Yes, my love there was a time when the television went off without having to be turned off. Remember the eagle soaring past old red, white and blue right before that wretched humming noise and then....silence with that awful colorful array of bar graph looking lines that made it clear that television was closed for the night.
Or how about walking to the library to gather reference material for your science project, term paper or anything else that required encyclopedic reference material.
Googling for anything would have been a term that probably would have landed you in the principal's office.
We did have four encyclopedias at home. I think they were A, F, I and L. My mother managed to get these four gems free with a $25 grocery purchase (on four different occasions) at the local Safe Way.
If you arrange the letters in the way having only four encyclopedias feels to a ten year old ....you get the word FAIL!!!
He was so amazed and curious as to how I managed to get anything done with no internet, cell phone, daily cartoons or a gazillion video games with 2 or 3 different consoles....and even more perplexed at the idea of going outside and playing until the street lights came on.
I could tell he was kind of settling in to the notion that life....wasn't all that bad. I made the memories of enjoying Saturday morning cartoons, reading good books, and harmless mischief while walking to and from the neighborhood library sound pretty good.
That warm fuzzing feeling he was developing came to a screeching halt after I shared the last memory of a time gone forever with him...and that was the fact that a microwave was unheard of (at least in my house) until the mid 80s!
He got all wide-eyed and wanted to know how on earth we were able to eat things like leftovers, popcorn, frozen meals, or even heated water for hot cocoa....lol.
Come to think of it....how on earth did we ever SURVIVE??!
