I Am A Relic From A Different Era
While taking a shower this morning, something popped into my tiny Duke head from way out in left field. Something to do with the 3 Stooges. Go figure.
In an episode I saw a year or so ago, Moe, Larry and Curly (or was it Shemp?) were running some kind of store. I think it was a general store, where they sold a little of everything. And apparently they owned it, which triggers a lot of unrelated questions…
Anyway, a woman came in and said she needed to purchase a light bulb. And the thing was shockingly expensive; I can’t remember the price, but it was way more than they cost now, without even taking inflation into account.
And before she paid, um, Moe, he screwed the thing into a light socket built into the top of the checkout counter, just to make sure it worked.
None of this was part of the comedy, it was apparently just the reality of light bulb-buying in the ’30s and ’40s. I guess they were so unreliable, and expensive, stores provided a place where you could test them in advance.
It’s one of those things that people probably didn’t even question or contemplate, which have become extinct over time.
So, while working the shampoo into a lather, careful not to disturb the wasp-built skin raisin on the back of my head, I tried to come up with things that were common when I was but an ugly youngster, which have now gone away.
And here’s what I came up with:
Taking your Coke bottles back for a deposit. That’s what we called it: Coke. It didn’t matter if it was Dr. Pepper or 7UP, and this led people to say things like, “Mountain Dew is my favorite kind of Coke.”
But I’m already getting off the subject…
Every grocery store had a sticky playpen-type thing right inside the front door, where people would put their “empties.” Some of the more fancy-pants places had an empties steward, who would issue you a receipt, but usually it was just done on the honor system.
When you purchased more sodas, in heavy-ass glass eight-packs, the cashier would say, “Did you bring in your bottles?” Then they’d knock forty cents, or whatever, off the price of your new “Cokes.”
And if you didn’t bring your empties, you’d have to pay a deposit on the reusable bottles.
Since empty bottles were worth a nickel each, which was a lot of money to a kid in 1972, we all scavenged for them. Put in a little effort, and you could keep yourself in bubble gum through bottle deposits alone. Oh, it was a genuine cottage industry…
Neighbors sharing a party line. My grandmother, who lived across the street from us, shared a line with two or three other houses when I was young. Can you imagine?
I remember picking up the receiver once, to call my mother at her job, and a fat teenager from two doors down was on there yammering to one of her friends. My grandmother said, “Oh, she usually doesn’t stay on very long. Just try it again in a few minutes.”
The whole thing seems bizarre to me now.
Letting the TV warm-up. Back when televisions had big ol’ tubes in them, we’d have to allow time for them to “warm up.” This was part of the TV-watching experience: “Jeff, if you want to watch Rat Patrol tonight, you’d better turn the TV on, so it can start warming up…” Heh.
Also, when you turned it off, there was a tiny white dot in the middle of the screen for a minute or so. My brother and I would put our thumb over it, then take it away to see if the dot had disappeared yet. And my mother or grandmother would yell at us, “Quit getting fingerprints all over the TV screen! Who cares about the dot?! Just don’t worry about that dot!”
Adjusting the aerial. Every house in the ’60s and ’70s had an eyesore conglomeration of aluminum attached to its roof, which was designed to improve TV reception during that pre-cable era.
My grandfather, never satisfied with the picture, was all the time leaning a ladder against the house and climbing onto the roof to adjust the antennae. Or, as he called it, the “aerial.”
This always made me nervous, because my grandfather wasn’t a young man, and I didn’t see why a person would risk their life just so they could get Flipper crystal-clear. But whatever.
Price stickers in stores. As weird as it now seems, stores used to put prices right on their merchandise. Indeed, when I worked at a grocery store after high school, we’d have to hit everything with a price gun before putting it on the shelf.
There were no scanners, just small pieces of paper stuck to the side of everything, with the cost printed on them. Crazy.
I hate to admit it, but we used to switch stickers at a local discount store, on LPs. I remember buying a copy of Exile On Main Street, a double album, with a sticker off a bottle of Body on Tap or something. The key, you see, was to identify a cashier who either a) didn’t have a clue, or b) didn’t give a single dingle.
