When I was a kid, I loved watermelon (of course, I still do). It was delicious, it was easy, and it was usually served in the summer, which, any kid will tell you, is the best season of the year. It was like that in the 1980s, and I’m pretty sure kids from the 1960s, 1940s, and even the 1800s felt the same way.
In fact, the vintage photos below are proof that kids from a long time ago loved watermelon. On a related side note: How cool are old photos? They not only LOOK cool (thanks to Instagram, you can make new photos look retro cool, too), but they seem so … real. Like a fuzzy memory or a glimpse into a crystal ball (if crystal balls looked into the past, and not the future).
Thirty years ago – and certainly 50 or 60 years ago – people took fewer pictures because digital cameras and camera phones hadn’t been invented yet. That meant that you took photos with cameras loaded with film, and you only snapped one or two pictures because you didn’t want to waste the film (getting it developed wasn’t cheap!). Sure, that resulted in lots of blurry photos in which someone was blinking or not smiling perfectly, but you know what? That’s life. Cameras back then captured real life. Or, in the case of the photos below, they captured real life with watermelon.
Nowadays, everyone has a 6-megapixel camera/high-definition video recorder in their back pocket, which means you get not two or three photos of the family picnic, but 65 pictures of the picnic, and they’re all online before the watermelon is cut up. Is that a good thing? I’m not so sure.
But enough ranting about technology. It’s making me feel old, and not in a good way like the pictures below.