70s & 80s Home Decor

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(upbeat music) ♪ No life, no fun ♪ ♪ Don't you know that you're grown-up ♪ Gen X grown-up is a YouTube channel website and audio podcast you're listening to right now. All made for and by people who love exploring media games, tech and toys of yesterday and today through the eyes of Gen Xers who refused to grow up. ♪ Your dinner can't just be french fries ♪ ♪ Basically life sucks, that's gross now ♪ Welcome back, Gen X grown-up podcast listeners to this, the back track edition of the Gen X grown-up podcast. I am John, joining me as always. Of course, is Mo, him in? Hey, he's gone, John. You know the Georgia's here? Hey, how's it going guys? (laughs) In this episode, you know, when you look at photos from our youth, the dead giveaway, the time they were taken, is the iconic way our homes were decorated. Most of those trends have faded away. Some of the fall, there's still others are just the way we remember them. But in this back track, we'll look back at Gen X household decor of the '70s and '80s. And as we were prepping for this, you know, often you'll see these memes, remember the '80s, remember the '80s, and what do they show, like neon and crap? That was mid to late '80s. What we're talking about is like what the boomers gave us, the stuff we grew up with, the shag and the wood paddling and that stuff, you know, it's very different than what people think the '80s was. Well, absolutely. I think it'll be interesting too in this podcast to get the three different perspectives we all have 'cause Mo growing up in the city apartment and me and the suburbs and John out in the woods, I kind of wonder if some things are gonna be similar or some things are gonna be different, it'll be fun. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I can't wait to go do this one. What do we do a couple of weeks ago? We did the fashion trends. I kind of springboarding off of that or like, yeah, the fashion trends were smacked up in the middle of this home day course stuff, so just followed pretty naturally. That's what we're gonna do in this time around. Before we get into that though, it is time for one of my favorite parts of the show and that's fourth listener email. The fourth listener this time around is Andrew M. He writes in with the subject line, Big Hair. Oh, okay, that's okay. Is there any more to say or is that, you know? He'll elaborate, there's more here. Okay, Andrew says greetings. As I left the '80s, I left my hair there as well. (laughing) And I wasn't upset. My hair was unruly with many cowlicks that not even a gallon of aquanet hairspray could tame. (laughing) Andrew is my brother. Yes, cowlicks are awful. I still have them and I'm 52 years old, which is why I venture out almost as a fucking skinhead at this point because I can't stand the stem cowlicks. Good Lord, I hate 'em. My barber has told me that I have two cowlicks, like at two different places on my head, which is like your hair kind of the way it grows, it spirals a little bit, it has that weird, and it means it goes in a different direction than the other, yeah. It looks like you got a swirly, but I got two small swirlies on the top of my head, so I just keep it short. I just have like nothing but cowlicks. So everything is just going in different directions. The natural state of your hair is cowlick. Now, Mo doesn't have the cowlick problem, do you Mo? Neither side of my hairchage has cowlicks, so I can't do it. (laughing) Genetically, I didn't have to worry about that. Just losing my hair, that's about it. You had a problem, it wasn't a cowlick problem, and was it a cowlick problem? It's totally different problem. It kind of solves the cowlick problem, losing hair. Right, so you never know, maybe you got it good and didn't know it, maybe you locked out. (laughing) Anyway, don't go that far. It's either, Mo wearing hats or me going as a skinhead, depending on which one you think is better or worse. Hmm, I'm gonna let the listener decide. I'm not gonna make judgment, I'm gonna let it go. Andrew wraps it up by saying thanks for all you do. Andrew, nice. Andrew, you are very welcome. We certainly appreciate that you listen and you took the time to write in. We love it every time the fourth listener writes in. If you would like your email featured here on the show, it's drop dead easy, just hit us up at podcasts. At genxgrownup.com, read every single email and most of them, like Andrews, will eventually make the show. All right, we are headed back to the '70s and '80s to check out that home decor, ready for this. Be sure to subscribe to or follow genxgrownup where ever you listen. And while you're there, rate and review the show too. It helps more than you know. Folks, do yourself a favor. Before you buy furniture in Houston, come out to gallery furniture. 6,000, 6,000, I, 45 North, between Tevon Parker. You'll find the same furniture at gallery that you saw in the department stores. Name bands like Bassett, Royal Hill, and Seely Posterpedic. Big selection we have, but at gallery furniture, we're gonna beat any price any day of the week. So get your best price and then come out to 6,000, 6 North freeways. We'll beat their price the same quality and we will save you money. Call today, 694-5570. Up front, I think it's, we need to say that this day core, if you like it, I mean, we'll take some credit, but if you don't, we're not gonna take the blame because this, this 70-80 stuff, we didn't do it. We didn't do it. We inherited that from our folks, right? We're not 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 years old, picking wallpaper and carpet and furniture or anything. But look, it's what we grew up with. It's just like we didn't write Pac-Man, but we grew up playing the hell out of Pac-Man. And so it's part of our DNA now. And so we're basically tackling the whole house. And honestly, I was at a loss for how will we possibly organize everything that we might have in a house. And then George came up with a genius idea that takes us on a perfect tour of a 70s, 80s home. - Yeah, well, I was just, it came to me, our podcast each episode is kind of like a house that we live in for that hour or so that we record. And each segment is kind of like a room. So why not just take each segment, put it on a particular room in the house. There are plenty of rooms to choose from, especially from the way that we grew up. So we might as well just follow that motif and go throughout the ones. And I think the first one to start with that makes the most sense at least for a lot of families probably is the kitchen. That's kind of a central place for a lot of families. It's the place where the parent who is responsible for the cooking made all these loving dishes for their family nine in and nine out. The kids coming home from school. Let me go to the refrigerator and get the snacks and the kool-aid and the jar and all the stuff. Everybody has their own memory. I would think of the kitchen, whether you had a dining table in it or it was just the kitchen itself or it was open content, whatever. For me, the thing that I remember most about the kitchen is the phone that was on the wall. - Oh my god. - I never saw it from the time I was born until probably '86 or '87, it was mounted. If you guys remember, we may have talked about this in some of our ordinary phone episodes that you didn't even own the phone. It was on the phone company. Had that crazy long cord that would always curl back on itself. If you had a teenager in the house, that cord was stretched all the way down the hall to a bedroom, probably 60% of the evening. It was usually either beige or avocado. I don't know how avocado ended up as a coloring kitchen, but it went from the phone to appliances everywhere. But that's what I remember as the phone on the wall. I just, I can't forget that thing. - It's funny 'cause my dad is very laid-back guy except when it came to that freaking cord. It was like, when they got all twisted up, it drove him crazy. And he'd be like, you know, holding it upside down, you know, so it spins in the way. - Like it spins, yeah. - Yeah, all right, yes, right. I still do that today. - And it was a perfect coil, but somehow you twisted it just right and it turned out those crazy little backs switchback knots and weird, and it would, oh gosh. But I remember stretching that thing. I had the same thing. Arz was like right on the wall between like the passageway from the living room to the kitchen, right there on that wall. And you could stretch it all the way to the other end of the kitchen or the other end of the living room, or you said George, you might tuck like around the corner and it's, you're straining that thing. Like it's almost a straight wire. - Something to coil you. - Yeah, right. - How it didn't get ripped out of the wall, I will never know. - The best part was like your mother would walk down the hall and not noticing it and get clothes lined as she was going to the bathroom and getting into the hall or something. - Or the phone would just get like jerked out of your hand 'cause some of you would walk over there. - Your dad got mad, get off the phone. Come over here. - It's just the nature of