One time Rocky and I were trying that particular scam, at the same store, and some Baby Huey dancing bear poofter brought the hammer down on us. We had to make a run for it. Not my proudest moment…
Would you like your carbons? Back in the day, before fancy-pants approval systems were perfected, credit cards were a huge pain in the ass. You’d have to take the customer’s card, attach it to an apparatus, lay a form across it and slide a big handle back and forth to make a rubbing of the numbers.
Ka-chunk!
Then you’d have to pull out a booklet, which was updated every couple of weeks, and check to make sure the card hadn’t been stolen or the person’s account wasn’t closed. Or, as we did at Peaches Records, we’d have to call the credit card company and get an approval code over the phone.
The whole process could take five minutes or more. It was a real ball-masher.
Plus, the form had carbon paper in the middle of it, and paranoid customers always wanted to take it with them. You know, so someone couldn’t dig the carbons out of a dumpster, and create a duplicate card with it.
I instantly disliked people who requested their carbons, because they were all doucheketeers. They usually acted like they were a little smarter than everybody else; there was a certain smugness to the carbon-folk.
Making soda tab chains. When I was a youngling the tabs off a can of soda, or beer I suppose, would actually pull all the way off. Consequently, the entire Earth was littered with pull-tabs.
So, kids used to collect them, and link them together to make a chain. I remember camping somewhere, probably Myrtle Beach, and some people we didn’t know made the world’s longest soda tab chain. I mean, that shit stretched an entire city block!
But, of course, that was all ruined when do-gooders forced soda and beer manufacturers to start using the current style of tabs, which stay attached to the can. Wotta rip-off.
And speaking of littering… Is my mind playing tricks on me, or did everyone just throw their trash out car windows during the ’60 and ’70s? I can remember people driving down Dunbar Avenue and, without thinking twice about it, slinging a whole sack of saucy Dairy Queen garbage through the passenger-side window.
What the hell? How was that ever acceptable? It makes me laugh, just thinking about it.
And now it’s your turn… I need to go to work, so you guys can take it from here. What things were once common parts of our everyday lives, and are now completely gone? Use the comments link.
And I’ll see ya tomorrow.
Filed under: Daily
Hey!
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King of the Internet!
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#2?
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Things my brother and I got away with as kids would have a mother arrested now. A Kindergartner walking 5 blocks home after school? To sit there from 2pm until 6pm alone? Surely you jest! String that mother up!
Nobody thought a thing about that shit back in the 70′s.
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FOUR?
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6!
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Remember Milk delivery?
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So, you hit on old TVs and lightbulb testing, but not on tube testing?
When the TV or radio went on the fritz, we used to trundle down to the local drugstore where they had a large cabinet whose top was covered in various plugs that fit the base of various vacuum tubes. You would place your suspect tube in the corresponding plug, press a button, and a needle would swing across a dial letting you know if the tube was OK or not.
As far as antennas go, with DTV what was old is new again. I have a huge antenna up in the attic (didn’t want the eyesore outside) for the first time in 20 years.
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Well, I’m only 24 so I don’t remember any of that stuff. However I do remember rotary telephones and adjusting the tracking on the top-loading VCR.
Oh, and I also remember methyalade (spelling?). I remember that my grandma put that bottle of hellfire on every cut or scrape and it burnt worse than peeing with the clap.
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Seems to me I recall dumping our household trash in a “gully” out back for years and then after we moved a county over maybe burning it in a 55 gallon can?
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Right on – I was talking about most of those things with someone I work with the other day. I recall some kids who use to steal bottles about like copper is stolen these days.
The trash thing still goes on – at least here where I live in Morgantown. I guess it has something to do with the college kids. The other day I asked some kid if tossed trash all over his parent’s yard/street back home like he and several thousand others do here. He flipped me off and went inside. I pick the shit up everyday as I am walking to and from work.
A couple of years ago, there was some students down the street who I think were trying to build a landfill in the backyard. I eventually got the cops to so something about it – but we still ended up with a rat problem.
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Seventh.
When I was a kid (in the mid to late 70′s) drug stores had this old tester machine where you could check either fuses or vacuum tubes or some such to see if they worked. Does anyone else remember this?
Here in the Detroit area we didn’t buy light bulbs. Ever. The Detroit Edison company supplied them. And when one burned out you simply exchanged it for a new one. That went the way of the dodo I’m guessing around 1976.
