24 Totally Normal 1980s Habits That Would Be Bizarre Today | Strange History Podcast

Welcome to the Strange History Podcast, the show where we take a fond and occasionally horrified look at the bizarre things humans once thought were completely normal. I'm your host, Amy, and today we're strapping on our neon fanny packs, grabbing a tab cola, and heading back to the nineteen eighties, a magical time when mullets roamed free, hair spray holes in the ozone layer were a legitimate concern, and safety regulations were more suggestions than rules. So let's fire up the Dolorean and revisit twenty four things that were perfectly normal in the eighties but would raise some serious eyebrows today.

Smoking everywhere. This seems to be a trend we have seen through the decades. At one point we smarten up. I believe it was two thousand and four when smoking indoors finally became illegal. Back then, lighting up wasn't just common, it was practically a social queue. Restaurants, offices, airplanes, you name it. People smoked there. You could sit in the non smoking section of a diner and still feel like you were chainsmoking through osmosis. On a TWA flight in nineteen eighty five, the flight attendant's turbulence.

Announcement was please remain seated, but if you must smoke, do so carefully. Safety first. Kind of kids riding in cars without seat belts seat belts optional car seats suggestion. The prized spot was in the rear facing way back of the family station wagon, where kids could make faces at the drivers behind them while eating pop tarts. In nineteen eighty three, a Florida family turned their minivans back area into a mobile playroom with bean bags. It was fun right up until the day a rear end collision turned the bean bags into airborne missiles.

When I was a kid, my parents and aunt and uncle would pile five kids and four adults into one one of those wood panel station wagons every weekend during the summer and go for pizza. If my cousin Sam and I were lucky enough to score the way back, we would be reminded of the kids who stuck their head out the window and the father had closed the window and decapitates the kids. It worked. We never ever stuck our heads out the window and today remain one with our noggins. As an adult, I now realized they were full of beans and scare tactics were, and I am sure still remain a wonderful parenting tool.

Letting strangers babysit your kids. If your neighbor's teenage niece was good with animals, that was apparently enough qualification to watch your children. No interviews, no CPR training, not even a background check. In nineteen eighty seven, a New Jersey mom hired a babysitter she met at a grocery store checkout. The sitter turned out to be a French exchange student who thought she was just coming over for dinner. Hanging out at the mall all day before social media, the mall was the feed teens would spend hours roaming, trying on clothes they had no intention of buying, and sharing fries in the food court.

In nineteen eighty nine, a Minnesota mall band sitting on the central fountain after teens started using it as a dare base dunk tank, calling someone and just hoping they were home. There was no texting, no DMS, no scene check mark. If you called and got no answer, that was it, mystery forever. In nineteen eighty eight, a Pennsylvania teen missed a live call in contest to win concert tickets because his friend's mom had forgot to hang up the phone after an all night gossip session. Renting VHS tapes and hoping they were rewound Friday night meant heading to the local video store and hoping someone had returned back to the future, and if they hadn't rewound it, you might get slapped with a twenty five cent fine.

Eighteen eighty seven, a Texas rental shop created a rewind police membership for customers who could be trusted to return tapes properly rewound. Everyone else was fined into compliance. Drinking straight from the garden hose, no one thought about hot plastic chemicals or hose safety. If you were thirsty after a bike ride, you went straight for the spigot. A Wisconsin dad in nineteen eighty four claimed water from the hose tasted better than tap water, mostly because it kept kids outside where they couldn't track mud into the kitchen.

Playing outside until the street lights came on. There were no GPS trackers or find my iPhone alerts, just the neighborhood's unspoken law. When the street lights flickered on, you came home. In nineteen eighty two, a group of Chicago kids built a clubhouse in a vacant lot out of wood scraps and old carpet. It lasted three years before the city demolished it for safety reasons that should have been obvious from day one. Smoking sections in restaurants picture this. One side of the room was smoking, the other non smoking, with nothing but a fake plant to separate them.

In nineteen eighty six, a Denny's proudly designated smoking booths right next to non smoking booths, separated by a plant. The plant did little to contain the cloud neon clothing that could be seen from space. The eighties were aggressively bright neon windbreakers, leg warmers, and glow shoelaces made everyone look like a living highlighter. A California middle school banned neon shoelaces in nineteen eighty nine because kids were trading them during fire drills. Instead of evacuating returning glass soda bottles for cash before recycling bins, you could turn in empty soda bottles for coins for kids.