communication back then was it wasn't personal. It was the house phone. And so everyone had access to it and it rang. And I remember running to answer it. You know, it was like, I wouldn't do it, I wouldn't do it, I wouldn't be the one that answered it. the phone. So you'd all ask him there to get to that phone. Yeah, for sure. And George, you know, you talk about like the color like that avocado in that beige. That was also like that trend with just like appliances like refrigerators. You remember like dope them, you know, say, and I don't know which came first. Like I don't know if the phones influenced the appliance colors or did the appliance influence the phone colors or I don't know either, but I kind of have a suspicion. It might have been the appliances influencing the phone only because I've recently rewatched that thing you do. You guys remember that movie? Tom Hanks. So the main character, one of the main characters, he's his family owns an appliance store and he's standing there like selling this mother and daughter on the appliances when their song gets played over the radio and one scene and he's like, it comes in white, off white, avocado. It's like it's this revelation and that was sitting the 50s I think or something like that. So I think appliance colors probably came first. The color that we had in my house, the most that I remember growing up, I mean, the one at home we had where they were just white, which is inoffensive and it's hard to pin what decade that's from. But we had, there's a certain color of yellow called corn flour. That's kind of a muddy yellow a little bit. Yeah, it's like that farm hands color. Yeah. Yeah, a little mustard to it. Yeah, I had a lot of those and they were, uh, what were they? Enamel or whatever paint and so they were tough, but when they got chipped, right, you had that big gouge in there with a little black because it was all, the stable steel wasn't a thing. You had some enamel paint on your appliances and typically unless you just had hand me downs, they probably all match like you had a corn flour stove and a corn flour refrigerator. And then when you tried to change, it changed one. Now suddenly had this rainbow kitchen that you had a wee corn flour for this and avocado that and sea foam green, this other thing. But those colors, you're right, they just kind of, they just came out of the 70s and that people thought somehow these were the magic five colors that appliances ought to be. And the one that makes the most sense that we never saw as a color of any appliance was black because everything got greasy and dirty in the name kitchen as soon as you started using it. Why not have black? But no, never had a black. It was always white, off white, avocado, they're yellow. Yep. Now talking about the appliances, we'll talk a little bit about now, oh my god, adult life, I have had electric range, a stone. But I remember you guys, now I lived because I grew up in the woods. We had a gas range with a pile of light and the, yeah, yeah. So basically, there's always, there's always a fire burning underneath your stove. Just a little bit. And my dad smoked and it was not a common for him to lift up the gas range, like the hood of a car, stick his head down there with a cigarette and use it to light a cigarette and then shut the hood on the stove. My dad would do that holding it to the burner. Just turned the burner around, because we had electric all the time. So yeah, the burner would get red hot, he would turn up all the way to hell with me burning my hand. He just wanted to cigarette lit. No, I mean, I grew up in New York, we had all had gas appliances also. It is you. Does that seem the most dangerous for an inner city environment? I know. I mean, it was just all apartments had gas like that was gas. Yeah. Wow. Your heat was gas too. Is that why he was gas also? Yep. He was gas. He had a supply. I got it. But yeah, it was just funny. Like you said, like one is having that pilot light and then God forbid that pilot light ever went out because then you're just right now with like, what is this gas? But yeah, I still remember like my dad's same thing, like he'd actually turn on the burner and do it. And I'm always like, why didn't he burn himself more often than he should have? But you think he'd burn the burner with his hat or his hair or his eyebrows or something with that. But I do miss though, like that fine control you had with a gas range. Well, it's totally hot. Yeah. But you could turn it down. Like you could you could get that temperature just where you wanted to where electric system has a step. So you got to, you know, going between somehow. Yeah. I mean, even the electric stove that I have right now because I have had nothing but electric except for when I moved to California. So I didn't I had gas when I was 30 and up until we moved back here, but I've had electric my whole life. Some ranges they had that little, you know, the little dashes on a one, two, three, four, up to nine. But the dial that you would turn it wasn't it didn't click into each one of those. It was just a smooth turn. But I never got the sense that it smoothly increased the electric output. It felt like it was like, okay, low fucking die. Those were the two choices. Yeah, literally eating your food to burning everything it's in the pot, right? Right. Right. Well, at least you can't accidentally like if it doesn't light your letting gas. We know that the gas doesn't have any natural smell. They add the odor to it. So you could tell if it has a leak and you walk in your house like, what is that? Somebody fart raw eggs in here going rotten or something? No, that's that smell of the death. Yeah, light a match and look, don't do that. That you guys, it wasn't all of our childhoods, but during our childhoods, like so many cool things in Gen X that we went from analog to digital or traditional to modern, do you remember first getting a microwave? Yes. 100% I do. Yeah, specifically because of my father. So dad had a lot of friends. Dad was one of those hustler guys as I've talked about on the podcast. And this one guy that he had, I swear, this was his name. It's one of the best names. I want to use it in a fictional story someday. His name was Babe Nahum. I love this name. The guy was like, he was this old kind of wrinkly bent over guy who was a restaurant guy for years, like he had restaurants, then he went into the restaurant appliance business, like if a restaurant shut down, he would buy it from them on the cheap and then resell it to the next restaurant that would open up. Well, our first microwave was one of those restaurant industrial microphones, because dad had beat babe out of some poker money or something that babe didn't have. And so babe gave him one of these microwaves, which I think at the time were, it was probably worth 500 or a thousand dollars. They're expensive. You know, in the 70s. And it took up one entire counter. Yeah. Like our kitchen wasn't big, but we had less of it after this microwave. Yeah. Crazy. I remember my first microwave was a beast also. I say mums, my parents first microwave. And when they first came out, like people didn't really trust them. Yeah. They're like, oh, it's, oh, it's, it's stand back while it's working. It is. Right. Don't get too close to it. Because what do you want to do? You want to look in it and see what it's doing? Like get away from it. It's microwaves. It's going to kill you. Like people thought phones would be for a long time, right? But why don't you start making the first thing I remember I made I tried to make in a microwave and you quickly learn microwaves don't heat like normal stuff. Yeah. Is I remember making nachos and the cheese melted great. But the chips turned into little plates of sadness like cardboard. These get so awful. You remember getting the first microwave mo. Oh, yeah. For sure. And like joy, like our kitchen was not big. And then the first microwave was just massive. In fact, it didn't even have like one of those turn tables in it. Like, oh, no, they did open it. Turn it a little bit. Yeah. Close it. Hit start. Open it. That was part of the instructions on the packages that they started coming out with. Yeah. We bought an aftermarket carousel for our microwave. You wound it up like a toy. And then I remember my grandmother for years was just anti-microwave. She just thought it was the devil's appliance. You know, because we got her one and she finally like fell in love with it just because she could heat up her coffee in the morning. Yeah. Yeah. That's the only she ever used to for was like coffee would get cold. She's sticking a microwave. She'd do like 20 seconds and it'd be hot again. She was happy with it. That was some of the first stuff we did with ours was reheating stuff. Dad would use it for, you know, in the morning like when the coffee maker sometimes wouldn't work or whatever. You heat up your water real quick with that. But I think I remember the first thing was mom had made some spaghetti like a night before or something like that and kept the leftovers. So the first thing I remember eating out of her microwave was reheated leftovers. Yeah. Yeah. That was big time. That was the main thing too. And