Remembered Things

One of the things about being my age, which is fifty-one, is that I've seen a lot of things come and go. Some had such a brief appearance on the stage of pop culture that they're almost totally forgotten. Others were around for years or even decades.

One of these that I would like to talk about are Kiddierama booths. These were small booths that had cartoons kids could watch while sitting in the booth. If I recall correctly, the cost was 25 cents. The cartoons would rotate so you never saw the same one twice in a row. These were an assortment of various cartoons. They included Mighty Mouse, Woody Woodpecker and several other characters.

The booths were usually located in department stores, but you would sometimes see them in other places. According to some sources, the owners of the company that built and serviced them tried to convert them to using VHS tapes in the mid to late 1980s. They had been using Super 8 film prints, it seems. The last time I saw one of these was in the bus station in Syracuse, New York, in 1987.

This, of course, was the old bus station, which was in a bad neighborhood and was run down. It's since been replaced by a very nice and new one in a much better location. I had a long layover between getting off one bus and transferring to my next one, so I watched cartoons to pass the time.

Another thing I remember, and these were around for a long time, were the small television sets located in bus stations. These sets were black-and-white. You got something like ten or fifteen minutes for 25 cents. These had no cable connection, so all you could watch were over the air stations.

Again, it was a nice way to pass the time. I always liked watching local newscasts in various cities to get something of a feel for what each city was like.

These became obsolete when the switch from analog to digital broadcasting was made. Retrofitting them with converter boxes would have been much too expensive to do.

I'll finish this post by talking about something that did not last very long. Does anyone else out there remember cable radio? This was radio delivered over a cable television system. Now, to be honest, I am aware that there are a few such systems still going strong, but for the most part, the whole idea came and went fairly quickly.

The neat thing about this was that usually, the fidelity of whatever you were listening to was quite good. The local company we had in this area, which was named New Channels, offered this at a very reasonable rate as an add-on to basic service.

If enough people read this post and like it to warrant a follow-up, I'll post one.

And as always, thank you for reading.