When we traveled long distances we had a big vinyl covered board that went over the back seat of the car and made one giant rectangular surface for the kids to roll around one. Any kid who could sit up under his own power rode on “the deck”. I’d hate to see the look on the cops face if I got pulled over with The Peanut on that thing today.
We didn’t have bottle deposits unitl around 1980. But we did have a bottling company called Towne Club where you’d mix and match your favorite flavors in wooden crates. You’d take your emptys back when you were done. I don’t know if they gave you a discount or not for the return. I also seem to recall the guy at that store was missing an arm. I know I have a bunch of bottles and a crate at home in my garage.
I rode my bike to deliver papers, pretty much without regard for the weather. Getting a ride from Dad was a very special treat. We’d hang on the running boards of the van and jump off when we got to the right house.
Anyway, that’s what I remember off the top of my head.
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How about those red chew tabs the dentist would give you so you could see exactly how poorly you brushed your teeth. Maybe that smear of red on their teeth would permanently damage the tender egos of today’s delicate children.
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I remember stopping by the pharmacy in downtown Stone Mountain -mmm made fresh vanilla cokes and chocolate malts-and buying packs of Winstons at 13 or 14 years old and no one batting an eye. Using, of course, the money from the returned bottles we scavenged from construction sites. We didn’t have the milk delivered but we would pick it up at Shepard’s dairy on the way home from the grocery store. We had Charles Chips potato chips delivered though, in big tin boxes, when we lived farther north Charlottesville maybe? My first stash box was a Charles Chips box.
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I remember laying down on the speaker deck in the back window of my parents car. Who needed a seat belt…
On long trips, my dad would put our sleeping bags in the back of the pickup with the camper shell on and we’d love it back there. We had 2 cars, so mom and dad would communicate via huge handheld cb radios. I remember my mom sticking the antenna out the window.
My dad would let me sit in his lap and steer our AMC Hornet (the “dump” car) when we took our trash to the local dump…which I actually remember as being a trash filled pit of some sort on the side of some backroad somewhere…
In elementary school, we would ride our bikes 2-3 miles to the local theater, library, or tennis courts…by ourselves…and nobody was worried about it.
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Ha Ha Rat Patrol! One of my favorites!
I remember someone made a dress out of those pull-top tabs. Rumor has it that you can still find them here where the Altamont concert was held.
Remember when TV stations played the National Anthem before they WENT OFF THE AIR for the night? My 15 year old niece didn’t believe me when I told her that. TV stations going off the air for the night, indeed….
Happy Wednesday, Surfers!
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Mimeographs. Mmmmm, the sweet sweet smell of fresh purple ink on hot paper. Takes me right back to 1977.
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My first boss used to tell me that drinking & driving wasn’t really an offense back in the day. This was his explanation when I would ask him why he was drinking behind the wheel… yikes…
Get caught doing that nowadays, and it will hinder you for a long time.
Oh, here’s a saying you won’t hear in the future:
“Be kind, please rewind”
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Brother? I don’t think I remember you ever talking about your brother? Just your parents and the other side of the family.
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i was just thinking about the station sign-off thing the other day, and was a little sad when i realized they don’t sign-off any more.
when i was a tot, we saved all our cans (separated by steel or aluminum) and newspapers, and took them to the recycling place for money. we didn’t have deposits.
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I remember the milkman who delivered cold bottles to a little silver box lined with a hard foam insulation.
I also remember the rotary phones. We just “rented” them from Ma Bell, so if it broke, you let them know and you’d get a new rental.
We got green stamps at the Winn-Dixie, and when there were enough in a book, we’d take them to the Green Stamp store and trade them in for other items.
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How about the test patern on TV before the broadcast day started.
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I use to be allowed to stand up in the front seat of the car. I had to know where we were going!
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Gretchen – yeah… mimeographs.
My Grandparents were on the party-line. Grandmother would get a little huffy because Oce Luce wouldn’t limit her calls.