I'm popcorn. Can you even cook in a microwave? Really reheating is all I ever do is microwave water and reheat stuff. Yeah. Is it ever really good? I didn't say it was good. You asked could you do it? Oh, you can. It just ain't working in a microwave. Right. Like I can cook on a stove. I'm not saying it's going to come out good. That's right. Fair enough. It's I would say it's tougher in a microwave because of the weight. That isn't the first thing I really cooked from scratch was when they started putting popcorn in the little bags, which I thought was magic. It was like jiffy pop. You could watch it pop, right? The bag got bigger and bigger. But before that, I remember we were a big popcorn family. We had one of those air poppers though. Yeah. That was them. That was the thing. You never had it. It was like a new appliance. Like you had a toaster. You had a can opener. You had a blender. Now you have an air popper. And it looks like this, this big awning coming over the top of this little wheel and you, oh, my brother was adamant. It's like it has to be oval red and bocker brand. That's the only kind he would eat. Like it was special. I don't know, maybe I don't, maybe it was. I don't know. But you put that in there with a little butter. It always sounded like a jet engine when I was at my friend's house. That thing on top, we supposedly can melt butter. Yeah. Yeah. It never worked. It just made a mess. It also worked. Look, I have a microwave. I can melt butter with no trouble. I think we were always a jiffy pop or a pan popcorn family for years until the microwave popcorn. Yeah. Because I used to, I remember mom with the pan on the stove in the lid. And she would take that pan. She put the kernels in it, put the lid on and then shaking that thing, scraping it across the stove back of her, she's, she's like that. Until the kernels would start popping. It was like she had to keep moving them or something. I guess it's like the stirring them. I remember that so much like the bottom of every pan she had was just scraped a hell of a lot because yeah, she was always making me popcorn. There's a couple of you. that these are both probably 60s leftover things, but I remember them being in my kitchen. I don't know if this is a common thing. Jello molds. I remember that a ton of Jello molds. Big Jello salads and she had a fondous set. - Ooh. - Oh. - Now, with the different color forks, you know, which one's yours apparently? - Yeah. - Yeah. - I think I saw them take it out once. Maybe, maybe that's just my image. Maybe I saw it on TV and thought it was my parents. I don't know, but the Jello molds I remember, 'cause they, every time he went anywhere, there's somebody had a freaking Jello mold of something. - That's right, yeah. - Yeah. - Well, especially the one that I remember, and now I can't even eat them if they're just pure Jello. There's like, there's the one that looks like a, like a butt cake. Like it's got a hole in the middle and it's a ring, right? - Mm-hmm. - Yeah. - But I remember seeing recipes for this thing. - Oh, yeah. - I kid you not, tuna salad in a Jello mold. - Ugh. - What? - Yeah, right? Oh, no, I'm not kidding. That's a thing. They'd put anything in there and it was just, it's just a tuna suspended in orange Jello. - Oh. - Ugh. - Ugh. - I am not advocating for it. I'm saying it's a thing. - It's a thing if it's not on the office and it's not a stapler. It shouldn't be in a fucking Jello. That's all there is to it. Jello's designed to be its own thing. I don't need little cubes of fruit or what the hell ever. Tupperware was, that lady was trying to sell my mother bullshit. It just needed to be Jello, that's it. My mother used to take old Kuwip containers and those were our Jello mold. - Oh. - I mean, it works, right? - Yeah. - I didn't work. - I like fruit in mine. I'm okay with the fruit, but yeah, anything else. But the problem is the tuna recipe has soured me. I don't trust it. I don't know what's in there. (laughing) - Well, they had the one where you do like a multi-layered Jello where like the first thing you put like, I think milk in it or something. So it came like, it was like a dream. Then you put, then you let it set for a while, then you put the rest of it up. - Oh, it sounds okay. - So you had a kind of two level Jello. - You mixed Kuwip, you mixed Kuwip in it, that was it. - Oh, that sounds good. You mixed Kuwip and then it's all set. - That's one way to empty the Kuwip jar so you can fill the whole Jello. (laughing) - I mean, I suppose you could've always done it just with the Jello. You could've poured the mold up about halfway, let that set, then put the next one in. - That's right. - You know, I've done it. - I remember the whole multi-coloured. That was like fancy, but that was, yeah. - Too fancy in my family. (laughing) - Listen, when we get back from the break, we're gonna take a stroll out of the kitchen down the hallway to the living room. Maybe, maybe the biggest culprit of '70s and '80s, decor faux pas, we'll be right back. - You're listening to Gen X grownup, but if you have a friend who's not yet listening, why not? Tell them about us, they'll thank you later. - 'Cause nobody cares like Smiths, you'll find sensational sale prices on furniture, appliances and electronics Sunday and Monday. Look for this special section in Sunday's paper for hundreds of bargains. For example, this four-cycle GE washer with mini-basket is just $3.97, this GE pot scrubber dishwasher is just $367, and this Deluxe GE refrigerator is just $5.97. You can also buy it with no payments and no interest until September. Sunday and Monday only at Smith's home furnishings, because nobody cares like Smiths. - Okay, let's continue our trek through our '70s, '80s home's here, and let's go to the most important room. - The most important room. - Yes, right. - The rooms of yesterday. (laughing) - The den slash living room, like we just had a living room. We didn't have a separate thing, but we did too. - I remember, and not just my house, but every other house, and it's something that I have never seen since, which was the use of orange and green everywhere. - Oh, everywhere. - It's enormous. - Oh yeah, and sometimes orange and green. Like in weird geometric patterns and stuff. - And neither one of them were the natural orange or green. - Right, right. - It was some like, chemically-induced orange and green bullshit. - Yeah, yeah. - Like an orange or something. - Right, it was that. - Yeah, just like the muddy cornflour, we talked about the kitchens, like that muddy orange, and a muddy green. Why would you make any fabric that looks dirty when you make it brand new, which immediately, maybe it's so when it gets dirty, you think it's normal? I don't know, but they were, and if things weren't orange or green and patterned and crap, I love this, Tritrand. I'm sorry, it's gone. Wood paneling. I love the look of wood paneling. - Well, I'm looking behind you right now, John. - And I see wood paneling here. - Yeah, I put up wood paneling in my studio 'cause I like it so much. - Well, let's be honest. Now, the wood paneling, which you have behind you is actually vinyl made to look like wood paneling. That wood paneling looks, okay, shh. What? That looks a million times better than the wood paneling that we got in the '60s and '70s, because that resembled wood in no way whatsoever. Like, it was brown, that was as close as it got to wood. - Yeah, I never noticed it back then, but if you've ever been in a, so I grew up, most of my young life in a mobile home, like a single-wide trailer. And that's all they had. There was no wallpaper. There was everything was wood paneling. The kitchen had wallpaper maybe or for Mike, I don't know. But the point is, it's so dark and oppressive. And you can imagine, like a wood paneling hallway is just like a hallway to doom. Like, it's just dark. (laughing) And if you ever go in a comparable sized home and the walls are white, you're like, "Oh, it's so freeing and breathy and it's so open." I never realized that it was such a dark, oppressive thing, but the reason I like it is not because of how it's in homes, it's how it was used on everything else on stereos and the sides of my mother's mini van or side of her station wagon or the front of my Atari or anything out there. Like, wood grain was almost like an advertising feature, like, "Oh, it's features lovely wood faux wood grain." Like, that was a selling point. My, one of my best friends growing up, he had a, actually, he had lived in the house like way to frick out in Queens. There was a way out there. Dock up to his basement, wood paneling. I mean, it was like, it was like, it was like a staple. Like, if you had a basement. Talk about, like, you had that. The area of a serial killer, right? Like, the basement with wood paneling, low ceilings. Yeah, exactly. A T-key bar. You know somebody's dying in that, a T-key bar, and a tarp on the floor. Like, a tarp exactly. (laughing) All the furniture too, and my memory of furniture, was mostly, well, instead of fabric, a lot of people would do a poultry and like a vinyl furniture in the living room. And look, and I grew up in Florida, and you sit on a vinyl sofa, and you stand up and it's