. Plus people don’t like formal dining and living rooms as much. We had lots of gold and avocado too!
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I was probably 10 gears older than you, Kelly, but we had a hi-fi (short for high fidelity) (stereo) much like the picture. Ours just played vinyl records and the AM radio.
Our den couch was covered in brown Naugahyde. The couch in the “living room” was a more formal fabric. There were also wood wall sconces in that room that held candles which, probably for good reason, were never lit since they were just a few inches from the wall.
We had a wall phone with a 5-digit number preceded by two letters, and we were on an economical “party line,” where our phone time was shared with another family. We had separate numbers, but if we picked up the phone and someone from the other family was on the line, we could have sat and listened to their conversation! Actually, it was just irritating to pick up the phone to make a call and not be able to use it.
We had one tv with three local channels, and all shows were in black and white until Technicolor was invented.
I remember our aluminum Christmas tree and the color wheel which I could watch from my bed as it went round and round, coloring the tree green, blue, yellow and red.
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My grandmother had that same silver rotating tree! I used to love watching the colors change…
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I remember the wall mounted, black, heavy bakelight telephone in my parents kitchen, we had a private line, which they paid extra for. The phone belonged to the phone company and was the only one in the house. No private conversations, for sure. We had one black and white TV, no color TV in the house until I went to college. Three channels only, no cable, and Dad got to watch what he wanted. No VCRS if you missed your TV show, too bad. Maybe you’d be lucky and they’d rerun it in the summer. No clothes dryer or dishwasher either. Guess who got to do these chores all the time. It sure wasn’t my brother, it was”womens’ work”.
My mother liked “Colonial” style furniture, there were “wing” chairs and sofas, in Brown plaid! Nothing like what real Colonial era furniture would have looked like.
We kids couldn’t sit in this “living” room, we sat on the old furniture in the unfinished basement to watch TV.
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Oh we had the aluminum tree, too, when I was much younger. I remember the color wheel! I never had a party line. I thought being tethered to a cord was bad enough!
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Wow, we had several of those growing up in my house too. It’s a little scary these decorations were so wide-spread….
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Well we had the gold ball lamp, a metal flower clock with sconces on either side, a hi-fi record player/radio, there was a plaid couch in the basement with the wood paneling, and my mother would put her hair up in pin curls and sit under that dryer. And my mother still has a rain bonnet!
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I live in an old house (built in 1895) that had dark paneling in almost every room, (obviously done in the 1970’s) and since the old plaster would crumble if I tried to remove it, I had to sand it and paint over it with white and light colors. A lot of other people did this too, you can see it in magazines like Country Living. I still have to do my kitchen! I still have lamps in there hanging from chains too! When I first moved here, I even had a brown refridgerator. One of my aunts had a clock like that. My family had one of those console stereo record players which migrated in later years to the basement and promptly gave me a shock when I tried to plug it in! Makes you feel kind of old when you realize that the furniture you lived with as a child would now be in an antique store. One of my aunts, until she moved to a nursing home several years ago, still had all her furniture from the 1950’s in her house. She had no kids, so it all lasted, and she had preferred to spend her money on traveling. It was like stepping into a time machine! Or a museum! I should have taken photos!
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Yep! No sitting on the living room furniture. Too funny. Thanks for sharing your memories.
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