A look back in “Time”

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Courtesy: Time Magazine, cover by Neil Leifer

Courtesy: Time Magazine, cover by Neil Leifer

I like cats. (No, this isn’t about cats!)

I recently found an issue of “Time” magazine that a good friend gave me in December 1981. It had a feature story on cats.

I kept it all these years. (I also have the post office’s cat stamp from the same era.) Don’t ask, don’t judge.

Yo mama! I couldn’t help fingering through it.

The ‘80s were great. I loved the hair and the clothes. (For me that long layered curly look was a lot less work than today’s “natural” flat look. More attractive too.)

In paging through the articles and issues of the day, many weren’t that different  — concerns about the economy, jobs, government budget deadlocks. Missing was terrorism and public shootings.

Some surprises were the cigarette ads (more than one brand too). When was the last time you saw one of those? (The construction workers in the ad were really hot!) There were ads for Atari and lots of booze.

The Bethlehem Steel Corporation had a full-page spread touting its success and plans for modernization. This company has been closed for years. Something got short-circuited in their plans.

There were old familiar names like Brezhnev, Haig, Schmidt, Sakharov, and Khomeini.

There was an article on mail orders which were taking off. (Yes, that with catalogs – no internet!)

Nissans were Datsuns. Texas Instruments was losing its edge.

Queen Elizabeth looked young as did Ronald Reagan, Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson. Really young!

I got lost in a reverie for a while. (I just know I looked years younger too.)

I was going to toss the magazine. The cat article was not as great as I remembered but shucks, those were some of my good days!

How about you? Stumble over something that sent you into a reverie?

38 thoughts on “A look back in “Time””

  2. 1981- my first year of college. This makes me so nostalgic. But even then there were signs of things to come. I protested Reagan and the NRA in those years. I also,unfortunately, started smoking. Calculators (from Texas Instruments) were new and for losers. Atari was cool – for 10 minutes. And then it was lame.

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  3. Sounds like a time capsule event. (The ads are sometimes the best part of old magazines)
    Big libraries have so much on film/internet they seem to be phasing out magazines entirely. (And the have fewer librarians due to budget cuts and the periodical dept got chopped) If it’s go Farrah, someone might buy it from Ebay/flea market at school or church?

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    • Along with Clearsil. My Mom had her Pond’s cream. It was before I discovered espresso at Starbucks! (Oh yes and Dippity Do! God I must have bought a truckload of that stuff!)

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  7. The eighties didn’t seem that long ago until you read about some of the details. I’d totally forgotten that Nissans were Datsuns. My last car was a Nissan, and I never once thought of it as a Datson. We lived overseas during the 80s, so I missed a lot of the cultural details. I wore a lot of cotton dresses, designed by me and made by the dressmaker, the fabric often bought by my husband on his travels. I loved the batik he brought home.

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    • I bet your 80s were wonderful! Living in a paradise! In the 70s I spent a month in Hawaii and I loved the wonderful prints. I came home with a lot of fabric and wore the clothes I made for years.

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  8. Yes! Connected with a long lost high school friend on Facebook. I’m amazed at what I do and do not remember. He has a really good memory so has been filling me in on everything. I can only assume it’s all true…

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  9. My sister sent me a real estate listing that popped up in her stalkerish Facebook feed. It was one of our old houses in D.C. Still had a hideous fuchsia bathtub.

    Yes, I was nostalgic over a fuchsia tub.

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  11. When I think 80s, I think of women truly breaking through the glass ceiling and going places. It was a fun era!

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  12. Funny! But ‘back’ when we lived in the 80s (and wasn’t that just a coupla year ago?), the hair was fun, the fashions made sense, and we were going to be young forever. Me? Every once in a while I go to my bottom drawer and read old cards from friends/family that even date back to the ’80s. Will I ever throw them out? What do you think? 🙂

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  13. Yes, I loved the 80s! Feathered hair, power suits and blouses with bows at the neck all worked for me. Still like to catch the sound of Hall and Oates on the radio now and then. Don’t know why the 80s are so dissed…Probably those shoulder pads on Joan Collins were a step too far!

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  14. I dug up a photograph of my husband’s cousin when he was a ten-year-old at our wedding rehearsal dinner 52 years ago. He was the father of the groom in last week’s wedding. He was just a boy then and is now nearing retirement age. Time flew!

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  15. Love looking at old magazines ~> such a blast from the past.

    So . . . mail order was in its infancy, eh?
    We’ve come a long way, baby!

    Pass me a Virginia Slims!

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  16. I would put the magazine in the pile to donate to the library. They can sell it at a book sale, the library will get a few pennies, and someone else can be amused like you were! BTW, I liked the curly look better, too.

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