like (sniffs) and your legs come off the back of it. It's not comfortable. It's hot, it's sweaty, and it wears poorly, and it just, hold those green colors well. But other than that, I hated. Now, once in a while, they'd be fabriced. But even if they had fabric, like they wouldn't let us enjoy the fabric. Yeah. Well, yeah. That was, oh my God. To this day, if I see this, it gets me angry. Plastic and furniture. It still angers me to this day. The plastic covers, right? It's ridiculous. I remember, oh my God, it's like, what my earliest, horrible memories is, my mom paid a personally coming to our house, measure all our furniture and make custom plastic covers for our couches and chairs. Wow. And it fit perfectly. But, okay, one of these, I grew up in New York, we didn't have air conditioning, and the summers get freaking hot, right? Oh, yeah. It's worse than vinyl. Yeah, and you get to that point where it's like, shames out the window, you don't care anymore, you walk around your underwear, every window's open, every fan's going, and I remember sitting in the living room watching TV, TV was like, okay, it's time for bed, and you're not waiting to stand up because you knew that you were stuck to that room. You're going to peel wet skin. Yeah. You're going to peel skin. And you're like, oh, how about I just wait a while? Or whatever, and then you get up and say, every part of your body is sticky to it. And it's like moist, like you can see like the dew on it from your butt. Oh my god, I hated that. It still gets me upset. My grandmother kept an immaculate house. I mean, nice furniture, but she had plastic covers on her furniture. She had the wood coffee table with the now-fused solid bowl of little candies that you couldn't just one candy out. And on top of it, if you want to take the plastic on the furniture, the nth degree, she had runners on the carpet throughout the house. Now, that I remember more than, because I never, I didn't even have any friends that had the plastic on the furniture, but I had several relatives in Kentucky and here in Florida friends that had that plastic runner over the carpet, like especially the one coming from the door into the living area. Yeah, and God help you if like the end of it was turned up and you stepped on those little spikes or something. Exactly. It's like a format in your car. It had the little pointy plastic rubbery spikes on the bottom to keep it from slipping around. But then you walk down and it was like, well, it keeps you from getting mud or dirt or whatever. I'm like, my problem with that is and the slip covers on the furniture is the same problem I have with buying a beautiful phone and putting it in an order case. I'm like, okay, yes, it's safe, but you will never enjoy it as it was designed. You're just saving it for who you sell it to next. You're never going to enjoy it. I'm sorry, I got one more plastic furniture anger story. Oh, please, because I remember as a kid coming home one day, my mom's taking the plastic off the furniture. Yay. Oh, nice. Her reasoning. We have special company coming over. Oh my God. So she's acknowledged special company got the regular. Yeah, she's like, yeah, she's acknowledging this is bullshit for us when it points people come over. We'll make it nice. We'll make it nice. And she took it all off the front again. That's the same thing with having the super nice China. Yeah, yeah, you never get to use right, but they only bring it out like when family to this day, my wife still has like these pristine white dishes. And I'm like, let's, let's put our coin in. No, that's for special mother fucker. If I'm eating, I'm alive. That's a special occasion. I don't, I've never felt like a second class citizen so much more in my house. No, it's just for company. And you're probably like special towels in the bathroom. They're only for company, don't touch on me. Keep dry for company. Yep. So here's the, do you have a liquor cabinet in your house? My dad had one. - You did just had liquor on the table, really. (laughing) - You had a special, like, vertical piece of furniture and you opened it up and it had places to put the bottles, had glasses, a glass set in there. - Mm-hmm. - So you have, like, your different types of glass in there. - Yeah. - The back of it was a mirror, too, for some reason. - Right, oh yeah. - Had to be a mirror, I'm not sure why. - It looks like more liquor that way. And maybe it does. The bottom, like, had other, like, the shake your cans. And, I mean, it was like-- - Right. - And it was, like, a major piece of furniture in our not main apartment. And, it seems weird, dedicated to liquor, which I thought was just strange. - And we didn't have the liquor cabinet. We had a, at one point, from Babe Nahum, again, he got one of those-- - Maybe they did. - It was like a piece of furniture that was designed as, they called it a buffet, but it was, like, this long, giant piece of wood furniture that, in the drawers and the doors that would open on hinges, that's where you kept all your nice China. - Mm-hmm. - And then, I guess, when we had the company over, they could take it out, put it on top, and that's where people could scoop up their food. But, I remember giant pieces of furniture that were specifically designed for certain tasks in the living room, like you're talking about. And, truthfully, the largest and most important piece of furniture in the living room, or Dan, if you had one, had to be the giant console TV. - We say giant, how big was the screen? (laughing) - The soul. (laughing) The screen was probably 14 inches. (laughing) - Right. - We were weight 475 pounds. - It absolutely, if you were lucky, it weighed 475. (laughing) And, we had one of those, it was, you know, straight out of the 40s or 50s. I remember on the side, it also had the radio tuner. - Yeah, it was fancy. - Yeah, and had the top. And, I was lasted, well, my dad had worked in an appliance TV repair place there for a little while. So, he actually knew how to replace those photo tube things that were in the back. - Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - So, ours lasted probably until, I'm gonna say, like, 81, 82, maybe, and then it died. But, it was so goddamn big. You couldn't get it back out of the house. So, what do you do? You get a new TV? - Plop it, right? (laughing) - Plop it, right on top of the TV console. (laughing) - The one TV with another one on top. - They got a little smaller these days. (laughing) - I use a bigger screen, but it weighed like a tenth as much. - Yeah. - We had the console TV, the one on the legs, like the furniture, the wood grain TV. - Yeah, yeah. - But, the other console that I remember and loved this, and I'm so sad that it's gone, is the big console stereo. - Yeah, I remember that, yeah. - It had to be like six or seven foot long. Speakers were built into it. There was storage for records inside. And, you pop it open, it's like a smorgasbord of ways to list this stuff. Now, this was a turntable. - Pream. - Pream. - Before cassettes, which had the turntable, you had the 45 adapter. - You had a truck plug? - Yes, we did. - I don't think we had any a tracks in the house, they were all in the cars, but they had, you could play them. - Yeah, my dad had a reel to reel. - Oh, oh, really? - Oh, yeah. - Oh, yeah, yeah. - Wow. - But it was so, the music was so resonant. I know it wasn't expensive speakers, but it was just the fact that it was built into real, hardwood furniture, and that, the whole thing vibrated, and it just sounded, I remember listening to records after record, after record. This is back when I only thought country music was music. That was all there was, and we'd have Johnny Cash, and we'd have Conway, Twitty, and Dolly Parton, Kenny Rogers, and you put those on, and they just sounded so good. Most days, my mom would just, you know, when we had that before we got rid of it, she would have a stack of LPs. The machinery would finish one side, and drop another record, and play a whole other side. It was fancy, fancy for them. - None of that pressed wood shit back then. - No, no, no solid wood, right, yeah. - This is lumber. - I remember specifically, we did have some of our e-treks in the house, and to this day, I'll never forget that we had this one song that I learned. I still know it to this day. Johnny, don't be a hero. I don't know who sang it. I don't know when the damn song came out, but some of our music people that list their podcast will probably write in. It was about this poor guy. Don't be a hero as you're going off to war, blah blah blah. Then a letter came home, he was dead. Everybody was crying. Oh, brutal song, but I was saying to shit out of that as an eight-year-old. I'm telling you. - Well, I'm just saying purple people later. - Luna. - But after I met the, I still remember, 'cause my dad had one of those big stereo console things. And it's like, when you play a record, it was almost like an event. I mean, it was like a ceremony. Like, you opened the top, you pulled the record out and set it down. You know what I mean, it was like a, it wasn't just like you hit a button, you got music. Like, you had to go through steps. - Well, and it's not an iPod and a thing in your