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From Gail Burns, Receptionist:

Dear Tripodian People,

This is Gail M. Burns — The Official Voice of Tripod (I'm the receptionist). Nothing will make you feel old faster than taking a job at Tripod! I was recently comparing notes with a fellow "old geezer" here, and we were bemoaning our fate as neither Baby Boomers (too young) nor Gen-Xers (too old). Where do we fit in? And who are we? Take a look at my list of recollected ramblings and see if you fall between the cracks, too. Maybe you can help me come up with a catchy handle for all of us poor lost souls.

1) I remember a horse-drawn vehicle on the streets of New York City. Actually, I am not THAT old, and I am not talking about the hansom cabs in Central Park, which makes this memory all the more amazing. I am talking about a horse-drawn vehicle on the streets of New York City around 1960. The fellow who drove it was the Scissors and Rags Man. He sharpened scissors and knives and he collected old rags, and maybe old papers, for what we now call "recycling." I can remember being given free carrots or lumps of sugar at the corner market to give to his horse, who wore blinkers and a feed bag.

2) I saw Nixon resign. You might be surprised that I chose this instead of the assassinations of JFK, RFK or MLK, Jr. — all of which I also remember (although I was very was only six when JFK was assassinated and so cannot tell you "where I was when I heard"). I remember distinctly where I was when I heard that Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated. I was asleep and my mother rushed in to pull up my blinds and wake me for school shouting "Get up! Get up! They've shot Kennedy!" I opened one eye and told my silly mother that they had done that five years ago, to which she replied, "No, they've shot the other one!" But the Watergate scandal and Nixon's resignation were a big part of my coming of age. I was 17, and it was the summer in between high school and college for me. I was in England at a Pony Trekking Camp when he actually resigned, and I can remember my sister and I being given permission to get out of bed and go down to the common room to watch the resignation speech live on television. We drank "hot orange" while we watched.

3) I actually wore all these hip "retro" clothes the first time they were in fashion. Yes, I wore it all — bell bottoms, platform shoes, mini-skirts and dresses, maxi-skirts and coats, chain link belts, day-glo plastic jewelry, white lipstick, white go-go boots, Nik-Nik shirts, temporary decals on my face and fingernails. Not that I actually looked any good in any of it — but I was young and foolish and I wore it all. That is why I refuse to wear it now. (I am now in my hip, retro "Return to Preppie" phase. As usual, no one else is and so, instead of being seen as WAY ahead of the crowd, I am merely viewed as hopelessly dowdy, especially by my teenaged son!)

4) A lot of people who are dead now were alive then. The longer you live the more you notice this phenomenon! My children are constantly amazed that I walked the same earth as Lucille Ball or John F. Kennedy or John Lennon or even John Belushi! (Not that I KNEW any of those people, I was just lucky enough to be alive when they were.)

5) I am now older than my boss, my doctor, and some of my sons' teachers. When I find myself older than my priest, I will know I have outlived my useful life on this planet.

6) I remember "chatting online" in 1968. This, like my memory of the horse-drawn carriage in NYC, is one that no one believes. But I know that I went to an open house at a place in New York called Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT), where my father was doing the books while he was in between careers, and that I typed back and forth with another girl at another EAT Open House location. I remember the keyboard and the screen, and I assume we were connected electronically in some way. At the time it was just a cool adventure. It wasn't until quite recently that I realized that I was witnessing the dawn of the Information Age. I can also distinctly remember my school "getting a computer." This meant that we got a telephone line that connected us to what was undoubtedly some huge behemoth of a machine in a remote warehouse. We called the computer on the phone, put the headset in a cradle attached to a big typewriter gizmo and then, if we knew the language, we could ask the computer to do things like add, subtract, multiply, or divide for us. Phrasing the question was terribly complicated, and any one of us could have done the math in our heads ten times faster than the computer could do it. Most of us used the extra phone line to make long distance calls.

7) I remember a time before zip codes. I can remember the big publicity campaign to get people to use zip codes and how annoyed people were by all those numbers. We are all so number numb these days! Where has the furor been with zip + four and all these blasted new area codes we have to memorize??

8) I watched most of the shows on TV Land and Nick At Nite in prime-time, first-run. On the other hand, I have yet to see a complete episode of:

Howdy-Doody
Kukla, Fran, and Ollie
Milton Berle
Ernie Kovacs

And I saw the following only as reruns:

I Love Lucy
Leave It To Beaver

9) I still talk about "records" and "record players." Actually, my husband and I have a big collection of vinyl that we wouldn't part with for the world. The graphics and writing are so tiny and illegible on CDs and cassettes! Half the fun of buying a new record was looking at and reading the record jacket! Not only do we have records and play records, but I still have the stereo I was given as a high school graduation present. Even in those ancient days (1974), it was hard to find stereos that played 78s. Mine does. And I own 78s. And I play them! I also once owned an eight-track tape.

10) I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis. Actually, I don't. It took me years and years to equate my experience with the historical event of that name. I remember being in first grade and it being explained to us that we were having an air raid drill. Having no experience of the term "air raid," what I clearly heard was "air aid." I grew up in New York City, and so fire drills from our big 13-story school building were a routine fact of life, but this air aid drill was something entirely different. Instead of leaving the building, as we did in a fire drill, we were to go into the hallway, get inside our metal lockers, and put our coats over our heads. I will tell you right now that once you are closed in a locker with a lined wool coat over your head there is not much in the way of air to breathe! And so this "air aid drill" seemed utterly pointless to me. Imagine my horror, when, as an adult, I realized that this was supposed to "save" us from nuclear holocaust! I can remember the Civil Defense stickers in the stairwells of our school and I realize now that our three subterranean floors were meant to be a fallout shelter. There were rows and rows of big olive-drab metal barrels down there, labeled as containing everything from peanut butter to sanitary napkins, to sustain us.

If this rings a bell with any of you, drop me a line! Just send it to The Vintage '50's Receptionist, c/o Tripod-Where-Our-Average-Age-Is-27, Silly-con River, Billsville, MA.

Sincerely,
Gail (2/27/98)

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Read more "Letters from Tripod" in the archive.