Deely-ted to see them again
Tuesday June 01st 2010, 10:23 pm
Filed under: Family,Life

I was telling a friend her dog’s picture with it wearing deelyboppers was cute, and I got back a query of “Deelyboppers?”

That gave me one of those instant, oh, good, now I’m old! moments.  So I found this site.  I had guessed it was the 80’s, maybe early 80’s when they started being a big thing?

1982. I’m good. And scroll down a bit and check out that cordless phone. I knew someone who had one of those back when we were all dirt-poor grad students living in married student housing, making her purchase (her husband had just accepted a semi-mythical Real Job) all the more memorable: the sound quality was so much bad radio static, the price something Steve Jobs would have loved. (The electronics, though, not so much.)

Yes, children, when you were little we had to shovel the driveway both ways uphill in the snow with our telephones. Well, they were big enough to shovel with, anyway. If we’d had one of those. Which we didn’t.

But those deelyboppers?  Baby, we put those on you.


15 Comments so far
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I’m so glad I was distracted by raising two small children through most of the 80’s. 🙂

Comment by twinsetellen 06.02.10 @ 4:44 am

Ha! You just closed another culture gap for me.

Comment by karin maag-tanchak 06.02.10 @ 6:01 am

heh — I remember those! and the cordless phone back in the day

thanks for the trip down memory lane!!

Comment by Bev 06.02.10 @ 6:38 am

You are NOT old. We’ve already established that I was just too deep into being a haughty teen to catch the deelybopper craze.

Comment by Channon 06.02.10 @ 6:42 am

I remember those! Had no idea what they were called, but I remember them.

I saw a cellphone like that in a movie a few months ago – forget the name of the movie, though – and again boggled at what we thought was endlessly cool back then. You needed to lift weights to be able to use that thing!

Comment by Lene 06.02.10 @ 7:30 am

We used the word ‘deeleyboppers’ or ‘-bobbers’ back in the mid60s in High School. But it was just used to mean something we couldn’t think of the word for, not an actual item.

Comment by sue 06.02.10 @ 7:41 am

My daughter has an actual corded phone – plugged into the wall in her current apartment! Funny thing is – she doesn’t have a phone line!!!

I too use deeleybopper for the name of something I can’t think of – or widget. Hope you are well. g

Comment by gMarie 06.02.10 @ 8:33 am

Boy, talk about square. I’m a lot older than you (see today’s blog), and I had to go look up “deelybopper”. Some cute pix on Google.

Other fun –

TOMBSTONES:
Harry Edsel Smith of Albany, New York: Born 1903–Died 1942. Looked up the elevator shaft to see if the car was on the way down. It was.

Thurmont, Maryland: Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.

Comment by Don Meyer 06.02.10 @ 9:32 am

I remember deely boppers, and I am NOT old, which indirectly means, you can’t be either. My only question is; why did we think they were so cool?

Comment by Ruth 06.02.10 @ 10:37 am

Sending you a photo of 70’s fashion backchannel. Doze were da daze.

Comment by Diana Troldahl 06.02.10 @ 1:04 pm

If kids today had to live the way we did when we were young they would have major anexity attacks!!

Comment by LDSVenus 06.02.10 @ 4:49 pm

Oh, I never thought they were fashion, just fun! 🙂 And I can’t remember the Swedish word for them, which bugs me…

Comment by Monica 06.02.10 @ 11:35 pm

Heh. I had an “I’m old moment” at work a while back. the radio station played ‘Layla’ by Eric Clapton, the acoustic version. I commented that you never heard the original with the screaming guitar riffs anymore. (one of my favorites) A coworker looked up at me and said, “Carol, this IS the original version”.Um, no, no it’s not…..

Comment by Carol 06.07.10 @ 11:12 am

I sang at a wedding back in the day where the mother of the groom cried throughout the ceremony and wore deelyboppers to the reception.

The marriage didn’t last.

Comment by Shirley 06.11.10 @ 2:01 pm




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