Things Only Baby Boomers Will Remember

Dialing a rotary phone.

We had a party line with a family a block or so away.

The phone hung on the wall in the kitchen adjacent to the door to the basement; so stepping through onto the landing and pulling the door to gave some privacy, in a houseful of siblings.

Instead of 7 numbers, we remembered the first three as "BRoad4"

My dad worked as a computer programmer and brought home a printer, keyboard and a modem. He dialed up the computer at work, and we played the very first Star Trek computer game. No video screen. The game play was printed out on that green and white folded continuous roll paper with the edge perforations.

Twenty-five years ago, I still had a black bakelite desk model, and my children knew how to dial, but my niece was completely flummoxed by it.

When I was very young we lived out in the country and had a ten party line. We rarely got calls (two rings) but the families who were four or five rings got a lot of calls. So disappointing whenever we heard the third ring start. At least we learned to count early.

I was a city kid so we didn't have party lines. I remember zip codes being preceded in larger metro areas by a two-digit code after the city name and before the state.

Also, abbreviations for US states that were more that two letters long.

I wonder if all the baby boomers who never liked coffee developed their distaste in the era of ubiquitous percolators.

>4 PhaedraB: I thought I was the only boomer who can't stand coffee. (Never felt truly grown-up because I can't stomach the stuff.) And I do remember that noisy percolator.

>5 Taphophile13: I love coffee, but I sure know a lot of people who say they love the smell but can't stand the taste.

My second husband was like that. He got cast in a production of On Golden Pond which has a scene where everyone is sitting around a table drinking coffee (from a percolator). The first night he takes a sip thinking it would be standard prop coffee which is flat cola. But no, this was a dinner theater with a huge kitchen in close proximity; it was real, hot coffee. By the end of the run he was hooked!

Iʻm a decade or so older than the boomers. From my 20s to my early 80s I drank a pretty fair amount of both coffee, altough in my mid-twenties and early thirties I had little time for
either--was too busy with alcoholic beverages.
But, though I liked both coffee and cola (esp. pepsi ), I would have been disgruntled to
find that what I believed was pepsi turned out to be coffee. I now limit myself to two cups of coffee per week, and am supposed to go easy on colas, too. They wonʻt quench your thirst, the doctor said, -- will only make you thirstier.

>6 PhaedraB: I'm one of those people who actually can feel ill just from the "odor" of coffee. I can't abide it in any form. A co-worker once raved about a certain candy and gave me a piece without telling me what it was. I didn't want to be rude but I spat it out as soon as she wasn't looking. "Doesn't it taste just like coffee?," she gushed. It did and I felt sick for an hour. I think I'm allergic to the stuff.

I'm Irish. Pots and pots of tea.

I recently watched the new Lost in Space opening episode and was reminded that the first one scared the bejeebus out of me when Will first faced the Robot. I hid upstairs every week for a while when it was on.

I don't like coffee in any form but love tea, both hot and over ice. Ice tea was a treat reserved for Sunday dinner and Coke and other soft drinks were even less available for us as children.

>9 2wonderY:

I'm English, so likewise, pots and pots of tea. I'll drink a cup of coffee after an upmarket dinner, or thick sweet Arabic or Ethiopian coffee in a local cafe, or of course an Irish coffee, but I never got a taste for drinking the stuff regularly. Iced tea was unheard of when I were lad.

I had a similar childhood experience when the very first Dalek appeared on Dr Who. If I recall correctly it was very dramatically done in the last seconds of an episode; you didn't get to see much of the Dalek but you were aware that it was something very evil. I hid behind the sofa.

More generally, rationing only ended the year I was born, so my early years were still a time of austerity, and my parents (and everyone we knew) still had that attitude. My early memories of London were bomb sites - the ruined buildings had generally been cleared but there were huge empty spaces, which of course were great for children to play in. The war still dominated life - virtually every adult male I knew had been in the army, and many of the women (including my mum). There was still a sense of community and homogeneity - we knew most of the neighbours and helped each other out, we played in the virtually car-free streets with neighbouring children, if we went to a friend's house it looked very much like our own and the family would be doing much the same as us and eating a pretty identical meal, there were fixed days when almost everyone did their shopping, laundry, etc. The coalman and the rag and bone man came with horse carts - my dad and other neighbouts used to rush to be the first one out with a shovel to collect the droppings for their rhubarb patches. Milk and bread were delivered daily in electric vehicles, and once a week, on different days, there would be mobile shops in vans - butcher, fishmonger, greengrocer, grocer - and the mobile library.

London was still "The Smoke", with coal fires, steam locomotives and the famous smogs. Buildings were black with soot - it came as a great shock to me years later to discover that landmarks such as St Paul's Cathedral and indeed most prominent buildings were actually white once the centuries of grime had been cleaned off. Modern media refers nostagically to the Routemaster as the "iconic" red London bus, but when I was a child it was the Regent Type which reigned supreme, and the RM was a new-fangled interloper.

I remember our first telephone (rotary dial, on a small table in the hall next to the front door, and rarely used because calls were deemed expensive), fridge, central heating (before that you would often wake up of a winter morning with ice on the inside of the bedroom windows), car (a 1958 Ford Consul), television (a large cabinet with doors, with a small screen inside, which eventually caught fire) and washing machine (a huge thing with a tub for washing and a mangle which you then had to feed the wet clothes through before hanging them out on the line). We had an indoor toilet, but some of my relatives living nearby still had outside privies.

Last year, in a little independent bookshop somewhere in Yorkshire, I picked up two interesting little books by Paul Feeney, A 1950s Childhood and A 1960s Childhood. Both a bit romanticised, but nevertheless recognisable to an English person of our generation.

Coffee. Didn't have my first cup until I was 21. Had I known it was so good at squelching a migraine, I'd have started drinking it when I was eight. I've got a 12-cup coffeemaker that grinds the beans just before it heats the water. It's got an insulated carafe that keeps it drinkably hot for a good six hours. I drink ten (10) cups a day (black) at a minimum, but I've set the grind to 2, so it's not like I'm really going overboard with it.
As for how it affects me, my resting pulse rarely surpasses 52; it doesn't keep me up at night, and my kidneys are fine. Love the stuff!

My folk's phone number when I was a proverbial knee-high was SWarthmore 7 3865.

The sound of a percolatoe, more or less.

(https://youtu.be/SY6PWacIZoc)

>11 John5918: It's only recently that I woke up to the fact that the reason so many British Invasion musicians were short and scrawny was because they grew up with wartime and post-wartime rationing. Jimi Hendrix looked gigantic next to his sidemen. (They're all dead now, of course.)

I remember 5 cent Cokes in glass bottles, 6 cents with the deposit, and five cent candy bars; 4 cent stamps, and the ice-man.

Before I started school we lived in a neighborhood where some people still had iceboxes instead of refrigerators and ice blocks were a regular delivery. He would, during hot weather, chip off shards of ice for all the kids.

I once counted the number of services which were provided by horse and cart (in Melbourne, Australia in the 1950's)

1) Milk
2) Ice
3) Garbage
4) Bread
5) Fish
6) Bottle-oh
7) Briquettes and Wood
8) Rags
9) Veggies
10) Rabbitos - sold rabbits :-)

and a few more which had almost vanished by that time. eg. Scrap metals I think.

ETA. I also had a neighbour who had a horse and buggy in his back yard , which was his primary method of transport.
This was an inner city suburb

We had a greengrocer who would visit our block, but he had a step van rather than a horse and cart. I remember once being on it with my mother when she asked me what fruit I wanted. I said "watermelon" and the both laughed. I asked what was so funny, and mom said, "It's out of season." Imagine that, within the city limits of a major American city you couldn't get fruit out of season! Now people eat strawberries in December without a second thought. Of course, they're not as good as they are in season. Sometimes even in season the agribusiness product isn't good anyway.

Very disappointed with the strawberries I bought yesterday, which were semi-local but still not very good. Very pretty, but little taste.

Also remember a vendor who visited our street on what I remember to be a cross between a bicycle and a pedal-driven grindstone. He'd sharpen scissors and knives.

We had a milkman who delivered milk and butter which he left in an aluminum milk box at our front door. There was also a bread and baked goods delivery man who came once a week.

>18 PhaedraB: a vendor who visited our street on what I remember to be a cross between a bicycle and a pedal-driven grindstone. He'd sharpen scissors and knives

We still have that in Nairobi.

>20 John5918: Nice to know. It's a very useful trade.

The five and dime store. Worn, even grooved, wood floors from all the foot traffic. Table sized tray shelves instead of stacked shelving. Wooden dividers built in so each type of item could be corralled. The comic book spinner in the back corner where we could stand all day and read to our hearts' content. (Comic books were considered trashy, and not acceptable to bring home.)

This was our only outlet for mother's birthday gifts. She got a lot of small blue bottles of Evening in Paris.

Our store didn't have a soda fountain; our town was too small for something that fancy. But the one across the river had one and it was a rare treat. Mom carried a list in her purse of which children needed shoes the most. The child at the top of the list might be allowed a one-on-one shopping trip and maybe - just maybe, a snack at the counter.

