The constant sound of car alarms in the 1980s


I don't know where you were in the 1980s, but if you remember that far back, especially if you lived in a place like Los Angeles (where I did) you remember the constant sound of car alarms. Of course, if you weren't there, how I describe it might sound like the rantings of an old guy, but I'm gonna try here in this blog post. 

The sound of car alarms was constant, all day, all night, 24/7, and it never stopped. It became something of a background noise. Sometimes the sound was up close, sometimes it was in the distance, but it was like a rushing river, it never, ever, stopped. No, not even at night - in fact it got worse at night.

Back then car alarms didn't automatically stop after a few minutes. So someone had to be there to go over to their car and turn it off, or it stayed on until the battery died in the car, which could take days. And there were a lot of aftermarket car alarms which were so sensitive that if a mosquito flew by they went off.

By the nineties, most of this nuisance had gone away, but not all of it. In my quiet suburban neighborhood in Glendale, Arizona, I had a neighbor who seemed to always be under his car in the mornings as I got ready to drive away to work, trying to stop his car alarm. It was loud, and I couldn't help but think that it was an awful thing to have to listen to first thing in the morning, but luckily for me it just faded away in the distance as I drove away.

I sometimes wonder if movies will try to pick up on this sound if they do a period piece set in the 1980s? It seems like it would comical to have the hero about to speak a dramatic line only to have a car alarm suddenly go off right next to him, or to have the background drone of the sound of car alarms as part of the soundtrack. It would be historically accurate for Los Angeles in the 1980s, but I'm inclined to think that it won't be done. If you know a movie, or TV show, that has that sound in the background please let me know - I'll be impressed, and maybe a big nostalgic.

Image at the top of this post: with my buddy Cory in 1987 in Canoga Park, California (I'm the one in the ASU sweatshirt - I have no idea who the little girl was, she just photobombed us). If you could hear the sound in the background, it would be car alarms 24/7.
If you like pictures of old-time Phoenix, please become a member of History Adventuring on Patreon. I share a LOT of cool old photos there, copyright-free, with no advertising. If you like Phoenix history and would like to help support my efforts to preserve and share precious digital historic images, please consider becoming a patron. Thank you!

Become a Patron!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me
Read more