ears. This is a thing you're sharing with the house. Everyone has to at least tacitly agree that we're going to listen to music now, because this is for everyone. - His dad said so and. - Right. - Or dad said so and therefore we all agree explicitly. - Right. - The other thing that I guess came out in the '70s was the whole shag carpet, like the really deep. - Ooh, shag, like not even like today you see it a little bit, but it's not nearly as long. Like, it's like a shorter thing. - Now it's pile carpet. - Yeah, now it's like, I mean, I feel like stuff like you could actually comb. I mean, it was like really long. - No, you're right. - You're right, yeah. - And it got so dirty. Wasn't ever clean? Could any vacuum clean-shag carpet? It's so far down there. - I just didn't understand. It was done only on the floor, but in a lot of homes, I remember from then, it was on the damn walls. It was like, wall-to-wall on the walls. I was expecting it on the ceilings. I expected it to be inside the toilet. It was everywhere, the shag carpet. People were going nuts now. You couldn't pay me to have a home with carpet in anymore. - Oh, no. - I hate carpet. - It's nasty, it's dirty. We've still got it in our bedroom only because we bought this giant bedroom furniture set thing that I just can't move enough to get the damn carpet up. - If you're going to go in and it's going to be no carpet except when they move the furniture. It's going to be carpeted. (laughing) - Oh, no, I know where the bed's at. You couldn't move it. (laughing) There's another trend that I remember that. So it's gonna sound like I'm trying to be hip swag lights. - Not swag. - Like the kids call swag, swag. But the actual meaning of swag, which means to drape. So also, my grandmother had this wonderful house, and this is the first time I've ever seen, and now I see them everywhere, or did back then, swag lights were the thing where you had this beautiful light fixture, but you'd attach it somewhere in the ceiling where there was no outlet. And so you would weave the extension cord through this decorative chain, and put it on a hook. So it had this little wheel, and then you'd run it down the wall and plugged it in. So the extension cord became part of the decoration. You had this little draping chain that had wire in it that you didn't just plug into the wall. You remember these? - I remember seeing them mostly in garages that had been converted. - 'Cause they didn't have any outlets on the ceiling. - Right, of course, yeah. - Well, the nice thing about it was you could put a light wherever you wanted it. So you're like, well, I want them over this corner in this corner, rather than I think most homes have like a bulb in the center of the ceiling, but that wasn't a thing back then so much. You didn't have bulbs in the ceiling. So this is a way for you to put a light on the ceiling wherever you wanted it, but you could run this goofy chain all throughout the house. - It was like a DIY solution to the chandelier, essentially. - Yeah, it was a, yeah, it was a make your own chandelier pretty much. And I thought they were pretty cool, actually. I was sad when I didn't have them anymore. 'Cause I'm like, it's just another way you can express yourself like, what kind of lamp do you have? What shade is it going to be silver chain or gold chain or is it going to be like a bronze or whatever? You can do all these cool things to kind of add to the decor and you want it something that contrasted with the wood paneling so you got the brighter colors. You had to think about the whole picture when you put it together. All right, so we've been to the kitchen. We've been to the living room. When we get back from the break, we're going to take a pit stop and head down the hall to the bathroom of the '70s and '80s. - Each episode of Gen X grown up has show notes loaded with links where you can learn more about our topics. And there's even more to see and hear over at Gen X grown up dot com. - Hi kids. Ever of our junior general manager of furniture USA, we hear worse stories about you being turned down elsewhere, ordering goods into taking five and six times to get delivery right, if at all. And the poor attitude of sales people in their stores, well furniture USA cares about you. You have security that you will be taking care of when you buy from a leader in the industry. As furniture USA is, you have my father and myself and over 100 employees to take care of your needs. So come into one of our five very locations today. You'll be glad you did. Call 800-5 credit for instant credit. The last thing you'll buy kids. - All right, been to the kitchen, been to the living room, time to get a little bit of relief and head into the bathroom. We're gonna spend as little time in here as possible because there wasn't a lot of note in the bathrooms, but what was there was notable. So for me, the first thing were the countertop materials, which you're talking about for Micah and that weird kind of colorations that you would get in different people's homes, especially the one that bothered me the most was those goddamn seashell sinks. And that's hard to say. - I hated those days. - Like they're embedded into it? That thing? - No, like the sink was in the-- - Oh, in the shape of a seashell. - Oh, oh, I hated those things. - Painting or something, right? Somebody should be pouring wine over there. - For some reason those were always pink. I don't know what sea they got this ship from. - Yeah, it's coral red sea maybe, or something. - I don't know, whatever. But I hated those things. Then there were, you know, you had like the ocean foam, green kind of a simple combo thing. - Like a white toe with an avocado stove from the kitchen. - Yeah, right. - It's slightly different than the kitchen appliances, but it was like the bathroom colors for some reason. Those greens in the peaches, yeah. Now on the counter, the thing that screamed out at me when we were prepping for this was when you're brushing your teeth. I had Dixie Cups. rinse out my mouth. Yeah. Dixie cups. These were so cool. So if you don't know Dixie cups, you're a little bit older. Here's the cool. It's just a little paper cup, but they were stylized. They might have Snoopy on them. They might have Garfield on them. They might have jokes and stuff on them. The ones I got were the ones that had jokes. And you had the dispenser that you peeled off this adhesive. It's stuck in the wall. Crooked, I might point out slightly. Yeah. And you could reload it and you pulled it just like you were like on the side of a water fountain in an office. You pulled out one paper cup, but they were flat bottomed. And the deal with my little joke cups was there's a joke written on the outside and the bottom was the answer to the joke. So you get a rid of it and go like what do you call them? Whatever exactly on the bottom. But in design, you want it. And I guess they still make them. But yeah. Actually, how did I rinse my mouth without a Dixie cup when I first made the transition? Because that's the only way I ever could do it. You just had a cup on the sink that had your nasty toothbrush residue left on it, you know, for weeks, because you know, for me, I remember their default pattern, which was that 1970s Partridge family flower design. That's what I remember most of the Dixie cups. And they were you talk about them being paper, but they were also like heavily coated in wax. And that was the thing like, like so much so that if your teeth were a little longer, maybe you were bucktoothed or something, you could scrape that wax off of the inside of the stick when you were using them to get your water or put your mouth wash in or whatever you used them for. Yeah, I just jumped to Amazon real quick, this with the Dixie cups. They're all just patterns out. There's no more. No speciality stuff, no speciality. Probably not the demand for the licensing and stuff. Yeah, it's the same. This is the same. The patterns are stupid. Did you ever have any of the cool toothbrushes or toothbrush holders? Oh, I did. I actually did. I actually had a snoopy one. It was safe in your doghouse. It was shaped like a doghouse. That was the main one. Yep. Yep. And you're snoopy. The toothbrush went into the snoopy head. You said to brush your teeth. You bailed snoopy. Yeah, you did totally. That's kind of grizzly, but it was, I mean, it got me to brush my teeth. I thought that was cool. And then Woodstock was like, oh, the Woodstock was the thing you put on the end of the toothpaste to roll it to squeeze out the stuff. Oh, that's right. Oh, Chris. That was there. The Woodstock on that. Oh, my God. They still make those. I don't look for that. I don't know, but we, I don't know how we didn't put it in the kitchen, but we needed to put in snoopy ice-cone machines. If we were going to be talking about snoopy appliances. Yeah. Well, I had to keep that in the garage. I wasn't allowed to have that inside the house. That was a mess. Now, I've got to tell a quick anecdote about toothbrushes. So do you guys remember when they first came out, toothbrushes were just a plastic stick with bristles? And then in the early eighties, they started doing things with toothbrushes. And I was dying to get