I’m sitting on my back porch relaxing, watching the birds and listening to the sounds, mostly country-type noises, but every once in a while I can hear a loud car or truck go by, which brings me back to reality. So, as I’m sitting here, I begin daydreaming, thinking or zoning out, and my back-in-the-day memories kick in. I start thinking of growing up in the 1970’s and how far we have come since then, and it is amazing and almost unbelievable. It would definitely be something my parents never dreamed of. What I present will bring back memories for the older folks but should be new to the younger ones, who should learn a bit about our past.
My goal for this piece is to go back in time, starting in the 1970s and moving forward, because I am familiar with that era, having grown up in it. We are now at a point where our kids have no idea about the past, and it’s not their fault; it's the teachers' unions forgetting our past and teaching woke stuff, and parents not spending quality time with their kids talking about it. Things are moving too fast today to stop and smell the successes of the past.
I will start with music and television in this “Remember When?” article, which will be the first in a series of pieces about our past that will be nostalgia for the old and a gee whiz, I can’t believe it was that way for the younger generations.
I’m still deciding what to do for the next article, but I’ll decide soon and then get started putting it together. The series is intended for two audiences: baby boomers and others on the older side who will enjoy the memories that come back when they see some of the images. But I'm really doing this for the younger generations. I want them to see what it was like and imagine themselves in those days and situations, just as they do when they watch a movie, but this movie is in their imagination as they read and view the past in this article.
Older folks may get a laugh out of much of what I present and may be bored by my detailed descriptions, but they will have to skip over them if that is an issue, because my intent is to help younger people realize the conveniences they have that were not available to us oldtimers. The elderly should get a good laugh from this and hopefully some good memories.
Let’s move on. Since 1970, daily life has changed drastically from a world of rotary phones, vinyl records, handwritten letters, paper maps, bank tellers, punch cards, and three TV networks (ABC, NBC, CBS) into a world of smartphones, streaming, GPS, online banking, artificial intelligence, digital medicine, social media, and instant global communication. That was a mouthful.
Technology has improved so drastically that we now live in a Jetsons world for those of you who remember this cartoon. We have moved from the mechanical and physical world into the digital age, the automated age. Music has advanced from 8-tracks, records, cassettes, CDs, Walkmans and MP3s to on-demand music, available when and where someone wants it. Remember landlines, party lines, phone booths, answering machines, pagers, fax machines, snailmail, typewriters, carbon paper, white out, and filing cabinets? All replaced by tech. In fact, most kids don’t even know some of these words, so they definitely don’t know about the past, and that is kind of sad. Families should be sitting together to discuss the old days, not only about family but also about how things were, not as a lesson but as awareness. We need to do anything we can to bring families together, which tech has destroyed for many. No interaction or family time is not a good thing.
The story is not just about gadgets. It is about how people lived, worked, learned, communicated, traveled, worshiped, shopped, banked, watched the news, listened to music, and stayed connected. This article provides a view of how the old-time tech of phone booths and punch cards has evolved into smartphones and artificial intelligence.
Let’s get to the meat of this article, starting with one of my favorites and one that today’s kids could not deal with. So what is that? Shared phone lines, but before I touch on this subject, I need to talk about the old-time landlines. So what is a landline? It is a hard-wired connection to a phone in one’s house or business. Here are a couple of examples of a landline:
One note, though: the standard color was black for many years, and color options did not arrive until many years after phones hit the market. In the old landline era, the phone in your house usually belonged to the phone company. Families paid for phone service as we do today and leased the actual phone from the local Bell company. Many were marked “Bell System Property — Not For Sale.” The advantage was reliability: if the phone broke, the company handled it, but those phones rarely failed. After the breakup of the Bell System in the early 1980s, Americans began buying their own phones from stores with color options, and the household telephone slowly changed from rented utility equipment into a consumer product. Remember, during those days, the internet, social media, eBay, cell phones, and even computers were only dreams.
On a more important point for the youngsters. Originally, the hardline in your home was shared with neighbors. Yep, that is true. So, if you picked up the line to call someone and heard someone talking, you couldn't use the phone. Now think about that for a minute. How many of you today would put up with someone on your cell phone because of sharing a line? You guys don’t know how lucky you are. There were many fights between users of shared phone lines, especially with teenagers wanting to talk to teenagers, if you get the point. There was no way to cut someone off but to argue with them on the phone along with whoever they were talking to. So basically it was a three-way conversation, but unintended, unlike today.
