Last week Linda’s wallet was stolen, which started the process of replacing her credit cards and IDs.
To get a new Driver’s License you now need all kinds of documentation (never mind that you’re right there in the system, picture and all).
The snag she hit was that her Social Security name was still Linda McBride, which didn’t match her license. (Remember when they assured us that Social Security numbers weren’t required, and wouldn’t be used for identification?)
So to get her name changed she needed our marriage certificate.
In looking for it, she unearthed a box of mementos from the 70s, that proved to be quite a time capsule of our college years.
Speaking of IDs, here are ours from our college days.
One of the things I found most striking was the absence of anything to do with computers. Even the tickets and itineraries for our honeymoon were hand written or typed, because travel agents and airlines worked by telephone, with pen and paper.
The only sure sign of computers were the UCLA quarterly registration cards, which were IBM punch cards generated by the university’s sole IBM 360/90 computer. These were folded up to fit in your wallet.
Remember BioRhythms? They were a popular gimmick in the 70s, and there were machines that would print yours for any date you wanted. But even the biorhythm cards would have been generated by a kiosk with dedicated electronics (or perhaps even mechanics) to generate the graphs. Here are Linda’s and my biorhythms for our wedding day. The prospects for sex look pretty bleak.
The saddest thing I found was this page from my 1973 senior yearbook. Each senior got to design his own page (actually, as editor, I had to design the whole book, but that’s another story). I decided to do a collage of things that were meaningful to me. There in the center is my mint copy of Spiderman Number 1, which is worth over a quarter million dollars. Unfortunately, the next year I sold it for about ten bucks.
Anyway, the walk down memory lane was fun. I can’t say youth is wasted on the young; those were good times, too.