this reach toothbrush. Oh, yeah. Yeah. The angle. Yeah. Exactly. Yes. The angle in the commercial like a dentist tool. That's right. In the commercial, what they do is there's like a guy holding a regular toothbrush and he pinches it like it's made of soft plastic. He pinches it and he makes it narrow. He stretches it out and he bends it and he shows you how it's different than a regular toothbrush. And I talked my mom and to get me a blue one and I loved it. And it was sitting there on my snoopy thing. And I had friends visiting from out of state and they visited it. And some reason we were both getting ready in the bathroom. You're like, oh, you got one of those reach toothbrushes. I'm like, yeah. And he's like, oh, let me see. He picks it up and he snaps that shit in half because we thought the commercial was just like what the brush was like. You could twist it and shape it or something. Oh, man. He broke my brand new reach toothbrush because he thought the commercial was real. He didn't understand. That's like ripping off the cover of your trapper keeper. That's some, that's some blast to me. Yeah. It doesn't do that in reality. It's just shaped that way. You dummy. Oh, one thing and also very glad has died with that time period. And now which to me is just gross. Did we see the fuzzy toilet covers toilet covers? What a great way to collect germs. I mean, yeah. I mean, it's it's absorbent. It's actually shag carpet on your toilet for the shitter. Yeah. Made no sense. So for those who can't see, you might see that I'm very despondent looking right now. It brings the subject up. You look guilty about something. Oh, no. These fucking things haven't died. What? Do you still have a fuzzy toilet cover? Do you have a fuzzy toilet? My wife swears by these fucking dead. Oh my god. How often do you wash so many reasons? One's that Moe is already enumerated. Plus the fact that when you have these damn things on your toilet seat, try and get that goddamn toilet seat to stand up while you're peeing as a man. And she's going to snap your junk off in a heartbeat every damn time. What kind of most vulnerable position? It's like a balance thing. It's like he's going to stay. I think it's going to stay. All right. Let me start the street. Don't start it at one point. I was just like, you know what? If this is what she wants, I'm just going to start peeing directly at the toilet seat cover as a backboard and see if I can keep it up. Oh my god. I hate these things. She still has them in both our toilets in this house to this day. And you're right. It's like shag carpet on my toilet. Oh my god. I hate these things. Does he think it looks pretty or? I don't know. Like the color coordinates that shit with the rugs on the floor or something. Oh, okay. I'm going to try to make you feel a little bit better here, George. The next thing on our list, also I remember as a trend in the 70s and 80s are the soft squishy toilet seats instead of the hard ones. Yeah. I've seen those in houses I've lived in up until the 90s. I've seen those in houses I live in right now. Yeah. I mean, it's comfy. The problem with it is this is that it's like filled with foam, right? And then it's like a soft vinyl. The problem is the vinyl eventually cracks. Oh god. That's right. And so then you sit on the seat and when you get up, the crack kind of grabs you. It might, it might, it might nip you a little bit or it might take a hair with it. You don't know what's going to happen with the crack in this little foam seat. It makes you feel like cracks. It's comfortable. But once it cracks, watch out because it's danger zone for your dairy air. I can testify. So I sympathize with you having the fuzzy seats because we have the soft seats too. So yeah, those things will cut you. They will. Yeah. I have marks. Believe me. I have marks. If you're a die-hard Gen X grown-up, you can pledge your support by clicking join on YouTube or by becoming a patron at genxgrownup.com/patreon. We come to the last room we're going to talk about here. Now I think every room we've talked about could you expand upon or you could go down the hall to your sister's room or whatever. But I wanted to specifically in the show talking about our bedroom in the 70s and 80s because we all had a different experience. But we had some of the same stuff from some different stuff though. Like any room in the house, you were probably also victim of the same kind of the wood paneling, the shag carpet, the orange and green pattern carpets, all that kind of stuff. But there was stuff that we could, because it was our room, we could personalize it and make it more kid-like and more kid-friendly to what our tastes were. Yeah, I mean, Mo might be the exception because I know Mo lived in the small apartment. He probably had like stacks of brothers sleeping on top of each other and shit. So that might have been like more of a trading game with him and he probably never won because he was the young one. But what I remember having my own bedroom, which was super awesome because not a lot of my friends did, I had my own stereo. It wasn't the giant console when like we were talking about in the living room, but it was a nice turntable that was set up on four little very slender legs and there was like a place for albums. Yeah, and it had the adapter that you could play the 45s, which had the larger opening in the middle of the records. And that's what I listened to for a long, long, long time until we moved out of that duplex that we lived in and until we moved out in the farm. I listened on it. I had the the super long curly, stretchy headphone cord from stereo to my bed so I could lay there and bed and just look up the ceiling and daydream about cooler shit than I could ever imagine having. But that stereo was kind of one of the centers of my bedroom experience. I remember the first time I encountered water beds in homes in the 80s. And I thought they were the coolest thing ever. I thought because look, all my life, I had had just a mattress, just a little foam spring mattress and we visited my friends who lived down in South Florida and they were a little well off, a little more, you know, had more money that we did by a bit. And for some reason, I was going to take a nap. It was we're staying overnight, but I was tired, whatever from the drive. Like you can lay in our, you know, the adults bedroom and they had and I laid on the thing like, what the hell is this thing? And it was really cool. I thought and I wanted one and I didn't get one until last week. No, about 92. I finally got a water bed. Oh, there's my a sale on them at that point. I imagine. Well, I had always wanted one. And finally, like I had a job and I was in college and I had an apartment where I had I could buy furniture. I bought one then, but all I learned about it is you got to keep that thing heated, not hot, but heated because otherwise it's a heat sink for your body, you will wake up frozen. It is absolutely. You don't keep that thing running. And it's so impractical and it's so heavy and it's such a pain to move and refill and empty. And as cool as they were, I heard people like putting fish in them. I think that was urban myth. You can't do that. You kill the fish. But they were fun to jump up and down on which we're supposed to do. Yeah. I mean, we, I got one in like, I want to say 87 or something like that. And I, I kept it with me up until like the early 90s or so when I started moving out. And the one thing you don't want to fool around with when you've got a water bed is trying to disassemble that sunbitch and take it somewhere. Yeah. It's not an easy move at all. But I remember living here in Florida, the evaporation factor was real. And so you would have to fill mine up at least probably once every couple of months, you'd have to add more water. Yeah. I remember the early days of warbiz before they put the baffles in them. So you get up one side and the wave would just go through. That's the kind I had. Oh, really? Yeah. Just the big open. Yeah. It's just a bladder. He puts a fence. Yeah. Yeah. If it doesn't have the baffles, don't even think about trying to get amorous in a water bed. It just won't work out for anybody. He presented some problems. That's what also it definitely did. Especially with the silk sheets. Oh, I still remember New York people like his warbiz are big trend. People are getting water bids and then actually falling through floors because they didn't really just like come with no damage behind them. Right. And then they actually had to start putting like restrictions that people like look, you're perfect. Cannot support a water bed because those around the world get a lot of money because like a gallon of water weighs like what, like 15 pounds or some shit. It's a lot. Yeah. And you're and you're probably putting, I don't know, 400 gallons of water in there. I don't know. I have no idea. It's a lot. The thing about a 50 gallon drum is like, yeah, probably three or four of those at least to fill one of those up. Damn. So what about maybe this might be when you were a little bit younger, but I had them up until, like, I got that water bed. I think because I slept in a twin bed, those different bed sheet