Ok, so you ask how do people get in touch with family and friends when they are out and about? There were no cell phones or anything else at the time other than landlines, and parents could not contact their kids, or vice versa, without using the school office phone. I’m not sure parents of today could deal with their kids not having a cell phone at school; boy, how things have changed.
But never fear, American ingenuity has the solution - hardwired public phones.
To use these phones, you needed pocket change because we didn’t have the equipment to accept dollar bills at the time. When I was young, it was 10 cents per local call, but that eventually rose to 25 cents before the technology revolution arrived. Now think about this: there were time limits on these public landline calls, and when you ran out of time, an operator would cut in and ask for additional money to continue. To top it off, if you wanted to make a long-distance call, you had to have a lot of change in your pocket, or, as we commonly did, go into a store to get enough change to make the call. How in the heck would any kids of today survive? Probably the same way we did: call collect, where the operator dialed for you and, when someone answered on the other end, asked if they would accept and pay for the call.
Long-distance calls back in the day were when someone was outside the limits of where you lived, sometimes in another city and other times maybe at county lines. A worst-case scenario would be if your friend lived close but was over the line; that would be long distance for each call. That is real and happened to many.
Here is a short story about how I had to call home while I was in the military in South Korea in the early 70s. Calls to the U.S. were made at a central location, with many waiting in line for their turn. It wasn’t a big problem, and the calls were free, but when it was finally your turn, you went behind a curtain and were patched through to the U.S. The only issue was that everyone in the room could hear your conversation, so there was no privacy to speak of. Sounds like the Stone Age to some of the younger ones reading this, I’m sure.
Of course, over time, technology has changed, and here we are with kids having their own cell phones. Heck, I no longer have a landline, and most young people have no clue how to use the phone connected to it. I recently watched a short video of adults placing an old phone on a table and asking kids to dial their friend. It was so funny because they were clueless. They would rotate the dial face but not pick up the handset, as if that would work, along with other efforts, but they never figured it out. Hopefully, they don’t end up stranded somewhere where wireless doesn’t work and landlines are all they have :-)
LISTENING TO MUSIC
Let's get into music for a bit, because the technology for listening has changed dramatically and quickly, leaving many outdated products lying in wait for a historian to examine or for auction to those who want nostalgia. I am going to review these amazing products from back in the day, which are the baseline for everything in use today. Kids need to appreciate the past, but most are clueless about it, including our country's history. Every generation thinks it is inventing the future, but the wisest study the past before they build it. It’s just plain common sense.
I was young in the 70s, and music was my focus, as it was for most young adults. I remember going to concerts when prices were reasonable, and I was lucky to see a few bands along the way, like The Allman Brothers, Seals & Crofts, Elton John (4 times), with the most recent on his farewell tour, Black Oak Arkansas, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Cher, and others I can’t remember. This was a time of love, with hippies and communes popular, along with anti-war protests against the Vietnam War. I remember skipping school one day to watch the protesters in front of a military base near where I lived; oh, those were the days. I still remember the horrible event at Kent State in Ohio and the song from CSNY (Ten Soldiers and Nixon Coming, Four Dead in Ohio). Most reading this are probably clueless about this time, yet the music and devices of today come from the tech of that era.
So, how did we listen to music in ancient times? Using technology, of course, but OLD technology that was the precursor to where we are today. Over decades, things improved to the point we are at now, with many in our younger generations clueless about life and what those before them endured.
Okay, let’s get into the devices and products that were considered big tech back in the day. The one thing I am thankful for is being on the ground floor of our journey to where we are now. My only issue is that I won’t be here to enjoy what will be an amazing experience for everyone in the future. I see great things.
Two basics before I start: one, we did have radio and even in cars, but in my day there were no buttons to select a station. But there were two knobs, one on each side of the radio. The one on the left was the volume, and the one on the right was the tuning knob to search for a station with a song you like. When I say search, it is not like today; you searched by turning the knob to find a station, and there were not many stations to pick from in the beginning. Also, the music was random in the sense that you did not know what genre was going to be played. So, you were going station to station to find a song you liked.