We were allowed to bring comics home, but boy, deciding which one was hard. One of my most vivid memories was when I was about 8. My sister and I had wheedled a dime each out of my grandmother so we could buy a comic. When we got to the rack we found that the price on the comic books had been increased to twelve cents. We looked at each other in shock, because this meant either we'd only be able to get one book between the two of us, or we had to wheedle a whole quarter out of grandma. Fortunately, Grandma was a softer touch than Mom, so we got our quarter.

I have a hard time with the prices of contemporary comics. I could lunch out for what one of them costs!

Saturday "arvo" at the "picturs" (films) would start with a swap-mart of comics on the steps of the one of the 2 local Cinemas.
Almost next door to each other. I was discouraged from owning "Superman/Batman/Phantom/Crime etc." thus I specialized in Disney cartoons.
I would buy one a week with my allowance of 2 shillings. They started of at 9 pence and with inflation went up to 12 pence (1 shilling) Thus I
do empathize with you > 23.

I still own about 500 originals from the 1950's early 60's and about 20 years ago I was offered $2000 for them.
I wish I had taken that offer :-)

>24 guido47:

For us it was Saturday morning at the pictures. We would watch cartoons, and episodes of "The Lone Ranger" and "Batman". I think it was threepence or sixpence to get in, depending on where you sat. Sitting just under the front of the upstairs gallery was not a good idea because the children above would drop things on you - it could be a bit rowdy. Each cinema chain had its own club - I remember "Minors of the ABC" - with its own signature song that we all had to sing.

The comics that I recall were things like Beano and Dandy rather than the Superman type.

Edited to add: Incidentally, while on the subject of cinemas, I remember sneaking into the cinema aged 14 to watch my first ever X-rated film. It was "Barbarella", which seems pretty tame now when young children have unlimited access to hardcore porn on their cellphones!

I do remember the "Five and Dimes" --particularly Woolworthʻs. (22) And I have pleasant memories of their (usually) soda fountains. But I donʻt remember being impressed with their "bargains", and never bought much outside of the soda fountain.

Saturday matinees
The Goldbergs
Captain Video
Willie the worm
Buck Rogers
Tom Corbett and the Space Cadets
Sealtest Big Top Circus
Howdy Doody
Romper Room
Edward R. Murray
Beat the Clock
Alcoa Theatre Hour
Playhouse 90
Flash Gordon
The Syncopated Clock
A thousand more, I could go on forever
Rock a Billy
Good Elvis
Tent Meetings
And many, many more

We were early (1950) adopters of television.

Our first TV had a round screen. After it was replaced with a console TV, my mom kept the old one in her bedroom. For what, I don't know because to my knowledge it was never turned on again.

>25 John5918: Our regular Saturday activity was the Roller Rink.

But I do recall going to a movie matinee. Very very oddly, it was The Man with the X-Ray Eyes. My sister wanted to leave and when I refused - because it was the movies! - she tried to cover my eyes.

Slide rules.
Not a device everyone had, and maybe not something younger baby boomers would remember, but it made an impression on me. What a strange piece of equipment for doing calculations. When I went off to college you still saw science and engineering students lugging them around, often in a sort of leather sheath from which you could haul it out like a sword for mathematical battle. Hand-held electronic calculators that could find the values of roots and logs and trig functions could not have been more welcome.

>30 dypaloh:

And alongside the slide rule, books of log tables, sines, cosines and tangents.

>31 John5918:

Yes! My first acquaintance with the word "interpolation" came from using those tables.

Returning to coffee: Before percs I remember that cheap restaurants with a counter and stools served coffee made with the Silex vacuum method — big metal bowls with a tube and rubber gasket that the waitress inserted in to the mouth of the carafe. Very much not automatic, which is why percolators displaced them.

My parents drank instant. Really, why bother? I suppose it also may have had something to do with the War.

Our cottage was near a farming village, and I loved blacksmiths' shops, dim, warm, odorous places with fire and sparks, patient horses, and laconic older men who spoke in what sounded like a kind of code.

The village also had its own weekly newspaper where I could watch the proprietor set type on the Linotype, a fascinating choreography of cams and levers. The makeup stone was in the front window, where the light was best and where I could see the pages being put together. I was smitten at five or six years old and spent much of the rest of my pre-university spare time messing with type and presses.

And then there were steam locomotives, eh John?

"The village also had its own weekly newspaper. . ." (34)
This goes back further than the Baby Boomersʻ memories, (Iʻm 87).
My native town, Woburn, MA had itʻs daily (6 days a week) newspaper THE WOBURN DAILY TIMES.
Reading it as an elementary school child, I already was getting a keen interest in the use of language, and I was impressed by the adjectives they used to describe h.s. basketball players: Tall players were called "elongated",* and short players were called "midgety" or "diminutive". "We" (i.e. the high school) were good at that time in baseball and basketball, not so good in football. Those, plus cross-country and spring track, were the only h.s. sports.
In the matter of personal surnames, 5, In the TIMES caught my eye: The names
Shepard and Higginbotham on Wilmington, MA h.s.,the town just to the north of us. and, later, the names Gingrich, Sexton and Millerick on the fb team of Winthrop, MA. I thought those were the strangest names I had ever heard/read. I didnʻt see/hear the name "Gingrich" again until the rise of Newt Gingrich in Republican politics. The name Sexton was next heard in the 1960s: Patricia Cayo Sexton the educationist, and Anne Sexton the poet. The next "Milllerick" I met was the niece of the Winthrop player! The TIMESʻs events reportage has been less memorable than their uncovering of surnames. They infiltrated local news with squibs of (I suppose syndicated) world and national news.


*To be tall usually meant to be 5ʻ11" or 6ʻ; to be short meant to be the more usual 5ʻ3" or 5ʻ4".

>#31

Dear John, My Dad was a Mathematician ( Actually a Statistician) Thus of course he had 7 figure LOGs which I took to school. Only Astronomers has 12 Figure logs.
I saw them once and boy are they difficult to use :-}

And as we are learning 4 figure logs (year 7 or 8?) I was showing OFF
my knowledge of how to use the 7 figure logs. Fortunately my teacher corrected me! A slap over the ears is always, sometimes useful.

I also still have a "SLIP STICK" (with green ink? on it) at home.

The other day I proved I could still use it. I was chuffed.

Yours Guido.

>36 guido47:: Ah yes - the slap across the ears. Life was better for teachers in those days. I remember being hit hard for having "an inane grin". Just read in today's Times (UK) that lots of new teachers in Scotland are leaving the profession before they've really started because now they're the ones being abused.

>37 PossMan:
My fifth-grade teacher would throw erasers at any of us who were misbehaving (at least at the boys, not sure girls were ever targets). We thought it was exciting.

That spring, he took our entire class (30+ students) to a professional baseball game. Paid for all the tickets out of his own pocket.

He was my favorite teacher from the elementary school years. Easily.

>38 dypaloh: My third grade teacher would slam a ruler on a desk when she lost patience. By the end of the year she had broken at least a dozen rulers plus the yardstick. It was a bit frightening to us. I heard that she resigned at the end of the year; it had been her first year of teaching.

When I grew up we were afraid to talk back to teachers or disobey them, because we knew we would get a whipping at home if we did. Also, I loved school, would rather be there than at home. Learning was fun and we knew that the teachers really cared about us!

Something reminded me today of gym class. I attended high school 1968-1972.

This is the gym suit we were required to wear:



Fortunately, the gym my school borrowed was two blocks from the school, and we changed there. So the boys couldn't see us in those awful things. Oh, right. Is there segregated gym class nowadays?

The only organized sport was boys basketball.

The most memorable part of gym was learning folk dances one year.

>41 2wonderY: Ugh. I had almost erased the memory of those things. We had one building with separate girls' and boys' changing and shower rooms. All our classes were outside and the girls' gym teachers liked to keep us in the field until the last minute. The boys liked to hang out near the girls' entrance and jeer at us as we made a mad dash inside.

>41 2wonderY: I wore them for four years and I hated them. We had to show up with them washed and ironed. One gal got one of the first permanent press versions, but she'd just crumple it up and toss it in her locker. The gym teacher called her out for not ironing and she answered, "But it's no-iron!"

Okay, a question in the TPBM thread got me going down memory lane.

Playgrounds. The one in my neighborhood had some basic equipment for the times; swings, slides, a see-saw, a merry-go-round (kid powered), and a maypole.

The maypole was the most fun! All run fast enough to fly. Boost each other by crossing chains to fly even higher.



Oh, yeah, and the high cross-bar, building those upper body muscles and tangling legs with the next guy in a chicken game.

In the UK there was a much larger version of the maypole that was known as a Witch's Hat, and it evetually got banned due to a lot of accidents - kids literally flying off if it went round too fast and landing on the concrete surface beneath. I think it was around that time that they introduced woodchips as a playground surface - less damaging if you fall off equipment.

>45 mlfhlibrarian: When I was a little kid (in the US in the '50s), our corner playground was gravel! But they did pave it with asphalt later.

