Speaking of under the hood, I remember seeing an engine and being able to change the oil, air, spark plugs. Carburetor! Now, there's a word googling for!
And you had to gap the plugs and set the points in the distributor - needed a big-ass Chilton's manual for that too! I got my driver's license and first car in 1973 - just in time for the Arab Oil Embargo to double the price of gas (all the way to 70 cents a gallon). New license, my first car, and I couldn't afford to drive it around the flippin' block.
And nobody except the well-to-do flew anywhere for vacation. It was always a long drive somewhere, usually in mid-summer with the 4-port A/C going full blast (windows, for you young whippersnappers). And all the exits didn't have gas/food/lodging like now - sometimes you had to drive a long, long way between gas stations and eats. You always had a packed picnic basket in the car going to/from. And lest we forget, the Interstate freeway system was just getting started at that point. Most long car trips - at least through the mid-60s - were on state or US highways.
My dad had this thing for Daytona Beach - every damn year, twice a year (4th of July, Labor Day), we would drive down to Daytona and do the same exact crap each time. That went on for 13 straight years. I've deliberately not set foot in Daytona for over 35 years now. One cool thing came out of it though - in 1969 we were there for the Apollo 11 launch. We drove out to Cocoa Beach and watched it from about two miles away. By far the loudest, most spectacular thing I've ever seen. It was deafening, even that far away. Seeing Deep Purple live was loud, but didn't come close to this. We got back home to Atlanta in time to see Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. That was absurdly cool.
Oh yeah - Captain Kangaroo, Have Gun Will Travel, Gidget, Bozo the Clown, Prudential of Omaha's Wild Kingdom with Marlon Perkins, Saturday double-feature matinees at the theatre, and drive-ins - I loved drive-ins! I bet every town in America had a "Starlight" Drive-In at some point.
Comic books were 10 cents and there was only one kind of Coke. You were a kid and wanted to go somewhere, you got on your one-speed bike and pedaled there. Hugh Heffner was the only one who used the term "playdates".
And if you went to a national park that had bears, they had garbage dumps near the main road to attract them so tourists could gawk and take pictures. Or feed them through a cracked window. My, my, how times have changed.
Groovy, dig-it, outta sight, neat-o, copacetic, later gator, bee's knees . . .