It was both eco friendly and a way to fund arcade habits. In nineteen eighty one, a group of Oregon kids pulled bottles out of a river and made six dollars, which they immediately blew on pac Man fixing cassette tapes with a pencil. If your tape got chewed up, you didn't cry. You grabbed a pencil, stuck it in the reel, and wound it back by hand. In nineteen eighty five, a Detroit DJ accidentally played a warped tape of Take on Me live on air. Listeners thought it was an artsy remix and flooded the station with requests for the slow version.

Leaving kids in the car while running errands. In the eighties, if mom had to just run into the store, the kids stayed in the parked car with the windows cracked and maybe the radio on. No one panicked, called nine one one or even thought it was strange. In nineteen eighty six, a mom in Ohio left her two kids in the car with a can of pringles while she did the weekly grocery shop. She came back to find they'd use the empty can to catch lightning bugs through the cracked window. School computer labs with Apple two's and Oregon Trail computer class meant lining up to use a big, beige machine with a floppy disc the size of a pop tart If you didn't die of dysentery and Oregon trail, you were basically a tech genius.

In nineteen eighty eight, a Massachusetts school's entire computer lab lost half a day because a student hid the floppy disks in the ceiling tiles to keep them safe. Long distance phone charges calling your cousin two states away could cost as much as dinner. Parents would yell it's long distance, Make it quick, and you'd have to cram your conversation into sixty seconds. In nineteen eighty five, a teen in Iowa called a California pen pal for forty five minutes and racked up a sixty eight dollar phone bill.

Her parents made her work at the local ice cream shop all summer to pay it off. Metal playground equipment that doubled as an oven. Every playground had metal slides, jungle gyms, and merrygo rounds that could sear your skin by July. Kids didn't complain. They just learned to slide fast. In nineteen eighty two, a Texas park had to repaint its slide because it was literally melting flip flops. Watching cartoons only on Saturday morning. You couldn't just stream he man or Looney Tunes. You had to wake up at six am on Saturdays, pour a bowl of sugary cereal and watch until noon.

Miss it too bad? No reruns until maybe next year. In nineteen eighty four, a Minnesota kid slept through Saturday cartoons for three weeks in a row and started taping them on VHS, sparking a mini cartoon rental business at his school. Ice cream trucks selling cigarette shaped candy. Nothing said summer treat like pretending to smoke while eating sugar. These chalky white candy sticks even had red painted tips to mimic the ember. In nineteen eighty seven, a New Jersey mayor tried to ban candy cigarettes.

The local kids staged a protest outside city hall, complete with bubblegum cigars. Encyclopedias as the Internet. If you had a question you didn't Google, you pulled down a dusty volume of Encyclopedia Britannica and hoped your topic wasn't stuck between two missing letters. A family in Kansas in nineteen eighty one proudly displayed their full Encyclopedia set, except for Volume M, which was lost in a move. They never replaced it. So Moon landing remained a mystery to their kids for years, leaving the front door unlocked.

Neighborhoods in the eighties often had an open door policy. Literally, friends and neighbors would just walk in, yell hello, and head straight to the kitchen. In nineteen eighty five, a Michigan man came home from work to find his neighbor making a sandwich in his kitchen. The neighbor's excuse, I was out of Mayo gas station attendance cleaning your windshield. Many full service gas stations had attendants who'd pump your gas, check your oil, and clean your windshield for free. In nineteen eighty three, a teenager working at an Oregon station accidentally filled a diesel truck with regular gas and still got a five dollars tip for cleaning the windows.

Real nice Unsafe science experiments in school science class in the eighties often meant unsupervised experiments with bunsen burners, mercury, or dry ice. Safety goggles were optional. In nineteen eighty four, a Florida teacher let students bring dry ice home for fun. One kid used it to make fog for his Gi Joe battles in the bathtub. Drive in movie theaters as teen hangouts. Drive ins were still going strong in the early eighties. Teens piled into cars or the trunks if they wanted to avoid paying and spent more time socializing than watching the movie.

In nineteen eighty two, an Ohio drive in had to post signs reading please watch the movie after staff caught dozens of people sitting backwards in their cars to chat with friends instead mixing tapes from the radio. Making the perfect mixtape meant hovering over the record button praying the DJ wouldn't talk over the intro of your favorite song. In nineteen eighty six, a Boston teen spent two hours recording Livin' on a Prayer without the DJ talking, only for his sister to tape care bears sing along over it the next day.

And that, dear listeners, is a quick trip through the neon colored, smoke filled hose, water hydrated wonderland that was the nineteen eighties. It was a time when rules were looser, phones were dumber, and somehow we survived. Thanks for listening to the Strange History Podcast. If you enjoyed this trip down memory lane, don't forget to subscribe and maybe call a friend on a landline just for old time's sake. Until next time, I'm Amy reminding you history is full of strange and sometimes dangerously nostalgic moments.

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