I don't recall playing on playgrounds. We played on old bombsites in London. There was one where we rode our bikes at high speed on little tracks that seemed to go endlessly up and down and in and out of trees and bushes (which later became the new public library and swimming pool), another which always seemed to have high grass (high to a little lad) in which we hid ourselves (which is now a housing estate), and another huge field and woods with a pond which was reputed to be the crater from a V2 rocket. I think that one is still extant as a little bit of green amongst all the concrete.

Plus, a short bike ride way, Hainault Forest, which was probably original a part of Epping Forest, where there is a lake with small streams that we could dam with mud. Slightly closer to home was Fairlop, which used to be a Battle of Britain fighter aerodrome, a satellite aerodrome of Hornchurch. It had been taken over by agricultural land, but bits of old hangars and runways could still be seen. Now it is a leisure centre with a lake for sailing.

>47 John5918: oh yes, bomb craters - tailor made adventure playgrounds! the biggest one near us was full of water and local lads and their dads would go fishing there. The land around it belonged to the local hospital but was very overgrown and we used to make dens, a la Enid Blyton characters.

I lived in a very industrial town in NW England, there were four factories within a half-mile radius of our house. So the whole area was very polluted, including the stream in which we played. How I haven't developed some dreadful disease I'll never know - one of the factories was emitting dilute sulphuric acid into the air! and the stream must have been chock full of chemicals.

>45 mlfhlibrarian: In the UK they now have a sort of rubberised asphalt in some playgrounds, it's very pleasantly bouncy to walk on.
I'll be getting to spend a lot of time in playgrounds in the next few years as I'm due to become a granny in September :)

>47 John5918: and >48 mlfhlibrarian: Much more exciting than town sponsored playgrounds! We spent our middle years hying off to the woods for Saturday hikes, armed only with a fried egg sandwich. We also messed about quite illegally in the derelict industrial sites along the river.
My town was bracketed by coal burning power plants (the high school teams were ‘the Dynamos’) and after a day barefoot, the bottoms of our feet were caked in black grime that only a scrub brush and harsh soap could remove.

>48 mlfhlibrarian: we used to make dens, a la Enid Blyton characters

Dens - that was the word I was looking for! We used to make hidden dens in the high grass, which in reality was probably no more than a metre high and our secret dens were probably visible to any adult who had any interest in finding them! And Enid Blyton - I wonder if anybody has ever calculated the influence she had on generations of youth? We also had Biggles, of course, and Swallows and Amazons.

>50 2wonderY: after a day barefoot, the bottoms of our feet were caked in black grime that only a scrub brush and harsh soap could remove

Not part of my growing up, but that conjures up for me memories of the beach near Blackhall Colliery in County Durham where a huge conveyor belt used to dump coal spoil directly into the sea. The beach, the sea, the foam from the waves and everything were black. I saw it when I was at university in Durham, but it was made famous in the film "Get Carter". I believe it's all been cleaned up now.

Another memory which has just been conjured up for me recently came as a result of seeing clips of President Bouteflika on the news. Poor old chap has had at least one stroke, and his face seems unnaturally shiny and immobile. As a child I remember seeing so many war veterans, many of whom were fighter pilots and other aircrew, I believe, who had been badly burned. Pioneering plastic surgery was able to put their faces back together again, but many of them remained with artificial-looking, slightly immobile, shiny faces.

>52 John5918: I had a biology professor at the College of Steubenville in the early 70s who had been in a house fire. His head and hands had been damaged. He would disappear for a week or so and return with a bit more ear or nose rebuilt. He always struck me as a very brave person to continue through.

I hardly ever cook anymore, living alone. But I made a cucumber salad for a covered dish event this weekend. I was at daughter's house and knew just where she stores her old Wear-Ever food processor:



She uses it all the time. So simple. I took it out to the back porch so my activity wouldn't wake the baby.

The other implement that still gets a ton of use is the juicer:



The best citrus juicer ever made.

>52 John5918: I don't remember seeing anyone with burns, but what you did see frequently were teenagers/adults wearing calipers on their legs, as a result of having polio as a child.

I had a food processor just like this one

My mom gave each of us a box full of school records and such. I dislodged it from the attic and dipped in.
Do you remember "Think-and-Do Books"?
And what about "Pee-Chee All Season Portfolios"?

Oh, and the night hardware I had to wear for 4 years:



I'd rather not have had that memory return.

>57 2wonderY: Yes, we had Think-and-Do Books. Hadn't thought about them in decades. I vaguely remember a bluish cover. Some are even cataloged here on LT.

I'm unfamiliar with Pee-Chee. Did you have Weekly Readers (something with a rabbit, I think)?

>58 2wonderY: Didn't have the forehead straps but did endure 4-5 years wearing the bridle.

I remember Weekly Readers. One of my teachers loved them and we had to read and discuss them every week.

Those strange contraptions on the teeth were a north American sport, I believe. We certainly didn't see them in UK in my younger days. It's only much more recently that I've become aware of them in UK, and I'd say they're still not widespread.

>62 Foxhunter:

Aye, 'appen.

>62 Foxhunter:: One day not very distant "Woolworths" will be a thing only oldies remember (at least in UK).

>64 PossMan:

In the US as well.

I'm smack in the middle of the US, and I haven't seen a Woolworth's in decades. The last one I saw was in Sioux City, Iowa and it was called Woolco.

>64 PossMan:

Good old Woollies. The name still exists in South Africa (and places like Kenya, where South African trade has expanded) but it's a completely different animal, a sort of middle-upmarket clothes shop chain, a little bit like Marks and Sparks in UK.

We also have a Woolworths (here in Australia and NZ) which is unrelated to the USA, UK ot the South African groups.

'Real' Woolworth's went out of business in the US in 1997...

Does anyone else remember colouring the margarine?

>71 librorumamans: I don't remember it but my mother told me about it. White margarine came with a little packet of yellow dye that you had to mix in to get a buttery color.

>71 librorumamans: >72 Taphophile13:
Yeah, my mom (born 1926) told me they had to do that when she was a child.

How about learning cursive writing with straight pens and an inkwell set into the corner of your desk?

>74 librorumamans: My mother learned that way. She said they had to practice up and down strokes, push-pulls I think they were called, and circles across the page, line after line. By the time I learned to write we had cartridge pens. Now schools only teach keyboarding, no cursive. My children can barely sign their names.

They've brought cursive back to the curriculum just a few years ago here in Central Texas.

I've been sporadically journaling for years, but since late July, it's been nearly every day, using a lined Moleskine blank book and a fountain pen. I'm quarter of the way through my second blank book, and have used up a dozen ink cartridges so far (since July.) I carry spare cartridges in my car for when I'm not at home. Keeps me sane.

>69 Foxhunter:

RIP Terry Jones indeed. Although I think this version of the Four Yorkshiremen sketch with Tim Brooke-Taylor, John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Marty Feldman from "At Last The 1948 Show" might precede Monty Python.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKHFZBUTA4k

>78 Foxhunter:

Now I have to confess that I don't remember "At Last the 1948 Show", but I had discovered this version of the Four Yorkshireman sketch on YouTube some time ago.

I well remember the Biggles books, although I don't remember which one I read first.

I remember "At Last the 1948 Show", with John Cleese and Marty Feldman and The Lovely Aimi Macdonald (who wasn't nearly that stupid, and is now 77!).!

>80 haydninvienna:

Aimi Macdonald. There's a memory from the past. Thanks. Glad to hear she's still alive and well.

>76 WholeHouseLibrary: My rant about cursive! I m a retired high school teacher. I went to school in the 50's-60's and of course, we all learned cursive. This move is away from it now. I think that's bad for several reasons, but I can see where the thought is coming from. I'm pro cursive because our national documents are all in cursive. We now have 2 generations that can't read the Constitution, the Bill of Rights (the original documents), etc. They have to be told what they say or translated to block print. Also, elementary teachers tell me cursive was very good for hand/eye coordination. When I retired (this year), I would write comments on student papers/quizzes, etc., and some would come to me and ask what it said! (mad red face) The flip side is that many children from the inner city (not exclusively) who have 2 strung out parents, have more to think about than cursive handwriting--- such as reading and math; I get that!

I don't know what the answer is, do you?

In my country at least, only Boomers will have known the haunting odor of leaves burning in the Fall.

I was reading the latest copy of The Idler a few days ago and there was an article about fountain pens. I imagine lots of post-boomers will have no idea what they were. And the later ones that had a cartridge. My own memory seems to be lots of ink on fingertips.

Telegrams. Telex machines. Mail deliveries twice a day, regular as clockwork. The red public telephone box at the end of the street, and later the telephone sitting on a little table in the hallway by the front door. And of course police boxes (on which Dr Who's Tardis is modelled).

