First, in case you’ve never heard the term before, a SEENAGER is a mashup of the words senior and teenager. (Just for the record, the proper term for a newly coined mashup word or expression is a neologism. Don’t worry though, I don’t expect you to actually remember that. Just trying to be helpful in keeping your brain engaged while reading my posts.)
Seenagers, a term that first gained some traction in the 2010s, are (technically) older folks, typically over the age of 65, who maintain an active lifestyle, a youthful attitude and an interest in the popular activities and trends of new generations. However, that doesn’t describe perfectly how I think about seenagers. I wrote a blog post a couple of years ago about how this time in our lives is a time to indulge in reminiscing which can bring back such great memories. For the purpose of this post, though, the following paragraph is most apropos. I was thinking of the similarity between teenagers and seenagers when I wrote this paragraph:
I don’t know about you, but I have innumerable favorite songs! Music sparks so many memories. Attending music events gives us opportunity and permission (though permission is definitely NOT needed) to experience the joy of dancing, relive the fun of partying, and provides an excuse for a hell of a lot of drinking. Because of our age, maybe helped along by the drinking, our discernment and sense of decorum are sufficiently suppressed that no one cares anymore what they look like dancing or who they impress (or not). It’s a wonderfully free place to be in life.
As an actual teenager back in the 1960s, the telephone was our social lifeline. There are so many things about growing up that I don’t remember, but the evolution of telephones is not one of them. That’s how important telephones were in our lives.
My first memory as a child is having a plain, black rotary phone in the mid-1950s. The rotary desk phone you think of now came out in 1949, was dubbed the Model 500, and was the standard phone in American homes for well over a generation. For several years black was the only color you could buy, much like the first Model T ford automobiles in the early 1900s. Toward the end of that decade, designer colors like rose pink, lemon yellow, aqua blue, and moss green were available. Here is a hilarious video, for the sole purpose of making you laugh, of teens in 2019 trying to figure out how to use a rotary phone.
In 1959 the Princess phone was introduced as a small unit with a lighted dial. Households mostly only had one phone in their homes, and the Princess phone was designed and marketed as a second, smaller, bedside set. Then, in 1965, the Trimline phone, with the dial built into the handset, was introduced.
I remember growing up with all these versions of phones in our house over the years. My dad was a bit of a technology geek and thought nothing of spending money to have the latest and greatest new thing. I think finding himself in 1968 with a couple of teen girls was as much as he could handle though.
Patti and I tied up that one phone in our house for hours if mom and dad weren’t paying attention and forgot to yell at us to get off the phone. Like I said, we shared one phone with the entire family of eight, all who had active social lives. In the 1980s some indulgent (and probably frustrated) parents brought a second “landline” in for their children. That never happened at our house, even for my youngest sisters.
Touch-tone dialing was introduced in the late 1960s but didn’t become commonplace until the late 1970s. The transition was relatively slow because of the cost and people’s reluctance to change to “new technology.” Still though, telephones were corded and you were limited by that cord. There was little to no privacy when talking on the phone. I remember my little brothers making kissy noises at me whenever a boy would call me on the phone. Lucky teenagers had a phone in their bedroom.
My first memory of a “mobile” phone was in the mid-1990s when the company I was working for provided a “bag phone” for some of their engineers who had to be on job sites a lot. These Motorola units weren’t exactly new technology, but they certainly weren’t commonplace. Some of the earliest portable phones (which grew out of car phone technology) weighed nearly 5 pounds!
Brick phones, which became commercially available in 1983 were the first “cell” phones. These units weighed a hefty 2 pounds, had a talk time of 30 minutes, took 10 hours to charge, and cost $3,995 ($12,995 in 2025!). They were necessary to the evolution of cell phones, I suppose, but those stats are kind of ridiculous, and I don’t remember ever seeing one being used in my world.
When we started All American Power Clean in 1998, we invested in Motorola cell phones that had a walkie-talkie feature. Those worked well for us. We upgraded them to flip phones in the early 2000s. When texting became popular several years later, we used those flip phones to text from the number page (pressing the #5 three times to put an L in the text, then pressing the #6 three times for an O, #8 three times, for a V, etc.) until it drove us crazy. We bought new flip phones with full keyboards, but Randy and I both resisted smart phones (which began to become widely used when the first iPhone came out in 2007) as long as we could.
I think I finally caved in to the smart phone pressure about 2012 or so. Cost of the phones was a primary pressure, but there was a trend I could see clear as day of companies using smart phone technology to conduct business, verify information, and contact people using texting and e-mail. Randy kept his for quite a few years past that. He still only uses his phone to talk and text. It’s astonishing to think I didn’t have a smart phone 15 years ago.
Adopting smart phone technology began my love/hate relationship with telephones. And the love/hate dichotomy intensifies the older I get. I love having access to virtually all the known knowledge in all of history at my fingertips. I love how much it’s shrunk the world so I can make video calls to the people I care about the most. I hate feeling chained to the technology. I am working on the unhealthy need to feel “available” all the time. I view that as one of my most human failings.
Today, as we prepare for an appointment tomorrow to upgrade our smart phones (they’re damaged and old, so old, Randy says, that his only has one camera which horrifies the teenagers we know), I hate the thought of having to process all the options available with the technology I understand less and less every day (but can’t live without). And I hate the thought of having to relearn how to use updated technology simply to do things I already know very well how to do. As a seenager, it’s one thing to have an interest in things, but quite another to embrace all the hassle it is to keep up with everything that’s changing so fast.
Maybe, just maybe, this will be the last time we’ll have to have new phones while we’re here on this side of the turf. That’s definitely worth looking forward to.
P.S. If anyone has any tips on how or where to park at the Miami Cruise Port without breaking the bank, we’re all ears.
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