Short story and true. Back in the day, many adults provided a good example of drinking and driving. It was not a big deal back then as it should have been, but that is why it is history. So, I was not the best teenager and happened to hang out with the partying crowd. This crowd was a drinking, smoking and chilling out listening to the latest tunes of the day So, one night a friend of mine and I told our parents we were sleeping over at each other's house, but we weren’t. We stayed out the night drinking. So, as we were driving down a street with a slight bend in the road, I ran head-on into a telephone pole. Of course we were drinking, but the story is that I was looking for music while driving turning the knob or telling my friend where to tune to and bam, head-on with a telephone pole with my Corvair, which is a story in itself. This Corvair was an older car even at this time, with the engine in the back and the trunk in the front. So, imagine hitting a telephone pole with no engine in front but only a cooler of Colt45. When we hit the pole, the beer cans popped out everywhere. I ended up in the hospital with a bruised kidney and my friend went home the same night with a head cut. The image below is the best I could do to recreate the event for you and is not bad but we only had a few cans in the car.
I actually did have a peace sign on the hood that a group of us painted on and it fit right in for the times. Back to the crash. The moral of the story is, don’t drink and drive and let the passenger find the music. Everything ended up ok, although I was a senior and lost my driver’s license.
Eventually, radios added buttons to save your favorite stations and other enhancements to where we are today.
Another primary source of music was the record, a vinyl platter of various sizes. So, what is the technology behind it? I assume not many know, because I didn’t and was only interested in the sounds and hanging out at the time. As a kid who cared about how music worked, all we wanted was to listen and be entertained, just what the doctor ordered. For this piece, I was interested in the science of this technology to provide to you, so I went to my AI buddy, ChatGPT and was provided the following:
“Sound is first recorded in a studio. That sound is converted into vibrations. Those vibrations are used to cut a tiny spiral groove into a master disc. The groove is not just a line — it has microscopic waves and movements that represent the music.
When the record is played, the stylus, also called the needle, rides inside that groove. As the groove wiggles, the stylus vibrates. Those vibrations travel through the cartridge, which converts them into an electrical signal. That signal goes through an amplifier and comes out of the speakers as music.”
So there you go; that’s the tech if you are interested. I’m not, but one point to know is that an album comes in three sizes: an LP (Long Playing) 33 1/3rd, 45 or 78 with examples below:
You’ll notice that there are three types of records in the image above. Since I’m not technical, I also asked to provide a quick explanation of the differences instead of me making stuff up or getting it wrong:
The image below shows a home from back in the day, and I can still remember having to get up every time a song or album completed because this was all manually managed by the listener. You actually had to physically get up, walk over to the device and remove the current record and replace it with a new one. There would be family and friend battles of who was going to change the music or TV channel because there was no such thing as a remote.
For the technically inclined, the image below displays a breakdown of the pieces that make up the device that plays the music, known as a turntable. I have spent many hours using a turntable, balancing the head of the arm to just barely touch the album. If the head was too heavy, you would get static, and that was horrible for the music enthusiasts of the day.
Now, if the head was set too light on the record, it could bounce over a word or verse from a scratch, or even by a slight warping of the vinyl. So, if you left an album in the sunlight, unprotected it could warp. Remember it’s only plastic or something similar, I think.
Some, known as audiophiles went through great lengths when playing an album and in fact they would not let anyone touch their stuff, none of it. I kid you not. These are the same folks who cleaned and sprayed each album before playing to get off the dust with a special felt like cleaning pad and some anti-static spray or cleaner.
The cartridge in the player's arm was the most expensive part because it contained a diamond stylus, the key to the music’s sound quality. The platter held a vinyl record with a continuous groove that the stylus would follow to play music. This was expensive stuff when I was young. It’s quite a setup, don’t you think?
I remember having friends with walls filled with nothing but LPs (Long Playing, 33 1/3 vinyl), and others with boxes full, along with albums thrown all over the place. The audiophiles music enthusiasts had everything categorized and in order. Remember this was before computers, so making a list and keeping it updated was all handwritten or maybe, for the crazies, using a typewriter. There were no databases or automation for this process. So, imagine managing hundreds of record albums and trying to find a specific one. As most kids did, the albums were stored randomly, with the bet that the owner would remember where it was when needed. Now-a-days, ask and you receive the music you want in seconds.
The Long-Playing (LP) record became very popular and was commonly called an album: a vinyl record with two sides of multiple songs (10-20) by a group or a single artist. Interesting, isn’t it? So I ask you: how do you play only one song from a vinyl record? Easy: you lift the tonearm, find the track you want to play, and slowly lower the arm onto a blank spot that represents a break between songs. I’m actually laughing as I write this because it brings back so many memories, like trying to do this after a few drinks and scratching a record or two, which could degrade the music's quality.