Bookmobiles. Do they still have those? Not in my area or even my State, I don't believe. However, growing up I lived on a 2 lane highway with only a blinking caution light in front of the school. All grades 1-12 (no kindergarten back then) went to the same school; grades 1-6 on the first floor and grades 7-12 on the second. We had no art room and no library. There was a gym but only grades 7-12 were permitted to use it. There was a music/band room. Each teacher tried to keep a small bookshelf of books we could check out. I read each teacher's the first 1-2 months of school and then nothing! However, in the summer the bookmobile came and sat in front of the school for 1 hour once a month. You couldn't browse, not enough time. We were permitted to take out 10 books for a month. Sadly, I had them read in about 3-4 days and then most of the time re-read them. We were poor, but we didn't know it, and my parents did not have money to buy books. However, at Christmas I always got 3-4 books, that what I asked for. I was so glad that about in the 10-11th grade our school got a library of about 500 books! Most of them were for younger students, I didn't care, I read them all. When I was about 10, my mother started getting the Funk and Wagnalls encyclopedias at the grocery for $1. She tried to get once each week, however we only made it through the H 's. I resorted to reading the encyclopedias. Nerd that I was, I enjoyed them! Anybody else remember the bookmobile?

P.S. I still have about a dozen of those books I received as gifts dated 1959-1969.

>86 Tess_W:

Yup, they do! e.g. https://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/bookmobiles/ even though there are 100 bricks-and-mortar branches in the system.

>86 Tess_W: Bookmobiles

I presume that's what we would call a mobile library. In the London borough where I lived, which of course had a comprehensive public library system in those days, the mobile library was part of the system. It wouild come to our street I think once a week althought it might have been twice, and stay for an hour or two in the morning or afternoon. There's a 1960 black and white video of a mobile library at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F17q-bXEoqA

We also had mobile shops, which were old convereted buses or lorries. I recall a greengrocer, a grocer, a butcher and a fishmonger, which would each come once a week. And of course milk was delivered daily, and bread slightly less often, by huge fleets of electric vehicles. The electric vehicles were later scrapped as they were considered old-fashioned - ironic to see electric vehicles now being viewed as modern!

You can see electric milk floats in action at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9T1QR2cAqk. If you want to have a good laugh at the same time, you can't do better than watch the Speed 3 episode of Fr Ted, set in Ireland not England, but the same style of milk float. The millk float really gets into the act from around 11.00 onwards.

>88 John5918: Mobile Library, yes! Here's a pic! We lived in a very rural area. The closest town was about 30 miles away. My family only went to this town once a year, before school started for a new dress and school supplies. We did have a mom and pop grocery with 1 gas pump, 2 churches, and a lumberyard, though.

Interesting name "milk float"....we just called them "the milk man!" My great uncle, from about 1900-1930 (exclusive of WWI), was the ice man, and delivered ice to our rural area for ice boxes. People would put a sign in the window "ice" and he would stop. It was 1 penny for a block of ice. I noticed on the video clip that the driver was a very young version of the latest DCI on the BBC "Death in Paradise."

We used the bookmobile during the summer while I was in high school. It came to the shopping center where my mother did most of her shopping and only quit coming when the county built a branch public library there. During the school year on Saturday I took a bus downtown to visit the main library (and sometimes a movie!) and used the school library as well.

Speaking of bookmobiles, let me recommend The Uncommon Reader.

>91 2wonderY:

Definitely! Terrific book!

>91 2wonderY: on my wishlist! My thingaversary is in December, I might pick it up then.

My grandmother's baby-boomer memory...
'horse manure on the garage floor'.
Of course she was a Spanish-American War boomer not a WW2 boomer...

Walking to school.

Oil cans and grease guns. And filter wrenches.

>96 2wonderY: Remember them? I still use them.

Of course you do. And so does John.

A small silver box on the front step in Billings, Montana. The milkman left our dairy in that box weekly...I think. I do remember when it was really cold (Montana, after all), the cream at the top of the glass bottles would freeze and push up out of the bottles and inch or two. The frozen cream and the milk with bits of ice in it was so yummy.

Mobile libraries are still going strong in the Highlands of Scotland.

Lived in a rental when I was young, an old farm house, and the owner tapped trees and made maple sugar. Sometimes he would bring us some warm maple syrup, and we would find clean snow and pour the maple sugar over it to have "ice candy."

What about outhouses! As I've said before, I grew up in a very rural area (Amish country), although we weren't Amish (we were Quaker). Most of the homes in the area were farm houses and there was no inside bathrooms. Our house did have cold water running into the kitchen sink. It was so far to the outhouse when it was cold! When we were little, my mom wouldn't let us go at night, so we used an enamel chamber pot with a lid. She emptied them and boiled water and clean them daily. I was 13 years old before we had an inside bathroom.

>98 2wonderY:

Yes, I still use grease guns and oil cans on both preserved steam engines and my twenty year old Land Rover.

>99 MerryMary:

Yes we also had a crate on the front porch for milk bottles - recyclable bottles, of course, in those years before anybody called it recycling. The glass bottles had tinfoil caps. I think it was silver for skimmed, red for normal and gold for the creamy whole milk. As you say, when it froze it would push out the top. The creamy gold top milk was delicious. And birds (tits, I think) loved to peck through the tinfoil caps to get at the milk.

>102 Tess_W:

I grew up in a modern (1940s) house in London, so we had an indoor toilet, but my aunties who lived a couple of miles away still had outdoor loos. For much of my later life in Africa I've lived in houses with outdoor pit latrines.

Crossing guards? Not the adults. It used to be a prestige assignment for the older kids. They got to wear a bandolier style belt that looked very official. And they were respectfully obeyed.

How do you send a text on a rotary phone?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkuirEweZvM

Petticoats: a long-forgotten (I'm in UK) of female apparel but fairly common when I was a student in late 1950s/early 1960s. 2 decades later I remember one of the chefs at a hotel I worked in using the expression "under petticoat government" to indicate that a fellow chef did what his girlfriend told him. Also expressions like "it's snowing down south" to indicate the petticoat was showing under the hem of a dress. I suspect it was often intentional. Mrs Poss has hardly worn a dress since her wedding day.

>106 PossMan:. Oh! I remember “it’s snowing down south.” Not really petticoats any longer, just slips. In high school, we all rolled our uniform skirts up as far as we could. As freshmen, the hem was supposed to just touch the ground when we knelt. Sr. Regina Clare checked regularly.

>107 2wonderY: freshmen

Now there's an interesting word. Is it still used now that we're more sensitised to gender in language? I presume there were no freshwomen or freshpersons? In any case, I don't recall it being used at all in British English. If I recall correctly, when I went up to university in 1972 we were "freshers". In grammar (high) school we were simply "first years".

Freshmen still used in US high schools and universities. Still used at US Naval Academy, also.

I carried Pee Chee folders all through junior high and high school.

Does anyone remember those men who went around door to door trying to get you to take accordian lessons? You got to try it out (big and heavy, as I recall). I loved the pearlescent parts. No one I knew ever took lessons.

>109 Tess_W: Freshmen still . . . used at US Naval Academy, also.

My recollection from my own time in Annapolis is that they were called 'plebes'. Am I mis-remembering?

Frosh

>110 marell: Pee Chee folders

Never heard of that one before. I was able to look it up on google.

>111 librorumamans: Called plebes, in general, but in the classroom (profs) they are called freshmen.

>114 Tess_W:

Aha; thanks for the clarification (and the confirmation that my memory's not entirely shot!).

>14 PhaedraB: It's only recently that I woke up to the fact that the reason so many British Invasion musicians were short and scrawny was because they grew up with wartime and post-wartime rationing. Jimi Hendrix looked gigantic next to his sidemen. (They're all dead now, of course.)

Hey! Some of us are still gigging on stage. (In the same jeans!!)

The funniest thing about Brits?

One of our most popular late 1940s radio shows was "Educating Archie". A ventriloquist with a dummy . . . . . . . . on the RADIO !!!

Us Brits will fall for anything. :-)

>104 2wonderY: Actually there was a lot more than just respect from school classmates. I was a crossing guard at one of the schools I attended. About 14 years later I happened to run into the principal of that school and we got to talking about the past. The subject of crossing guard duties came up and I mentioned to him how, from time to time, we would step out into the crossing holding a stop sign and once in awhile a driver would just gun right through the crosswalk. When they did we would get their plate number and report it when we came back in. The principal remembered those occasions and said, "We never told you kids because we didn't want anyone trying to get a driver in trouble but when you reported those numbers to me, I would call the police, they would find the driver wherever he/she was and ticket them."

He said if the driver tried to beat the charge in court all the police officer had to do was explain what had happened - no driver ever beat one of our reports.

>104 2wonderY: Crossing guards? Not the adults

As far as I recall, children did not perform that function, at least in our area. The "crossing guards" were adults, and the sign they held up, a disc on a pole, looked like a lollipop so they were referred to as "lollipop ladies" and "lollipop men".

>118 John5918: Oh yes. In fact it was quite common for a number of years in the various states where we lived. As I noted in my earlier post, the job could be hazardous and I'm not surprised the job now seems to be done by adults everywhere. Of course, there were perks too. If you were assigned the 12 Noon crossing duty (this was when the Kindergarten kids went home) and it was raining - when you came back to school the cooks in the school lunch line always insisted on giving you a free meal (Mom always sent us to school with a bag lunch so if I got a free meal - I brought the bag lunch back home). If it was Wednesday - hot dog day - they would load your tray up with more hot dogs than you could possibly eat. As a result, when you walked out into the main cafeteria you were instantly popular and everyone was hoping you would sit down at their table and share the surplus food. :-)

>105 Crypto-Willobie: - what about telephone numbers that were a combination of prefix letters followed by numbers. All of the prefixes had catchy names.