Is anyone else sick of seeing ads for when all of the tv broadcasts will go digital and everyone with an old analog tv will have to buy a new tv or get a converter box? TIRED OF IT! If these people don’t get it already, they ain’t gonna. maybe when their tvs are just snowy, it’ll dawn on them. more more likely than not, there’ll be someone going to walmart (butthole) cause their tv don’t work no more, gol-darnit
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I remember our ma standing my brothers up in the front seat so they could pee out the windows without falling down. I remember actually eating the crawdads out of the creek by our house. I remember drinking out of the faucet on the side of the house and if you put your mouth on it, you’d get the piss shocked out of ya. I remember getting to ride to our grandma’s 4 miles away on the roof of our scout, I remember my dad growing weed in our garden until I was 9. I remember jumping off of our roof into piles of leaves in the back yard. I remember my brother eating an entire bar of exlax, it looked like a hersheys I was so pissed that he wouldn’t share. Hee hee, he survived, barely. I remember our parents sending us to the front at the drive-in movies to play on the playground equipment until it was pitch black dark and then trying to find your way back to your car looking in all the windows as you went. Those were the days…
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Every fall, about early or mid-October, my granddad would come to grade school and go in to the principals office and have me paged over the loud speaker. He would get me out of school so I could ride along with him out to the coal mine, load the truck with coal, and I would help him shovel it in to the basement through the coal door. They heated their house with coal until I was in high school.
He would also take me out of school for two days in late October so I could ride to Steubenville, Ohio with him to buy a truckload of grapes. These grapes came in 42 pound wooden crates and were delivered to a wholesaler called Canella’s in a refrigerated rail car from California.
I would unload all the grapes to his basement, let them warm up to room temperature over night, then grind them in to the mash barrels. Several days later, we would squeeze the mash into the finish barrels.
He was getting way too old to lift and tote. I was the free labor. It was lots of hard work, but many fond memories.
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I’m with you Jeff, we had to let the TV warm up so Grandma could watch Bonaza, Hee-Haw, Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction and My Three Sons and don’t forget the rabbit ears with aluminum foil on the ariels. We use to scavenge around the alleys and trash bins for bottles to get candy and ice cream money. My grandmothers stash of Coke bottles was off limits. The Mr Softee truck that use to drive around the hood in the summer time. Now Mr Softee takes on a whole new meaning.
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speaking of littering…do you remember the Indian (yes, dammit, that’s what he was called back then) / Native American in the commercial, standing by the side of the road – looking at the litter and a big fat tear rolled down his cheek>
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Drew – Merthialate and Mercurochrome
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I remember all the houses on our block still had the milk boxes even though they didn’t deliver anymore so I must have just missed it.
I remember only having 4 channels on the TV (CBS, NBC, ABC & PBS) which did have to warm up and you had to get up and change the channel by hand, no remote!
I remember our first cottage “up north” (<-it’s a Wisconsin thing) didn’t have indoor plumbing so we had a hand pump that had to be primed and an outhouse.
I remember at one placed we lived you could dial other people in your exchange by dialing 9 and then the 4-digit part…. i.e. instead of 833-1234 you could go 9, 1234… saved two whole buttons.
Speaking of which, we had the touch tone phones by then (I do remember rotary) but they had a little switch so that instead of getting the tones you got the rotary clicks because our old phone system didn’t do tones.
But here is the ones that going to shock the kids. If you are under 30 please sit down for this….. ready? I can remember a time when MTV played music videos all day long. Seriously. Then came Remote Control and we didn’t know it at the time but that was the beginning of the end.
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I remember the vacuum tube checkers at the 7-11 and Golden Gallon convenience stores. As far as litter goes, I remember my grandmother telling my sister and me not to throw it out “until we got to our street”.
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I remember when we were on a 10-party phone line (10 houses sharing the same line). My grandmother would like to listen to other people’s conversations. Then they cut it down to a 4-party line. Eventually the phone company (there was only one phone company back then) did away with party lines, but all the old folks were bitching because it was so expensive.
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Back when I was still teaching our department head would circulate a “mindset list” so that we could better understand first year students. It always amazed me every year the subtle differences in day to day experiences between my childhood and the childhoods of those I was teaching. Here is this year’s list: http://www.beloit.edu/mindset/2012.php
Other things:
78 RMP records – we only had a few (show tunes my mom liked)
Going home from school for lunch – when I was a kid you had to go home unless you came to school by bus. Two income households were rare in those days, but it didn’t matter. If you lived in town you had to go home. Of course in the 70′s kids weren’t as fragile as today’s kids, so we were safe when unattended. My son started school yesterday and they have to stay for lunch unless the parents demand he be allowed to leave.