Also, how your equipment is set up, as well as the structure of the house, could affect the quality of the music. So, what do I mean? If you were having a party and all the kids were dancing and jumping up and down, it could cause the needle to skip over a few tracks, disrupting the music and fun. In addition, the vinyl could be scratched, and if so, in the future the music might skip a beat or two, or the needle would not move forward on severe scratches and continuously play a word or verse. Kind of archaic, I know, but the music was good, and it didn’t bother us as it would the kids of today.
The following is a close-up picture of a vinyl to give you an idea of what I’m talking about:
I have another short story about a situation related to this topic from my time stationed in Okinawa during my military career. I had a situation with my son, maybe 3 at the time, walking around the living room as little ones do, hanging on to things and exploring. To set the stage, houses in Okinawa are built from concrete because of typhoons, and as I was an enlisted man at the time without a lot of money for furniture and stuff, so we improvised and made our own stereo cabinet, as you can see in the example image below:
So, one day the wife and I were cleaning or doing something and not paying attention to my son. I still have a vivid image in my mind of my son standing in front of the turntable, holding the arm with the diamond cartridge in it and scraping it back and forth across the album. I couldn’t believe it, and I don’t even remember my reaction, except that an album was now scratched and useless. But that was only part of the issue; the other was the stylus needle, which was trashed and expensive to replace. I find this all funny now, but back then it was upsetting. But life goes on.
My last comment on this tech is that it was not mobile; if you wanted to listen to your music, you had to take it with you or hope your friend had it, and there would have to be equipment to play it. The one benefit of this is that we got together as a group to listen to music, chat, smoke (remember this was the 70’s) and do other things. Those were some fun times that I remember well.
THE NEXT TECHNOLOGY OF TAPE
Time to move on to the next technology after the record album days: music not on vinyl but on magnetic tape, starting with 8-tracks for a short period of time, with cassettes and reel-to-reels becoming the next trend. Let’s start with an image of what I will be talking about:
Notice the 8-track tape on the left side of the table with a cassette in the middle and a reel-to-reel tape on the right, with the equipment that played them behind on the table. These are what I grew up with, mostly using cassettes during my day. I’ll go over a couple of things about each tape type so you understand things weren’t easy back in the day as they are today. But we were fascinated with the technology and new music of the 70’s coming out every day.
Let’s start with the 8-Track tape, which held about 40 to 80 minutes of music and played in a continuous loop divided into four programs, with the player switching programs with a loud mechanical click. Sometimes that switch happened in the middle of a song, but that was fine for us.
My primary memory of 8-Tracks is their primary use: in automobiles. Radio was limited to what was played, so at least with this player you could jam out with your friends while driving around raising cain, if you will.
As you can see, these tapes were bulky and took up a lot of space, and you didn't carry them around except to take them to the car when going out and then bring them back home when you returned so you could listen in the house. Not very convenient, but you were cool if you had this tech back in the day. However, this technology did not last long.
Next comes cassettes, a smaller version, much smaller, but capable of holding more songs than an 8-Track. Cassettes became very popular, and everyone had a stereo at home with a cassette player as well as one in the car. This was the tech of the day, along with the stereo systems and equipment to play them and the radio. These cassettes started with 60 minutes of recording or playing time. However, this quickly grew to 90 and then 120 minutes of capacity. I had many of these tapes; all gone now, with some in a landfill and probably worth something to collectors.
I could go on and on, which would be fine with me, but I don’t want to bore you, so I’ll skip over some things to keep this moving. To round out this subject, I’ll leave you with a couple of images of the day. A car with a cassette player, followed by an image of a stereo rack system of the time, which gave you status: the bigger and louder, the better. Unlike today, the smaller, the better.
Hooking up these systems for all of us non-technical folks back in the day was quite a task and sometimes required a call-a-friend option. I’ve provided an image below for reference. One simple misunderstanding of input and output resulted in failure of the system to play because the cables weren't hooked up right. Hell, it took me forever to figure out input and output, and many times I spent a lot of time trying to get my system to play. Remember, at this time we were clueless about technology, and schools taught none of it. Anyway, you get the point. I’m going to skip the discussion about reel-to-reel devices because they were short-lived technology, and the same tape technology was used, only with more storage space. These newer tapes held multiple albums of music, but finding a song was crazy. Eventually, scanning of tapes for the next song became available as an advanced feature. However, at that time, technology left reel-to-reels behind.