>119 alco261: telephone numbers that were a combination of prefix letters followed by numbers

Yes, I still remember the letters and number of our first phone, sixty or so years ago. And for some reason, athough I've never had to dial it, I also remember Scotland Yard's number, Whitehall (WHI) 1212. Perhaps it was drilled into us, like the emergency number 999.

>119 alco261:

Empire, Hudson, Mohawk, and Walnut are the exchanges I can still recall. They still exist, of course, as 36, 48, 66, and 92, followed by a third digit.

Ours was Cypress and later 297.

In the Los Angeles area we had Adams, Walnut, Topaz, Chapman.

Someone mentioned being a city kid and not having party lines, but I grew up in Los Angeles and in the early ‘50s we had a party line.

Did anyone mention incinerators in the backyard? We had a garbage can for food waste (yuck), a trash can, and an incinerator. Incinerators were banned in 1957.

We never had a party line. Two rotary phones in the whole house - one wall-mount in the kitchen, and the other upstairs in my parent's bedroom.

I remember two things: it was a big deal to get a long cord for the kitchen phone, so my mom could move around and talk, and second: it was an even bigger deal to get pushbuttons!!!!

>19 Taphophile13:: We had a milkman for years, too. That's how we got all our dairy. Funny, I haven't thought about that in years- we did it routinely until suddenly, we just got everything from the local supermarket.

The difference in age between my oldest sibling and my youngest is 16 years. There were ten of us, but two died in infancy (of a disorder that I also have.) In short, in a span of 18 years, there was at least one of us in diapers.
Delivery folks -- We had:
1) a Laundry man -- diapers, and my father's dress shirts and handkerchiefs;
2) a Milk man -- four gallons every day (which we mixed with powdered milk and water to make it last), plus butter and eggs; and,
3) a fishmonger who would stop by every Friday afternoon to deliver fresh fish for dinner. (Yeah, my folks were pathologically Catholic.)

My maternal grandmother had a Scwan's grocery truck come by every two weeks, plus a Charles Chips (potato chips and pretzels, etc.) delivered once a month. They were in tin cans the size of marching band field drums.

In Fair Lawn, NJ, the exchange was SWarthmore 1.
We moved to Ramsey when I was nine, where the exchange was DAvis 7.

My first exposure to a push-button phone was at the New York World's Fair in 1964.

A friend my age, who lives in a fairly remote part of Arkansas, had a party line until maybe twenty years ago, when the business she and her husband started required dedicated and reliable phone service, and then internet access.

A typhoon blew down all the TV antennas.
We had to use rabbit ears.

We always had rabbit ears for our black and white TV as a child. Did not have a color TV until I married in 1973, but we still had rabbit ears! In fact, in college, my roommate brought at 12 inch black and white from home for our dorm room--we were very popular!

Also had a party line as a child/teen until about 1970. There were multiple parties. The bell would ring like dots and dashes so families would know who was to answer. When I was "sneaky" I would pick up the phone and listen in on conversations--nothing ever interesting!

My great uncle was the "ice man" from about 1920-1940. People would put a cardboard sign in their front window that said 1 cent or 3 cents, and that indicated the size of ice block he was to bring into the house and place in the ice box!

In the 50s, the two telephone exchanges in Billings, Montana were ALpine and CHerry.

>128 Tess_W: My husband remembers ice being delivered for his grandmother’s “ice box.” I seem to recall people referring to their refrigerator as an ice box in my early childhood, after ice boxes were no more.

I still have a dairy box on my front porch for nostalgia’s sake. It serves as a base for displays - right now it holds an elaborate birdhouse. No one notices; it just gives me quiet pleasure.

>130 marell: You are correct, my grandparents also called a refrigerator an icebox.

>119 alco261: Yes, ours was Atlantic, but the other local numbers were Central and Pacific.

>125 terriks: Ha! My dad was the milkman! I loved riding in his milk truck when he took me to school and being the envy of all the kids when I got out. He also delivered milk in the little bottles (later cartons) to my school.

>123 marell: Yep, we had a party line. Our elderly neighbors down the street complained about me and my teenage sisters talking too much on the phone, so they would leave their phone off the hook so we could not receive or call out.

Also we had an incinerator in the backyard! One of my chores was taking out the trash and burning the papers. We also had a garbage can--usually full of maggots in the summer! Yuck and yuck!

>126 WholeHouseLibrary: Some people (with money, obviously) in our area had a diaper service that took away and laundered their dirties and brought them clean diapers--these are of course cloth ones. The rest of us just dealt with them at home.

We also had a Nickles breadman who brought a tray full of breads and pastries to our house to select from. We would always try to convince my mom to buy some sweet rolls too!

Anyone remember the Fuller Brush man?

Something that I wistfully recall is when a brand new Penguin paperback cost 65¢ or 2/6.

>136 LadyoftheLodge:

How about the Jewel Tea man?

Where I lived you were famous if you KNEW anyone who had a telephone.

>136 LadyoftheLodge: My folks were not "with money," especially with 8 kids. It turned out to be more cost- and time-effective to have a laundry service for the diapers (plus getting Dad's white shirts starched), so my folks budgeted for it. I somehow ended up with their ledgers when they retired to Florida. Even a pack of gum was accounted for.

My first wife (ThiMs) and I used cloth diapers with each of our three boys. Not sure what happened to them (the diapers I mean; I'm still in touch with the offspring), but I have a diaper that was cut in half, and I use it to keep my left arm from sweating the ink wet (I use a fountain pen to write.) while I journal.

I write on the right page and starting from the last page heading toward the front, I maintain a summary of topics I write about on a given day. When the narrative and the TOC meet, I flip the book upside down and continue until I fill up the blank book. I rest my left arm on the book to keep the pages flat when I write. That diaper is perfect for my needs.

Our children think they’ve got it hard. Our mothers never blinked laundrying for big families with a wringer washer in the basement and a clothesline out back. And all cottons needed ironed. I knew some mothers who ironed sheets. My mom didn’t, yet there were mountains of clothes to be sprinkled (remember that?) and ironed and hung up. And buttons replaced and socks darned. We all pitched in and mom made it fun. She would stage ironing parties with us and our friends. Pizza and root beer floats after the work was done.

Saturday mornings, best friend came over and we’d vacuum, dust, etc. and then do the same at her house.

I’ve ironed a lot of sheets but eventually my mother decided there were better ways to spend our time.

>141 2wonderY: wringer washer

Yes, we had one of those, although I also remember my grandmother up north washing by hand in a tub with a wash board in a shed in the back yard, and using a hand wringer (we called it a mangle). Life was very conformist in post-war Britain and all the ladies in the street washed on the same day (I think it was Mondays and Thursdays) so all the back gardens as far as the eye could see would be festooned with washing on those days. There'd be a lot of chatting across the garden fences. If it started raining and the washing had to be brought in, the first lady to notice would start calling to others. For some reason they would never use each other's first names, but neither did they use the entire surname, just the first letter. My mum (Mrs A) would shout to our neighbours, "Mrs B! It's raining!" and "Mrs. M! It's raining!" and the cry would be taken up by others up and down the street until all the washing had been brought in. We didn't have basements, so usually it would be strung up in the kitchen, the warmest room in the house until the coal fires were lit in sitting rooms, when some of it would also be draped on clothes horses there.

My mom had 3 children in 30 months and of course, didn't work outside the home. She took in ironing for others, 50 cents a basket! She would iron most afternoons while watching the soaps--As the World Turns and the Guiding Light-now defunct.

>135 LadyoftheLodge: I can well remember the garbage cans in the summer--the maggots, just yuck! Only 2-3 times since I've been married (47 years) have we had maggots in the trash can. I refuse to touch it when I see them. I scream, the husband comes out and takes care of it! I'm not sure, I can't remember, but in the 1960's, did they have garbage bags?

>145 Tess_W:

In the 1960s in UK we had metal dustbins (trash cans on your side of the Pond), and we certainly didn't have black plastic rubbish bags (your garbage bags). At some indeterminate point in recent history plastic dustbins appeared, as did black bags.

There's an interesting reflection on metal and plastic dustbins (and particularly their lids) in the Irish rebel song Lid of Me Granny's Bin.

>145 Tess_W: Yes, there were four of us children, and my mother also did ironing for others while watching the same soaps as your mom! Also, Search for Tomorrow and The Secret Storm.

Supermarkets just had “rice”, and it was just short-grain or Calrose. Now there’s 3188 different kinds of rice. Similarly once there was lettuce and no other salad greens.

>148 haydninvienna: Aged about 10 years or so, at school we were shocked to learn that 68% of the worlds population had a staple diet of rice.
Us wartime kids only occasionally saw rice in sweet milk puddings. The thought of people living on milk puddings took some leap of the imagination.

>141 2wonderY: My mother was raised in a very strict home with all hardwood floors. Each night, after dinner, the windows were closed and the curtains pulled, no matter the heat. EVERY morning, each room was dusted and the dust mop was used. The curtains were not opened, nor the windows, until these 2 tasks were done.