Evening papers- as a kid I made a living delivering evening papers after school. The London Free Press canceled the evening edition in about 1981.
Gas stations- had mechanics and not convenience stores.
8 track tapes- gone and not missed in my house. This was the most inconvenient music medium ever invented. Still, I did wear out Sargent Peppers and Fly By Night.
Stubby beer bottles- all Canadian beer came in stubbies until the early 1980′s
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I remember going to Lake Erie as a child and seeing the entire shoreline covered in dead fish and pollution.
We would go outside and play all day unchecked until Dad would whistle for us to come in for dinner. We would all dress up every Sunday and go to church. Afterward we would have a very nice dinner. Kid’s clothes were very simple and childlike. Affordable. Now their clothes are expensive miniature adult clothes. We had to sleep in the heat growing up sometimes the whole family would get to sleep in the one air conditioned room…my parents. Playing neighborhood hide and seek when it was getting dark.
Jello molds, salmon croquettes, liver, homemade jams and jellies. Punch at parties. Bathing caps.
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Before I even finish reading, did I find this here or is this just a random coincidence?
http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/
Map 308 I believe.
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remotes on cords. I remember Laurie Johnson from across the street having one, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. You didn’t have to get UP to change the channel. Man, that made staying home from school sick even better…because you didn’t have to stick with the channel that showed The Price Is Right all day long because you were too weak to get offa the couch.
Riding in the ‘way back’ of the station wagon., My brothers and I FOUGHT over that one.
Summer camp, back when any kid could go, and not just those whose parent can afford the 600 simoleons a week.
Simoleons. I miss those.
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cc – if your first stash box was a Charles Chip can….would you be my best friend? that’s a LOT of consumables, right there.
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Your reminder about the price stickers brought back a memory of an old, old SNL commercial advertising price sticker guns you could buy and set your own price. I remember my sister, who’s a couple years older than me, ask if it was real.
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Mimeographs… yep, I remember those from my elementary school.
I also remember the old card catalog at the library. We used to mix stuff up – heh heh. Poor librarians.
I also remember programming in DOS in the old Texas Instruments computer for half an hour just to see the result of a red “ball” going across the screen.
Man… apparently I was a dork even back then!
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Jeff, thanks for the trip down Memory Lane. I remember in the late ’60′s (I think it was) my father bought an “Instant-On” TV which didn’t have to “warm up” and we thought we were really high-tech. I also remember putting price stickers on bottles of aspirin, sticks of deodorant, whatever, in my father’s small-town pharmacy. Every item had to be “priced” before it was put on the shelf. I also filled out “charge tickets” for regular customers, who put all their purchases on “my bill” and paid at the end of the month. Condoms were kept behind the counter; you had to ask for them. Mothers would call and say, “Sally needs some Kotex; will you put it in a brown bag and just hand it to her so she won’t be embarrassed?”
I also remember my father sold cigarettes to kids who swore they were buying them for mama or daddy. And I myself at 13 purchased a beer to use as a hair rinse (read that in Teen Magazine, I think). The cashier, my neighbor, made me promise that I was really going to use it on my hair and then she sold it to me. (And I really did. Boy was I dumb.)
Boy, do I feel old.
Hope you and Toney had a happy anniversary.
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Best Update! Shiny Rod killed in this update. Just killed. Mr. Softee, indeed.
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Oh yeah….racist cartoons and Lil’ Rascals. Speedy Gonzoles (sp?). You don’t see that anymore, except maybe adult swim.
O-tay!
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Haven’t read the comments but here are a few:
-points and condensors on a car
-distributor caps and rotors are all but obsolete
-the little plastic thingies for the hole in a 45
-non-filter cigarettes…my mom used to smoke Camel n-f’s
& my brother-in-law smoked Lucky’s
(I’m sure they’re still around but few smoke them)
-typewriters
-steno pools
-banana seats for bicycles
(or playing cards in the spokes)
-leisure suits
-REAL Coca Cola with sugar
(you can still get those from Mexico)
-good model airplane glue
(the shit kids used to huff that melted the plastic)
-do they still sell balsa wood planes?
out, y’all
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Jeff – this is a little off topic, but at your site i dont think it’s a topic that will ever be forgotten.