Note: going forward, I will use the word tape and cassette interchangeably and will get specific if necessary.
As technology advanced, the capability to record music hit the market. I’m not talking about someone singing or speaking on tape, but the ability to copy from one tape to another, an exact copy. Not only could you copy tape to tape, but you could also record an album to tape, and even music from the radio. Why would you have to buy anything when it could be cheaper to copy what you wanted to listen to? You were no longer forced to buy a complete album or cassette for only one song.
As teenagers, we were in heaven, but that did not last long. As the music companies and artists recognized the lost revenue, they struck back, and a big copyright battle was fought, and copyright protection was enacted. Hey, if you really think about it, this was the right thing to do, and copyright battles are still going on today. But with digital music, everything changed. You make a playlist and have it everywhere you go, even on your phone. My gosh, we teenagers back in the day didn’t have phones or mobility of music, but that was about to change.
Boomboxes changed how people experienced music because it was now mobile, and the status symbol was who had the biggest, loudest box. The picture below gives you an idea of what I’m talking about.
Before that, music was mostly tied to a physical place like a living room stereo, the car radio, the jukebox, or the record player. Talking about jukeboxes, what the heck is that?
I have to mention the jukebox that was popular but was on the way out in my teens and is still around but mostly to add to the ambiance of a bar or restaurant. I still remember putting in a dime or a quarter to play a couple of songs. Sometimes the jukebox could turn into a friendly musical battleground. Someone would put on country, the next person would answer with rock or Motown, and somebody else would head back to the machine for another selection. Before long, people weren’t just choosing songs—they were competing for control of the room. It was fun to watch or even be part of.
COPYRIGHTS - The time when music went from shared public listening, to home copying, to industry-controlled digital access.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, blank cassette tapes and recording devices gave people a new power: the ability to copy and not pay for music. With an FM radio and a cassette recorder, listeners could capture songs directly from the air, especially during commercial-free music blocks. I still remember FM radio designating certain hours when it would play an album, advertisement-free, so people could copy the music. At the time, FM was considered the underground music source to all of us teenagers. We would coordinate, with many of us were listening and recording our music. Those were the days when I copied Steely Dan, Pink Floyd, Cat Stevens, CSN&Y, Santana and so much other music. Copying from AM would be like today: nothing but commercials and DJ’s talking, so you couldn’t get a clean copy. FM is now also the same with no ability to copy music.
For the music industry, however, all of this was a threat. Record companies argued that every homemade tape could mean one less record or cassette sold, which is actually true. The conflict grew sharper when digital CD copying arrived, because digital copies could be higher quality and easier to duplicate. Over time, music moved away from home recording and physical ownership toward CDs, downloads, iPods, and finally streaming. Now, with streaming and iPhones or other devices, you have music with you wherever you go with your playlists. We’ve come a long way, baby.
A couple of mentions before I continue on. How many remember the days of the Walkman and other associated devices? The Walkman changed music from something shared in a room or blasted from a boombox into something personal and private. Beginning in the late 1970s and exploding in the 1980s, portable cassette players let people carry their favorite tapes with them and listen through lightweight headphones. Other companies quickly made similar players, often adding AM/FM radio, auto-reverse, bass boost, smaller designs, or rugged sports cases. The idea continued with portable CD players, MiniDisc players, MP3 players, the iPod, and finally the smartphone. The Walkman was not just a gadget. It was the beginning of the personal soundtrack. To give you an idea from a timeline perspective, I had AI put together a list.
Let me end this section with one more memory lane trip, Cassette Clubs where you purchansed one tape for some low price and received many free ones to join the club which I did. The only problem is you had to buy one every month and that is how they got made their money. This moved to CD’s as the technology change. Enjoy these examples advertisements from AI.
TELEVISION AND VIDEOS - I still remember a bit of black-and-white television (TV) on a small screen, probably not a lot bigger than a large PC screen, but in a box on a stand. These things were heavy because the reduction of size and weight of tech changed to where we are today, able to lift a 60”+ TV by yourself, if you are young of course.