Air conditioning.....no such thing until I was out of the house. Also did not have it in the dorms in college (The Ohio State University in the 1970's.) I got married in 1973 and our first apartment had air conditioning---it was like heaven. However, fast forward, 40+ years, and the only reason we run it is because my husband insists. Quite frankly, I do not like going around inside with a sweater in the summer. I have negotiated the temp to 72, because hubby would like it at 68-69. It's a meat locker! I could do with just a plain fan in the bedroom at night.

The dorm I mostly was in had no air conditioning but they built some new dorms when I was a Junior that did. They had smaller rooms though. This was in Middle Tennessee.

...Since it is Tuesday ...for those in the U.S. does this ring a bell?....."Today is Tuesday. You know what that means. We're going to have a special guest! So, roll out the carpet and sweep the place clean. Dust of the mat so the "Welcome" can be seen...." We never had a TV but I did get to see an occasional show over at a friends house.

>149 TeaBag88:

Us too. The only rice we ever ate was in sweet milk puddings, and we had no idea that it could be used as a savoury main course. Mind you we also never had real spaghetti - the only spaghetti we ate was from Heinz, the canned variety.

>151 Tess_W:

Air conditioning was unheard of. Mind you, so was central heating. A coal stove in the kitchen, and a coal fire in the living room - this was the one that heated water if you needed a bath, with a small tank built into the back of the fireplace. The house was freezing until someone (usually my dad) got up and lit the fires in the morning. It was not uncommon to find ice on the inside of the bedroom windows of a winter morning - and as recently as the 1980s I recall staying with a friend in the north of England who still had no central heating and there was indeed ice on the inside of my bedroom window. If it got too cold you put extra layers of clothing on; if it got too hot you shed layers of clothing and opened a window.

Time perhaps to revisit the famous Four Yorkshiremen Sketch from the pre-Monty Python "At Last The 1948 Show".

Foods that I had never eaten until I left home and moved into the dorms at college and/or married: spaghetti, pizza, mushrooms, any seafood. I can honestly say that we never had salad at home, only when we went to a restaurant, which was rare.

>154 John5918: ditto on the frost on the inside of the windows on the farmhouse. We also heated with coal, although the coal furnace was in the basement and I remember coal being brought to the basement via a chute. The first floor was warm, but the 2nd floor only got the heat that rose from the first floor and it was cold!

My mom made a “Chinese” meal from Uncle Ben’s rice and canned components warmed in a saucepan. Can’t recall the brand, as I’ve protectively blocked the memory. It was awful. But we reversed our spoons and forks and used them as chopsticks.
ETA: Ah! Chun King chow mein

Pizza was made out of a boxed mix.

>156 2wonderY: Oh! that is so funny.

Also: Pizza was made out of a boxed mix.

The first time us kids heard the word "pizza" it would probably have been in an early Rock n Roll song and we would not have a clue what they were talking about.

Elvis sang about "Get the hi-fi high and the lights down low." At school we had no idea what he was on about but we still loved it.

ETA: Pizza, It was a Nat King Cole song. 😃

>156 2wonderY:

The first time I tasted Chinese or Indian food was after I left home and went away to university in 1972. Chinese and Indian takeaways were beginning to appear, and they had the added advantage of staying open late after the pubs had shut, perfect for students who were a bit peckish after a few jars.

I don't recall eating pizza at university, nor in fact even having heard of it. Must have been later in life before I discovered that one.

Pizza finally made it to my part of the south about 1965.

>158 John5918: Well, real Chinese food was also a college experience for me. The first restaurant in Morgantown WV was a family operation, named Hallelujiah Chinese Restaurant. Very nice family! And not anything like what mom served.

Pizza was known as pizza pie.

I remember those Chun King dinners too!

I don’t think I had eaten broccoli until my senior year of high school when we made broccoli with cheese sauce in my home ec/meal preparation class.

>161 marell: "When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's amore." Dean Martin 1952

Even as a Brit, I knew all the words, still do, but not what pizza was. 😃

"When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's a-messy!" -- Pookie, Soupy Sales Show, early 1960s

The only asparagus I tasted was from a can. I thought it was a nasty vegetable until my adult children introduced me to fresh asparagus. I now have my own small plot which will be poking up soon.

>165 2wonderY:

Likewise, including canned asparagus soup. I never ate fresh asparagus until I was in my forties, doing my MA in Spokane, WA, where asparagus is grown locally. Now it's one of my favourite treats.

>165 2wonderY:
>166 John5918:

Love fresh asparagus! We eat it broiled in the oven just tossed with olive oil and salt and pepper (maybe bacon, if I'm feeling ambitious). Parmesan cheese also good after broiling.

I also make a mean asparagus soup.

The only thing about asparagus is that it is so expensive, even in the summer around here, about $2.98 per lb. Although, for the past week Kroger has had it for $.97 per pound, but I knew with my duties this week I would not be able to process it (in fact, I'm not even sure if it can be frozen and still retain its texture--I'm thinking slimy!).

About the only "normal" foods my hubby and I won't eat are sardines, anchovies, and any type of meat brains or testicles!

>167 Tess_W: sardines, anchovies, and any type of meat brains or testicles

I like all of those! So far in my travels I have not found any food which is "normal" to any of the cultures I have encountered which I won't eat.

Edited to add: Obviously there are some foods that I like less than others, but when one is really hungry in a situation where there is no choice of food and no prospect of getting any other food, one will eat whatever is available. Also when one doesn't want to offend the hospitality of often very poor people who have made a real and even self-sacrificing effort to provide something for their visitor.

>168 John5918: Obviously a shared background !

Travelling alone all over the world I have never found anything that I could not eat, and usually enjoy.

Astonished, as a teenager, to find olives in Italy, were not to my liking. Now I love them.

>163 WholeHouseLibrary: "When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's a-messy!" -- Pookie, Soupy Sales Show, early 1960s

I love it !! I will never be able to think of the song now witha-outa-laughing😃

Wow, Soupy Sales! I had not thought of that for years. And the different soap operas that my mom always watched. Speaking of daytime TV, are there any Dark Shadows fans here??

The first time I ever had "pizza pie" was at my aunt's house, and it was nothing like what we have now. I remember it was a "strange new dish from Italy." I hated asparagus--that yucky soft pale green thing in a tiny can. Yuck. And I did not know there were different kinds of lettuce besides Iceberg.

A bit O/T...

Soupy Sales' sons, Hunt and Tony, became well-known rock musicians, playing with David Bowie and Iggy Pop among others. And his grandson Tony Jr is currently playing with the Flamin' Groovies.

Our main TV soap opera was Coronation Street, started in 1960, although it's not a "thing only baby boomers will remember" as it is still going sixty years later. Since most of us didn't have TV when we were little, the radio soap opera The Archers ("an everyday story of country folk"), which started in 1951, would be a more common memory, although that is also still going strong seventy years on.

>173 John5918: Our gang of urchins hated the "bloody Archers" 'cos when it finished it was "bloody bedtime" !!

Did anyone else get "surplus food" in the 60's ?

Someone who knew we could really use it used to drop off a box with a bag of rice, tinned beef, powdered milk and maybe something else. It wasn't great, but it was food. I had a grandmother that had a farm so fruits and veg ( the imperfect ones) were given to us too. Those things helped a lot.

Maybe surplus cheese; though that was probably the 70s as poor college student household. We did get bags and bags of used clothing; mostly very inappropriate stuff. But we had great fun going through and having impromptu fashion shows.

>175 mckait: My grandmother was a cook in a public school that received some ag products from the government. They got 10 lb. blocks of pasteurized cheese (Velveeta like). They had expiration dates. Rather than throw it away, she would cut it into chunks and give it to family members and others who she felt needed it. She said the govt. sent so much that she could have used it everyday and still had 50 lbs. left over. The taste was not very good. The only thing my mom did with it was make toasted cheese sandwiches or melt it over macaroni.

We got free milk at school in those days before Margaret Thatcher stopped it. Little bottles, 1/3 pint (about 200 ml), at mid-morning break, which were ice cold in winter but sometimes a little too ripe in summer after standing outside in their crates since being delivered in the early morning.

>178 John5918: oh goodness yes, school milk. Much less attractive in a Queensland summer ...

>178 John5918: Aha, Yes, free school milk. And for two of us desperadoes in a class of 42 in a school of 100s, free school dinners too.
In such a large school, dinners were in two sittings. If you were very careful you could get into both sittings. I'm sure it kept us alive.

>176 2wonderY: Yes, that too ! But it was the 80's for us. Steel mills closed down in PA and OH and few realized the impact it had on 20,000 or more people who lost our income and homes. Our fire dept would give out the cheese and butter and sometimes if there were leftovers, they would bring us extra. I had 4 kids and my spouse was off working in another state, waiting for us to join him. Remarkably, all of the kids still love cheese :)

The school principal arranged free breakfast and lunch for those of us affected with a stroke of his pen. He was amazing. There were so many of us in town...