I went home for lunch today. I got home and the trash was full. So after i took out the trash for the Wife, i was kneeling down to get a garbage bag out of the bottom cupboard, and then, i heard a sound i had never heard before in my life. That sound was the sound of the ass of my pants blowing out. I feel your pain Jeff. I’m just glad it didnt happen earlyier in the day at work. My wife sure got a kick out of it though.
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Never had a party line, but we did have a dial tone that sounded like a distorted 60-cycle buzz. Oh, and “cycles” rather than “Hertz”. Even after touch-tone existed, we never had it because my parents didn’t want to cough up the extra $5 a month, or whatever it was.
We actually had seven (!) TV stations, plus a few unusable UHF ones, due to living in NYC.
Remember general-purpose pop music radio stations? I’m thinking of Music Radio, WABC! in particular. There were no “adult contemporary” or “smooth jazz” or “urban contemporary” stations.
The record industry bleating that “home taping is killing music”.
…about all I can think of that hasn’t already been covered.
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I recall my grandfather telling us that light bulbs were originally provided free of charge, as part of the utility.
On the other hand, the Wisconsin Electric building in Milwaukee was built rather opulently, so that it could be converted to a high-end hotel once this whole “electricity” fad had passed.
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Oh – and I have milk delivery. It’s back!
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How about those “photocopies” the teacher used to provide back in the 70′s. It was on this special glossy paper and you would dare one another to lick it. Yech, it must have contained every banned chemical currently known.
And speaking of photocopies, back before the Internets, someone would show you a funny/rude cartoon photocopied from a copy of a copy of a copy… and it would have little black dots all over it from being copied so often. And you would say – hey that’s funny, loan it to me so I can make a copy!
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I had a morning and evening paper route and the paper was to go on the porch on in the screen door. None of this crap of throwing it onto the property.
Games called ‘smear the queer’ and lawn darts (not played at the same time).
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Going to gas stations and the attendants running out to pump your gas, check your oil, and wash your windshield – for FREE. Riding my bike to school when I was in the first grade. My Mom was a little worried because of the railroad tracks I had to cross, but otherwise, no problem. Listening to am radio with the one ear bud, I thought I was so cool (didn’t matter, it wasn’t in stereo). Record players. Walking to the “little” store to buy cigarettes for my mom with a note when I was 6 and getting candy as a reward. I remember all of the other stuff ya’ll have mentioned. I could go on and on, but this was a sweet, nostalgic update. I’ll probably have flashback dreams tonight.
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Think about how many people today attach a cc to an e-mail without realizing it stands for: carbon copy!
When i was a kid (back in 1863) before colour T.V’s you could buy a plastic cover for the screen blue on top green in the middle and brown on the bottom so it was almost colour!
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i remember all those things… and
gas rationing …
Smokey the Bear for fires and the commercial with the crying Indian looking at the garbage/trash?
CB radio’s -EVERYONE had aone, their own ‘handle’-not just for the truckers (can we say CONVOY:) and today – can you see it? CB’s would cause ROAD RAGE galor now – days…can you imagine if everyone today had one in their car – like if you knew the cell phone number of the guy that just cut you off? You just pick up the mic and start slining insults? It would be crazy. The FCC would ban them! lol
Going for hours in the woods climbing trees and building forts and the parents didn’t need to worry that you were going to end up on a milk carton? (oops, they were still bottles then:)
Actually playing outside VS online (didn’t even have ping pong video til I was a teen – we actually played on a REAL table hehe!)
EXXON – put a tiger in your tank….
Gas was all leaded
Cars were cool
The screen door slamming (with each one having a particular ‘beat’ when landing against the frame)
Thanks for the trip down memory lane
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Oh to be a kid again! such great times. Curfew was the setting sun and neighbors would smack your bottom if you did some thing wrong at their house. The ICE CREAM MAN !! driving down the road, Saturday morning cartoons started at 6am and would go till 10 and you would play all day outside. hanging from trees, riding double on your bike without head, elbow and knee gear!
And I am one of the younger reader of the WVSR.