designs, right? Oh, yeah. Like different characters maybe or just some generic things like some clowns. And I specifically remember the quilts that I had were made for me by an aunt or my grandmother that had little baseball like 1920s baseball guys on them up and down. There was a catcher and a hitter and a pitcher. And I, maybe that's what influenced me to want to play baseball, but I had those things from when I was a little child up until I was probably 13 or 14. I love, I still have the quilts to this day. I just don't have a bed small enough to put them on, but those things were awesome. I love them. I had no surprise. I had Pac-Man sheets. Awesome. Yeah. But I didn't have the Pac-Man like entire set for your room. I had Corvette drapes and comforters. Oh, okay. They were just, they reminds me of your baseball guys. It was just like a pattern of lots of like, there's a Corvette logo and a couple shots of little cars or stingrays and stuff. And it was on just a plain blue background. And I had my drapes or curtains or whatever in my room matched this big quilt that I had. And then you pulled the quilt back and it's Pac-Man inside, like a Pac-Man burrito inside. Because you could personalize it. That was a cool thing. You could, and you know, sheets back then had all, at least they'll do for twin at least, all kinds of designs of current pop culture stuff, right? Yeah. And somewhere ours, like my mom would start buying like the character ones. Then after a time, it's like you had this hodgepodge of sheets, like, you know, I've had a Disney fidget sheet with a Superman top sheet with a pillow case, and it's like, you could pass your ship's on it. Mix and match. What about a phone? Did you guys, no, we had the phone in the kitchen living room, of course. Did you guys ever have a phone in your room or your own phone? Not, not until I could afford one myself. Your own? I didn't get a phone in my room until I was like 15 or so. Right around the time when I got the Commodore 64 computer, that's when I had, I think like I got a phone the year before that. Maybe. Yeah. What about you, Mo? I mean, we had a phone, but it was all like, not separate line, though, you know, it's just like an extension. Right. But it was, but it was like the standard, I forget what they called princess something that just sits on top of the, you know, the big, the clamshell kind of phone. Yep. Yep. Exactly. And that's all we had. We never really had. It was touchstone, eventually, which was nice. Yeah. Right. They started off with the dials in the middle. Yeah. Exactly. I was very lucky. I think it was mostly when my dad was driving a long haul truck driving and sometimes my mom would go with him and I would stay with my grandmother, the one that had the Immaculate House and the runners, right? And it was when I was staying with her that I got my first, my own phone, my own phone line. It was well before computers. This is a Atari 2600 era. There's no need for a phone line other than talk to people. And I think it wasn't so much. Here's something nice for John. I think it was my grandmother was sick of me taking calls on her phone. Okay. Because I talk to my friends all the time. And she's like, get off the phone. Get off the phone. It's a one Christmas. They surprised me. Somebody might be calling. It was a wrapped phone, but they had had the guy come run the line before Christmas. And it was a surprise that I now had my own phone. But I never had any of the fancy phones like the, you know, one of the Mickey Mouse that you can hang up on his arm or anything like that. They were popular. All phones. We're still straight. I wanted that Garfield phone. Yeah. I wanted the Garfield phone still to this day. I want the Garfield phone. Never had the Garfield phone. It won't work on anything I have because I don't have a landline. I just want the fucking Garfield phone. You would lift the phone out of his back, right? It's like part of his back. And I remember that one. That one and Mo just talked about the sports illustrated football phone. We described you got one. I mean, we subscribed. We just never got the football phone. That's sad. What about, so for me, the other big part of my room, I had the bed, I had the stereo. And in between those two, I had this giant office metal work desk. Did you guys have a desk in your bedroom at all? Yeah, I did. I had a giant metal one that my dad got from an old office thing somewhere. Yeah. It's massive. I don't know how he got in the house. Yep. That's like my dad got his from like, or the one that he gave to me. It was from one of the convenient stores that he had managed. And I guess he just stole that shit in the middle of the night or something. But he didn't open my bedroom. Those metal drawers that would slide out and they had the dent in the front of them. And the top of it was either slate or glass depending upon which one you had. And I had the other thing that I loved a lot in my bedroom was my television in the corner of the desk. And I had it angled in such a way that it could face me while I was laying in the bed. Because I didn't have a lot of room in there. But I made use of every speech that I had in there. I felt very lucky because I didn't have a big behemoth of a desk. I don't where it came from, but I loved that I had a school desk at home in my room. Like with a chair attached? Can't see it. Like the flip top? The chair attached, the lift-up thing, you can reach under your butt, the books thing down there. I just thought it was so cool. I don't think I wouldn't wanted that. You didn't want it? Oh, I loved it. Yeah. Like I wanted the Gallagher one that he drove around the stage. I thought it was so cool because there's things you can't do to a desk at school. Like put wacky packaged stickers on and write on and stuff like this. But this was mine. So I could stick it up however I wanted to and I could draw on it. I could do all those things. I don't where maybe my dad probably got it in a thrift store or a junkyard or something. But I loved having that kind of desk. I thought it was neat. Yeah. I just remember the fact that I think when we were young, we never got purpose kids room desks. Nobody could go to Kmart or whatever big box store back there. By a desk for their kid, it was whatever hodgepodge thing your parents could find on the side of the road somewhere. I know I had a friend who had cinder blocks with a piece of wood across them and that was their desk. Oh yeah. We've seen that. It's definitely gone now. People don't do it anymore because it's dumb. But in our house, we had, do you know what popcorn ceilings are? Are you familiar with that? Oh yeah. Oh my goodness. So we had these things in the house. And the problem was if you're a kid, you like to play and you like to bounce things off the walls and sometimes they bounce off the ceiling. And those popcorn ceilings tell on you because they'll be little evidence of things that fell off the ceiling. They spray that crap on there. Like they have an air gun that has these little beads of foam and glue and they just go like paint. But as the glue dries over time, all it takes is just just a mouse to fart near it and it falls off the ceiling onto the carpet. And I'd be in deep shit every time my grandmother would come go and go, you ever throw things at the ceiling again? I'm like, no, I'm not. I'm lying. There's evidence right there. It's clear. It did just magically fall. Gee, why is your stuffed animal full of these little things too? Oh, I guess because I was thrown out of the ceiling. Yeah. I'm glad those are gone. As far as decorations, though. Do you guys have any things like lava lamps or any of those like very? No, but God, I still want one. I want to go to the Amgarfield phone. I want one now. Did you have a lava lamp? I had a lava lamp. Oh, lucky bags. One thing is that lava lamps once they get amazingly hot. They take really like crazy hot because they have to melt that wax thing so it does the lava action stuff. That's been fixed now. I wonder if they have a different way of doing them now. They probably have some new materials they can use now that maybe like more. Right. Well, you can't do an LED lava lamp because it's not going to heat anything right at all. It's got to be, maybe it has a heating element and LED light now. Yeah. I wondered why. Like I had a neighbor that had one and I remember I would visit and I would just sit like it was TV and go, wow, look at doing stuff. But I never owned one. I wish I did. It's like transcenducing. I love that kind of stuff. I did not have a lava lamp still want one to this day. But I'll tell you what I did. Damwell have, especially by about time I turned 12, maybe 13 celebrity posters over my wall. Yeah. On my door, head Thomas in a pink bikini. Oh hell that would oh my god. You're not seeing that much anymore. No now my kids have fucking anime shit all over their lives. That's what they have. But celebrity posters Heather Thomas in the pink bikini with she's pulling up the one little hip string a little bit. Oh yeah Heather Locklear, Farah Fawcett in the brown bathing suit with the feathers. You notice a trend. I didn't have you know like whatever his name was with kit. I didn't have that guy on my wall. No no it was why and they didn't have to be purchased posters even because you get magazines and magazines are smart enough to go magazines. You can rip a poster out of there and sometimes it'd be like two pages right or like a centerfold but not nude right so they'd fold out a magazine. I remember I got dynamite magazine. Still love it. I'm still collecting those to this day. Oh yeah. And they would have the fold out poster. Now they have creases in them but it'd be maybe it's a 3D poster or it's a poster in King Kong or whatever. I've slapped those up on my walls which because oh yeah I got a poster and it had to be something I loved. It's like a poster in my room. Yeah it's my own personal feeling. So I didn't have one of these things but I definitely remember some friends having them which is the bead doorways. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I remember them over the adult section at the video rental. They were there too. Yeah that's it. I was convinced they were there because they made noise. Is that why they were there? Because you can see what they had to be. Yeah because you have to move and go jingle jingle jingle jingle so you know somebody was going in to draw attention right it was embarrassment is what it was for. Let me tell you when I visited someone's house that had a beaded doorway I would practice my stealth techniques to see if I could get through without making noise so I could use that when I went to the video store and never really panned out there are two noise. You have to go slow. Yeah. Is that the secret? My visit friends who had them it was like every time you walk through though it almost like it had to be an event like you couldn't just walk through them. But put your fingers through first and spread them apart as you walk through or something like you're walking into the saloon you're no cowboy. If you didn't if you didn't do the finger hand separation technique they were under your armpits you get hanged by two or three of them. They're dry across your back. They're tear under glasses on your face. Yeah. Oh my god. I just remember we're a painting where if you were carrying anything or if you had like they were just a painting but it was just this is a bad idea. If you were a sadist you could just put little fish hooks on it. They had to be really important for parents who had kids that would go out and get drunk and come home without them knowing because then you catch the kid is he's going to stumbling into his bedroom. I'm fine. They're not going to. It was always like an uncle or an aunt that I knew would have those. We never had the beaded doorways but when you see them you're like oh how cool I wish and now I thank my parents for not putting a beaded doorway in our house but back then I thought I wanted. I feel like an uncle or an aunt thing. Isn't it? Yeah. It is that uncle right? The one you know the one I mean. Yeah. It's one of those uncles. It's a crazy Uncle Bill. And he was. It was my Uncle Bill. How did he always say? Yeah. So what? Okay. One more thing that I want to talk about in our bedroom that was very personal to me and I think not only is it novel to being a kid but it's novel to a Jinx era kid because I don't see anybody have these anymore unless you're just a toddler and your parents do it for you. I had a toy chest. Yeah. I had one. A great big vinyl covered box. Again I could put my own stickers all over it but that's where my toys belong. Right? Toys weren't decorations. Toys weren't all in a shelf. They were a collector. They didn't right. You had to put something behind them. When you're done playing you throw your toys in there. Yep. The only deviation from that was Lego. I was allowed to build something with Lego and leave it on a shelf or put on my Legos at a separate box in the closet. But otherwise all toys when you're done playing go in this chest and play time is the excitement of well let's open. Open the chest and start digging through it pulling out all these toys and sometimes you go to the bottom like I haven't seen that forever. I wonder where that boot went. You dig it through and all your stuff is there. It's your own little chest of everything that brings you joy in this box. I'd love to have an a toy chest. Mine was a little footlocker. Yeah. That you know and again I get those any I just like I could put any stickers I wanted to want. I could draw on it. I can do anything I wanted to with that thing. That was it was okay. That was like my thing to do whatever heck I wanted to. If it got to a point where toys didn't fit in it anymore then my dad's like up time to go through your toys. You were a toy. He got to give her something. For me mine was an old black metal not really a footlocker. It was bigger than that but I remember distinctly and the reason why I remember is because we had this toy chest up until this year when we sold my parents' old house. It was still in part of the storage building over there but it was black and the black paint was flecking off of it so it was the rust metal underneath two handles on the front of it like you could carry this fucking behemoth anywhere. It was there's no way that was happening for decoration. Oh I had all of my favorite toys. My curious George doll, my electronic little owl calculator thing that I had all the toys that I had race cars all and the race cars were the worst because those sons of bitches would find their way down into the bottom of the house and always with the GI Joe boots too. Yeah and you'd lose one for six years and oh yeah I'd loved my toy box. It was awesome. It was dangerous and it was fun. And every once in a while you got to empty it and you find that puzzle piece that you just couldn't find three weeks ago. Oh okay we've made it through our home of the 70s 80s run through all of these memorable things. I don't hate any of them. You know we talk less time about fashion trends. I'm not embarrassed or ashamed of any of this. Even the beaded curtains. I think that's cool. I don't want one of my house right now but I'm not ashamed that we had them. Is there anything in this list that any of you are like like you hate that it existed? Covered toilet seats. I just can't. Yeah. Okay. All right. Well you might have a point there. I mean there's a couple things. There's not a lot. All right. Fair enough. Guys this has been a blast. This is so much fun. I had no idea what we're going to get into at this back track and this has been great. Fourth listener right in. Let us know what we missed. What things were in your 70s or 80s home growing up that is emblematic of the that era that we forgot about. We'd love to hear from you. Before we leave I need to thank another brand new supporter over on Patreon. This is another Marcus. Marcus another. We have Marcus is coming out of our ears. Thank you Marcus. Hey Marcus enjoys what we do. Wanted to support us doing it headed over to patreon.com/genxgrownup and pledged a regular monthly amount to go to us to help make sure we pay the bills. Keep the lights on and keep on producing this show and the stuff on YouTube and the podcast and everything that we do. Marcus thank you so much for that. You probably know this already. You're joining an amazing roster of people that are so generous and so kind. We see them all the time we've run discord. They're so supportive. Great bunch of people and we're happy to welcome you into the fold. And while we're on the topic of patrons we are still going forward with our one dollar patron challenge. If you're already a patron member of genxgrownup I am challenging you to go find three more one dollar patrons to help boost that support that we need to make this thing our full time job. I am trying to do it myself. I am not had a lot of success. But we definitely want to see those people coming into that patreon fold. That would be amazing. It would be great idea George and I hope you will take us up on the challenge. That'd be awesome. Listen if you would like to join Marcus and everyone else it is so easy. Just head over to genxgrownup.com/patreon for as little as a dollar a month. You can do exactly what Marcus did and help us keep going. That's going to wrap it up for this backtrack edition of the show. Don't worry we have another one coming in two weeks and next week is the standard edition of our show. Until then I am John. George thank you so much for being here. Yes sir Mo you know I appreciate you. At least fun then. Forth Lister it's you though we all appreciate most of all we cannot wait to talk to you again next time. Bye bye. See you guys be care everybody. Genx grown up as a member of the Evergreen podcast family learn more at EvergreenPotcasts.com. I found these little like a little six pack of candy at five below they're like I don't like this big but they're fizzy candy like if pop rocks was about a third is powerful you know so just just sizzles a little on your tongue but doesn't crackle and pop you know like a rice crispy. We should all try them while we're recording the podcast just to see how they fuck up all your stuff so you can make noises. Well Andrew you are thank you. You are thank you. You are belong to us. You are all your base. Yes. Yeah.