>177 Tess_W: That was good cheese, if it was the same as what we got, lol. It was a huge block, yes.. but it was delicious, cheddarlike. I'm sure that your grandmother's kindness was appreciated. The practice these days in many schools of throwing out food instead of allowing hungry kids second servings, or giving it to kids who had no $ for lunch sickens me. My sister used to volunteer in the lunchroom at the catholic school where her kids were students. She refused to throw out food and went out and gave it to kids. When they...the priest and staff... protested.. she said "fire me " and carried on. yay her.

>182 mckait: LOL I don't think our 1950-1960's processed cheese was like yours----ours was American cheese in about a 20 lb. loaf. And definitely, granny's cheese was appreciated by my family, who was pretty poor. We probably had grilled cheese 2-3 times per week with a can of soup for dinner. We wished she would have had left-over peanut butter, because the government made it with honey instead of sugar, and it was good!

>183 Tess_W:

Grilled cheese on toast is known as Welsh rarebit in UK and was very common when I was growing up. I have to confess I had some yesterday!

In the mid-seventies I used to volunteer on a church-run children's camp on Holy Island (Lindisfarne), and cheese on toast was on the menu at least one evening a week. I recall one occasion when the cooks forgot to take the huge block of cheese (which probably was at least 20 lb like yours) out of the freezer and with the time to feed 110 starving adolescent boys fast approaching it was frozen solid and they couldn't cut it with a knife, so I went and found a hacksaw and sawed chunks off. Probably not the most economic nor hygienic use of cheese, but it worked.

We did not realise we were the first generation to be using POSTCODES. Two of my elder brothers were soldiers serving in Korea and Germany respectively.
If their mail to us was not marked: LONDON S.W.17, it would take forever to reach us.

>185 TeaBag88:

In the seventies I was at Durham University and our student residence was in the castle. For those three years any letter addressed to me at simply "Durham Castle" would get there, postcode or no postcode. But you're right that once postcodes came into being, generally it would take longer if you omitted them. Those were also the days of two postal deliveries a day, morning and afternoon, of first class letters almost always arriving the next day, and of mail trains where mail was sorted on the train overnight. Many of those mail trains even had a postbox on them where you could post a late letter at the station.

TIme to listen to Night Mail by W H Auden, perhaps?

Or the original steampunker, Kipling, With the Night Mail, if it doesn’t have to be a train.🙃

>182 mckait: When I was an elementary school principal, I was in the lunch room daily. If kids had some packaged part of the lunch they did not want, they set it aside on a little table rather than throwing it away. Then others who wanted it came and got it. However, the amount of food being wasted was still sickening. I saw kids toss their entire sack lunch that was carefully packed by mom--into the trash cans.

>188 LadyoftheLodge: kids and food. I am sure that continues today. Having a share table is a great idea. I'm sure that plenty of kids benefitted from it. These days though.. they might be gone for good :(

After that bad spell in the 80's we moved to MA. We had money for groceries again. One day my daughter came home and wanted to take artichoke to school ( because it was all the rage with her friends) I had never tangled with one before, and that was pre-internet days. I somehow found out how to prepare one, and sent her off with it and some mayo. She never asked again, and later admitted it wasn't her cup of tea. lol. I might have been the cook, but who knows. I suspect it landed in the trash too.

By the time my kids were in high school, we were able to give them money for school lunch. I'm sure a good part of that money was spent elsewhere.

These days they are all in their 40's and all have different food preferences. I know for sure that one of them still chooses chicken strips when out.

>188 LadyoftheLodge: That's heartbreaking, isn't it?

Our school dinner tables sat 8 kids. Even very poor kids would often turn up their noses at the meals provided at very reasonable cost. My attitude was always, "are you not going to eat that? . . . .Pass it over here."

ETA >14 PhaedraB: Yet, as you so rightly pointed out, we never carried an ounce of fat. Too busy running to and from school to keep warm. 👀

>171 LadyoftheLodge: Hey, I remember Dark Shadows! My sister and I used to watch it when we got home from school.

I wish I could say I remember a lot about it, but aside from Barnabus Collins, the main vampire, I really don't! :)

Anyone ever read the comic books "Classics Illustrated"? Anyone ever use the comic book as a crib instead of reading the novel when it was assigned reading in class? I didn't (use it as a crib) but I do remember people who did.

>188 LadyoftheLodge: the amount of food being wasted was still sickening

This really struck me much later in life when, after years living in one of the poorest countries in Africa, I went to a US university to do my MA in the 1990s. There was a huge dining room (refectory, canteen, restaurant, whatever the correct term is) where you could eat as much as you wanted for a fixed price. It was buffet style, and you could go back as often as you wanted to refill your plate. It had a huge array of different types of food, including soup, salads, cooked meals, "fast food", "junk food", healthy options, snacks, do-it-yourself stir fries, vegetarian, oriental, pizza, desserts, fruit, etc, etc. I can understand hungry students filling their plates and going back again and again for more - indeed I often did that myself. What I could not understand was sudents piling their plates, then taking no more than a couple of mouthfuls of food before throwing the rest into the bin. I really found that sickening. Disgusting. If you're not hungry, why heap your plate? If you don't know whether you like a certain food or not, why not try a small helping first and go back for more if you like it? It seemed to me to epitomise some of the worst attitudes of the throwaway consumerist society in the Global North.

>192 alco261: That's me when I was 10 or so, except for the cribbing thing. I much preferred the Classics Illustrated over the Superman and such comic books. My younger-by-4-months cousin, however collected and bagged all those other comics. He claims to be sitting on a fortune because he has the full series of Superman, Green Lantern, etc. I consider myself to be the richer of the two of us because I read.

>192 alco261:
>194 WholeHouseLibrary:
My school had a set of Classics Illustrated and I checked most of them out to read. Never did that to get out of reading an assignment. Except for The Red Badge of Courage, I liked the school's reading assignments. Don't know where you are from, but here's what our Great Classics Illustrated looked like (they weren't comics):

>193 John5918: I felt the same way when I attended college, John. The waste!

>195 Tess_W: That's interesting - I don't think Great Illustrated Classics and Classics Illustrated are the same thing. Classics Illustrated was definitely in comic book format and could be found on the comic book rack along with all of the others - DC, Dell, etc. None of the schools I attended here in the U.S. ever had them in the school library.

>195 Tess_W: etc
My favorite Classics Illustrated comics were Stevenson's The Black Arrow, and Hamlet. The Hamlet used a great deal of the original dialogue and was my first experience with Shakespeare.

>197 alco261:
>198 Crypto-Willobie:

Yes, after further checking, Classic Illustrated and Great Classics Illustrated were not the same thing. Great Classics Illustrated were a very condensed version of the classic with one page of text and one page of pictures (all B&W).

>195 Tess_W:: Swiss Family Robinson! I remember that from my early 1950s childhood. And "Coral Island" was another but sad to say I can't remember either story.

A bit OT but following on from all the school meal posts Mrs P worked in a primary school until she retired about 10 years ago. Quite a lot of children brought their own lunch box from home and class teachers were expected to inspect them to check no junk food, chocolate, sweets etc. Mrs P was a little lax as she thought it rather intrusive but some staff did it with gusto.

>191 terriks: I loved Dark Shadows!

>200 PossMan: Good on Mrs P. As long as they have food, so what? Some kids are picky eaters and better that they have a chocolate bar than nothing at all.

>191 terriks: My girl friends and I were hooked on the show. I still own several of the paperback books on which the series started--Victoria Winters was the first one, and others followed.

>192 alco261: Yes, we loved Classics Illustrated! Many of those resided in our comic book rack. Some people thought comics were awful, a waste of money and hazardous to young brains. Remember Archie, Nancy, Little Lulu, the Katzenjammer Kids?

>193 John5918: Really sicko that some people still let their kids do that at buffet restaurants (pre-pandemic of course.)

>202 mckait: - While the following only constitutes what one boomer remembers it does pertain to school lunch. One morning in my 6th grade class the kid in the row next to me just folded up and slumped over his desk in a dead faint. The teacher called the school nurse and they got him on his feet and out of the classroom. The next day the word went round he had fainted from lack of food. From that day forward around 10 AM he was briefly dismissed from class and he went up to the lunch line for the school cafeteria where he would eat a small candy bar and a half sandwich. We kids were told it was because he was growing too fast and needed the additional calories - as an adult my guess is his family was in dire economic straights and simply couldn't afford to adequately feed him so the school found a way to get him some extra food without hurting his feelings.

>204 LadyoftheLodge: Oh yes. When I had the requisite 10 cents my choices were usually the Disney group with a focus on Donald Duck and company (the inventor Gyro Gearloose was always a favorite), or the Looney Tunes crowd with Daffy Duck and Marvin the Martian leading the way. I never did care much for Superman, Batman, Sgt. Rock, etc. - too much action and no laughs.

>193 John5918: >205 LadyoftheLodge: Where I live, all-you-can-eat buffets fine people who leave too much on their plates, to discourage this sort of behaviour.