No one mentioned the Beta the machine that went up against the VCR and lost.
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Check out this Canadian Ad. It just came on the TV and I thought of this post. Enjoy!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSv7_Fs2mrc
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The Frito Bandito
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I can remember when the Baker (bread delivery), Milk man, Butcher, and soda delivery were all standard delivered at home! Plus the green stamps, I still have a sleeping bag from the green stamps.
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I remember party lines and still have a bit of rage inside of me because of them. We were on the same line as these two old ladies, they were sisters that lived in the same house. They would NEVER hang their phone up. Seriously.
They would sit the phone “handle” beside the base when they were done talking. Every evening, my mom or dad would have to walk over to their house, knock on the door and ask them to please hang up their phone.
I don’t know if they just wanted the couple minutes of company, or if they were just old hags that liked to piss people off.
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You mentioned renting the rotary phone and exchangin it when it broke–thing is, those things NEVER broke. Ours weighed about 40-pounds and if you picked it up you could pound holes in your asbestos lined walls with it and still make a call.
I also recall the pop bottles–which we would literally collect from the side of the road, and before they were made extinct, the refund jumped up to a dime a piece.
I remember in MIDDLE school, you could smoke if you had a note from your parents. I also remember you could bring your gun to school if you’d been hunting in the morning before arrival–you simply had to check the firearm in for storage in the principal’s office.
Good ole days–gone forever.
Buck Out
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Jeff:
You are showing your Southern roots – soda?
Soda is bicarbonate of soda, what the oldsters used to take as an antacid. (I’m on ranitidine, myself.)
Anyways, up here we call Coke, Pepsi, etc. *pop*.
Soda is an inaccurate, southern term for pop. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to explain this to the unenlightened.
Must be a southern affliction. By southern, I mean anywhere south of, say, New Martinsville.
Meditation: it’s not what you think.
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OK here goes…
Restaurants served ice water to everyone, but no free refills on soda. My Dad would make us drink the water first and we couldn’t touch the soda until our meal got to the table.
We drank Kool-Aid that our mother brought into existence in a glass pitcher. It had cane sugar from a paper bag. The only plastic involved were the re-usable plastic tumblers we drank it out of.
If a toy broke we did our best to fix it. My brother had a box of “G.I.Joe” parts. All of the arms, legs, heads, chests and “underwears” (if you had little G.I. Joe, you know what I’m talking about) all donated from other fallen soldiers whenever another guy would get injured we’d disassemble him and replace his broken part with one as close to the original as we could find in the box.
Even though we had plenty of money, I didn’t always get everything I wanted for Christmas.
Easter was the day you got new church clothes, not another “toy-buying” holiday.
My freshman year of high school kids who were old enough to buy cigarettes got a “smoke break” out side on the lawn. It was banished the next year though.
Most of the FFA or hard core red necks had gun racks in their trucks with guns in them. We even had a kid show up with a shotgun to “kill” one of our teachers. Said teacher dis-armed said kid, and kicked his ass right then and there. The authorities were alerted and the kid was arrested, nothing was said to the teacher.
When I was a kid there was no such thing as a heat index. If the football coach saw lightening he would turn his back to that cloud and tell us to keep practicing that he “didn’t see nothing.”
Gas was really expensive and cars got terrible gas mileage, oh wait was that 1977 or 2007?? Who can tell they’re so similar, and it all starts running together after a while.
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Uncle Buzz -damn you yankees
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Brillcream..a little dab’oldoya.
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Wow, almost everything was mentioned . . . mercurochrome, testing vacuum tubes, milk delivery, mimeographs (mmmm), rotary phones, gas rationing, full service gas station,
How about . . .
. . . paying a dime to use a public bathroom. My mom and grandma would make one of us smaller ones crawl underneath the stall door and open it.
. . . tissue paper for AirMail letters. We had relatives in Mexico and Peru and my parents would type letters on this very, very, thin paper to save on postage. My dad would make a “carbon copy” of the letter he wrote. WHY???
. . . going door-to-door collecting subscription money for the local paper.
. . . learning Apple Basic programming in 1980. Yikes!!