This was our life before cable, VCRs, DVDs, streaming, and smartphones. Looks like fun, right? Actually, it was because, as a family, you sat together and enjoyed being together; laughing and discussing was a shared living-room experience. We need a lot more of this, unlike today, where everyone is on their own. It is no wonder our kids have issues; they lost family time, in my opinion.
Early TV grew out of radio, starting with variety shows, westerns, children’s programs, game shows, news, and live comedy. When I say "variety," we are talking nothing like today. Only a handful of choices were available on TV and movies did not come out daily. A theater had one showing at a time, unlike today and the time between the showing and the next feature films was not on a weekly basis, more like monthly. The following is a list of shows from the ancient days.
OMGosh, does this bring back memories of my past, especially the show I Love Lucy, which is still one of the best shows ever. She went on year after year with variations, and the public loved her. She was so funny, just simple funny no gimmicks and the trouble she would get into was hilarious. One of the funniest shows was when Lucy and her friend Ethel started work at a chocolate factory working on the line. As the chocolates passed by on a conveyor belt they were to wrap the chocolate place it into something and then back to the next piece. Well, that did not last for long as they got behind and starting eating them or placing them in their bra. It’s hard to explain but it was funny and is to this day at least for me.
Some of my other favorites were the Jackie Gleason show with him telling his wife “to the moon Alice” or something like that. Then their is The Carol Burnett Show, and watching her do skits with Tim Conway, Harvey Korman, Vickie Lawrence, Lyle Wagner and Dick Van Dyke. Carol Burnett had a cast where the audience laughed not only at the sketch, but at the performers trying not to laugh at each other. They would perform a scene and start laughing, trying to hold it in by turning away or holding their hand over their mouth, which of course made it funnier. Tim Conway was the one who got all of them to break up, causing the other performers to be unable to hold their laughter while performing live on stage. Remember, these shows were live in front of an audience. I think if we could ever get the younger generations to watch these clean, funny shows, they would enjoy them. But they have to get over black and white to do that, and at a much slower speed than TikTok. Most of this stuff is better than anything we have today where morality doesn’t exist in the Networks, Hollywood or the influencers.
One last thing before I move on: in the beginning, there were only the big three networks that controlled all TV media, and that is still true today, although they are now too big for their britches and have turned political, negating anything they say or publish. Those networks are ABC, CBS and NBC, and they still have a lot of power today with many affiliates to support their narrative. The following from displays a summary from back in the day:
There was no cable back in the day but there was an antenna. So, what the heck is an antenna?
The antenna was how many families pulled television and radio signals out of the air. A rooftop antenna, rabbit ears, or a long metal rod on a radio could mean the difference between a clear picture and a screen full of snow. People adjusted antennas by hand, turned them toward the nearest broadcast tower, and sometimes wrapped foil around the rabbit ears hoping to improve the signal. For the young this is like going back to the dinosaur time.
The TV box anntenna was small but served the purpose and were a critical piece of equipment of the day to stay informed. The image below displays a man installing an antenna at the peak of the roof to improve reception. When I had a Cape Cod home, I tried to install the antenna myself and tried climbing the ladder to see if I could get to the peak. I got close to the top before backing down, and that was without the antenna and decided to have a construction worker install it at the peak. I paid him well.
Antenna’s were strange devices because you could turn it in a 360 degree fashion and change the reception. That is if you are watching a show and there in interference or static the issue could be resolved by turning the antennae which is impossible if installed as I just showed. But, never fear technology comes to the rescue and that is an automated device to turn the anntenna from within your home. Of course someone had to go back up and reinstall the antenna into a different bracket allowing the turning of the the device for better quality.
The following image gives you an idea of watching TV back in the day. No remotes, everything was manual, so you had to get off your butt to change stations, tapes or albums. And maybe we need this back so our kids get up and move around instead of sitting on social media all day long. Changing the position of the antenna was a continuous task to be able to watch a show.
I could actually go on and on about this subject, but that would most likely lose readers’ interest, so I will end it here and start a new article following this line of thought at a later time. I hope you enjoyed this article and appreciate any feedback. My intent is to inform and to give you a break from politics.
Have a great day, Charley
Notes: All of the images are AI-generated from Openart.AI and reviewed by me to ensure accuracy, as I intend. Of course, I used AI spell checking and formatting, using some of the content suggested changes, but otherwise this is mine, all mine.
Let me leave you with a couple of images, mostly for the older folks to bring back some memories.
