What time is it?
I don’t know. I don’t have my phone with me.
Phone? Where’s your watch?
What’s a watch?
Time was, everyone wore a watch. A right of passage for a young girl or boy was their first watch. It was a big deal.
I think I was 7 when I got my first watch. It was an inexpensive stopwatch. I was constantly stopping and starting the watch, which also reset the time. So I never really knew what time it was – only that 30 seconds had passed since I last hit the start button.
When I was 10, I got my first quality watch as a Christmas present. It was a Bulova, a very nice timepiece, when I remembered to wind it.
Yes, non-Boomers, we had to actually wind our watches. They were not powered by atoms and they were not digital. To tell the hour, you looked for Mickey’s short arm. His long arm told the minutes. For us, the time would have been twelve after four, not 4:12
Also, I think every Boomer had a Mickey Mouse watch at some point in their lives. Or maybe it was a Davey Crockett, Alice in Wonderland or a Superman watch. We had those, too.
We also likely had a Timex.
Timex watches were reasonably inexpensive, much less than a Longines, Elgin or Bulova. They were hyped by John Cameron Swayze as the “Watch that takes a licking and keeps on ticking”.
Swayze was a serious newscaster, but became better known as a spokesman for Timex.
For twenty years, Swayze put his Timex watch under truck tires, dropped it out of an airplane, smashed it with hammers, but he never could stop the watch from working. It kept on ticking.
Today, about the only watches you’ll see are costume or dressy watches for ladies or Rolex products for all those who want the world to know how much money they have.
Time was, we all had just plain, old watches.