Ahh, the memories. And, this is only from the 60′s forward
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I can still remember, when I was a kid, when you needed a bag of ice, you would pull up to good ‘ol North Pole Ice, tell the guy what you wanted, then he would go back into the place, come back out with a giant block of ice on a couple of hooks and throw it into a crusher which fed into a plastic bag. I used to LOVE watching that kinda stuff.
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My Dad had a job as a milkman for a while when I was a kid, then he got promoted to driving a big truck to deliver to schools/hospitals/etc. As I remember, it was one of those old Mack (?) semis that had the dual shifters.
I also remember my first computer class (junior year in high school), learning basic on an Apple. No mouse, no hard drive, my final project was different colored dots that would fly up and explode like fireworks on the screen. Sort of.
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We used to go an old school barber shop
(not Super/Great/Clips/Cuts) and they had three chairs and Playboy magazines. We would thumb through them while waiting for our buzzcut. Nobody said “BOO” to a seven year old checking out Miss November and pitchin’ a tent. And then you got two pieces of Bazooka bubblegum when you were through.
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Gas stations used to have stacks of Coke in glass bottles sitting out as displays. Sometimes they got too hot in the sun and would go off like a bomb…acid soaked shrapnel everywhere…awesome.
What about Speedy Gonzales…he was politically incorrect but funny as hell.
I miss the REAL Slug Bug game where you got to punch the crap out of your brother whenver you saw a VW Beetle.
And I miss my green Schwinn Sting Ray. I could get that thing flyin’ and then hit the coaster brake and skid that slick back tire for 40 feet.
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Knowing it was time to go outside and play on Saturday mornings as soon as Soul Train came on! Then staying outside ALL DAY until a) the street light came on or b) we heard Dad whistle for us. Crawdad fishin’ in the creek behind our house. Riding mini-bikes all over the neighborhood…with no helmets! Riding on the “back dash” of our giant car, or on the tailgate of Dad’s truck with our feet dangling off. It’s a wonder any of us survived!
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When I was about 7 or 8 I would spend Saturdays running errands with my dad (I found out later this was just an excuse for my dad to get out of the house go bar hopping on a Saturday morning!). We’d usually go to auto parts stores in East Wheeling. He’d buy me a 25cent 10 ounce coke – in a bottle from one of those machines where you opened the little skinny door on the right and pull the coke bottle out of the hole. Of course, there was a deposit on the bottles so I had to drink it before we left the store! He’d spend time waiting for me just sitting on the stool at the auto parts store and look through the car manuals (he was a mechanic).
Then, he would actually take me into the bars (along 29th street in Wheeling – I think the Silver Rail). I’d get to sit right at the bar and drink a coke and have beer nuts while he had beers. No one even cared!!
But then we were busted…we were driving past the bar returning from my grandma’s in McMechan and I informed the family (8 of us crammed into a station wagon -complete with a back window covered in stickers of states we’d visited, and no seat belts because my dad tore them all out) that I’d been in the Silver Rail with dad!! No more barhopping on Saturday mornings
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For a while a schoolfriend worked retail and had a great little scam going with those credit card carbons. He made/stole a lot of money, before he went to jail for it.
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ooey gooey, rich and chewy inside
that’s right, take a bite
tender golden flakey on the outside
Your darn tootin
It’s a big fig Newton
It’s a big, fig, Newton.
Aye, aye, aye aye
I am the Frito Bandito
You give me your corn chips and I’ll be your friend
The Frito Bandito you must not offend
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Did the Baby Huey dancing bear poofter work at Murphy Mart?
Cause I remember that guy.
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What about smoking?! You could smoke anywhere…at work, on an airplane…in the HOSPITAL.
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I remember “chipmunking”. With the rotary phone system we had if you dialed your own number it would ring busy, you then hung up and a few minutes later your phone would ring. Who ever picked it up would hear this funny noise kind of like chipmunk chatter. We would say you got chipmunked. It was best done when someone had 2 lines in their house and that way they were caught off guard.
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Son of Sam said “Brillcream”. Most excellent. To the larger point:
Remember we had to wet our hair, put in goop and comb it back? Then came “the wet head is dead” ad campaign and that was the end of the greasers.
Greased and combed hair. With a part. And a “wave”.
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I used to love ice cream cones from Isaly’s in the summer. Love that Mr. Softee ice cream too.
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