School lunches--The Great Depression

I do not remember this, of course. However, it was told to me by both my mother and father. My father's family were poor farmers of about 60 acres. They slaughtered a hog each fall, but by April-May there was no meat left. They had a chicken on Sunday, but not much else the rest of the week. My grandmother made all the kids 2 lard sandwiches to take to school each day. My dad told me that kids would beg him for the 2nd sandwich--which he said most of the time he did give away. Then for dinner, they had heated lard--made into gravy--over bread. They were very glad when summer and the garden arrived. My grandfather eventually got a job working for the WPA loading logs from a forest onto a semi. For this he was paid $5 per week (40 hours) and a 20 lb. bag of potatoes. The family was quite happy with the job!

Baby boomers remember Levi jeans that would stand up by themselves. :-)

>210 TeaBag88: especially if dried on the line!

>146 John5918: John, the black plastic bin liners first appeared when we had the bin men’s strike in the 70s; our local council gave them out for free if you went to the Town Hall. It was only later that the bin men refused to empty bins if you didn’t use a bin liner and that’s when supermarkets started selling them in rolls of 10 or 20.

>206 alco261: Not having enough food was bad enough fifty years ago...it still goes on. One of my greatest fears when my kids were young was to have to put them to bed hungry. :(

>162 TeaBag88: When the band 10CC had a hit with Life is a Minestrone, I had no idea what either minestrone or lasagne were :) didn’t encounter such things until I went to uni in 1975.
Didn’t know what broccoli was until my husband brought some home when I was pregnant with my first child, ‘eat this, it’s full of iron’, I remember the taste was very bitter until I got used to it.

>214 mlfhlibrarian: I'm with you---it was only meat and potatoes, corn, peas, and green beans for me until I went to uni. I went from a rural area of about 190 to a university with a student population of 50,000 at a state capital. It was like I had walked into another world.

We mostly ate what my grandfather grew: carrots,onions, potatoes, green beans, lima beans ,tomatoes, crookneck squash, sweet potatoes, corn, cantaloupe,watermelon, cabbage, cucumbers, popcorn and peanuts. There were also Concord grapes and raspberries and four huge black walnut trees on his eleven acres. So with canning and freezing and making jelly, tomato juice, and pickles we ate pretty well for about nine months of the year off what he grew. Of course we had to help with the harvesting and storing! In our backyard we had a little patch with radishes and carrots and a few tomatoes. Other veggies were a mystery to me until I left home for college except for the occasional raw turnip from our next door neighbor’s garden.

My grandmother had a farm ad grew corn and tomatoes and apples, apricots, pears, cherries, and more. My great grandmother made bread and sent some out way every 2 weeks. So we had those. I was a young teenager before having pizza and like some of you, things like lasagna and "fancy" foods were not part of our diet. To be honest, it was mostly the same for our kids. Feeding four of them often kept us to the basics.

I remember getting a color TV at about the time I was to graduate from high school. Watching ( the sometimes hard to find these days )old black and white movies still takes me back. I still love those old movies, so many of them musicals and most seem so innocent compared to what is on these days.I was about 3-4 and I have memories of listening to the Jimmy Durante show my parents were watching when I was meant to be asleep. When the kids were small, it was Bob Ross and Mr Rogers most days :)

And what music did our parents listen to? My mom loved Burl Ives. So do I.

>218 2wonderY: Yeah, Burl Ives. Dad loved to listen to him and Mr. Ives got me (and I think Dad also) in a LOT of trouble. I don't remember how long Dad had owned his 3 Burl Ives records but he did play them a lot and I, of course, listened. In 3rd grade during the music time our teacher asked if anyone had a new song they would like to sing and maybe the class could learn it. I raised my hand, went to the front of the class and in a nice clear voice sang The Eddystone Light - For those of you unfamiliar with the lyrics the first line is - "My father was the keeper of the Eddystone light and he slept with a mermaid one fine night...." ...it sort of goes down hill from there... when I finished there was complete silence in the room and (I realize this now as an adult) the teacher regained her composure and said, "I'm sorry but we don't like to sing those kinds of songs." I was crushed - of course all I knew was the catchy lyrics and nothing of what they meant.

When I got home I told Mom my sad tale of rejection. She sympathized, and in so many words told me it was ok....and Burl Ives disappeared from my Dad's record collection never to be heard from again. When Dad died many years back I was helping with sorting household effects. Buried under all sorts of odds and ends at the bottom of a long stored and unopened trunk I found those 3 records.

How about the Newport Folk Festival recordings - Dad bought the first of the series which covered 1959 and 1960 and had many of the greats - Cisco Houston, Odetta, Pete Seeger, The Kingston Trio, etc.

>219 alco261: I do remember the Eddystone Light song! My dear departed spouse knew all the words and would sing them to me. I might still have a Burl Ives CD somewhere.

Nat King Cole was played a lot in our house...

>221 mckait: Then you will know the words:

Let there be wind, occasional rain
chilli con carnie, sparkling champagne.

Us kids decided that chilli con carnie must be a drink.😊

>218 2wonderY: We had a few Burl Ives records, too! I remember that mellow voice.

>219 alco261: Hilarious!! 🤣

We listened to a variety of stuff, between my parents. In addition to Burl Ives, I grew up listening to Sammy Davis, Jr., Judy Garland, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra, to name just a few.

I still know all the lyrics to "16 Tons" and the amazing vocals of Tennessee Ernie Ford, wailing them out at the end.

Good memories. 👍

“Another day older and deeper in debt...St. Peter don’t call me cause I can’t go. I owe my soul to the company store.”

I mostly heard Ford at my grandparents house and at home it was mostly Big Band, swing, and jazz.

Oh, Burl Ives, I remember him from my parents. My parents were not big music listeners as the church frowned upon it. But my mother played the accordion and I bet I listened to more polkas than anybody my age! I also remember Tennessee Ernie Ford (Sixteen Tons and a bunch of gospel songs) as well as Ferlin Huskey (On the Wings of a Snow White Dove).

>225 Tess_W:

My parents were also not big music listeners. At that time a lot of UK radio and TV programmes would include a musical interlude at some point, usually what one might call fairly unadventurous middle-class middle-aged music, and they liked that sort of thing. Harry Secombe, Andy Stewart, Val Doonican, Tom Jones, Billy Cotton and his band, etc, as well as the musical bits on various popular comedy shows (Morecambe and Wise, the Two Ronnies, Ken Dodd, etc) and the music hall numbers on "The Good Old Days".

My wife's father was a senior postmaster, but in his spare time he used to play jazz trumpet in Kenyan bars, so she was brought up listening to a lot of jazz.

>222 Jammy1:
Let there be birds, to sing in the trees, someone to bless me, whenever I sneeze.

So long ago! lol @ chili beverage

Tennesee Earnie Ford reminds me of my grandmother's house. So does the Arthur Godfrey show, with Carmel Quinn..geez I haven't thought about this for a long time

>223 terriks: omg... 16 Tons! me too :)

This nostalgia is alright but it's not what it used to be, is it? 😎

>224 hailelib:
>228 mckait:

It will get your fingers snapping, won't it? :)

>230 terriks: for sure!

Does anyone remember Camphor Ice? That's what came to mind when I read the title of this thread. I guess you could call it Chap-Stik's grandmother.

I was reminded the other day of the outfits my mother bought to dress up the bathroom throne. It consisted of a wrap for the tank, a bonnet for the lid, and a fitted apron/rug for the floor in front.

I was thinking the other day about the phenomenon of "fast food", and the fact that it didn't really exist when I was young. Fast food was a sandwich which was made at home and you took it with you, made from slices of square white bread (no healthy alternatives in them days). If you were lucky it had something tasty inside it like cheese, processed ham, a boiled egg mashed up with butter, or jam. There were chip butties ("fries" across the Pond), and bacon sarnies were a treat. But often it was just bread and butter with nothing else, or occasionally just a thin sprinkling of sugar, or perhaps some potato crisps ("chips" across the Pond).

Wimpy was probably the first fast food chain in the UK, starting in the '50s. Then the Chinese and Indian takeaways started to multiply during my teenage years, then things like kebab houses. Or perhaps that's just when I started noticing them?

>234 John5918: Fast food did not exist when you were young???

John, where were you? Fish n Chip shops were a goldmine that had queues with staff working flat out.
If you ever bought salt beef sandwiches late at night from the stalls on the bridges over the Thames you would still be dreaming about them today. Mmmmm !

I was thinking we had Wimpy’s before McDonald’s but it turns out it was a local chain called Winky's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winky%27s

Not that I ever tasted fast food while living at home. That was considered an unnecessary luxury. My first job was at a place called Eazer’s Restaurant. Art Eazer was at least third generation owner. His mama baked all the Syrian bread (Oh, lordie, it was delicious!) and ran the register at the back where there was a small grocery. It was next to the hospital and catered to those employees needs. I waitressed and ran the grill evenings.
I remember one young man who sat in a booth for hours and wrote terrible poetry.

>235 TeaBag88:

Can you believe I had completely forgotten fish and chips?! Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. It comes from living overseas for too long...

As for stalls, again thanks for the memories - cockle and winkle stalls, horse chestnuts in winter... yes, I suppose all of those were fast food in their own way.

>236 2wonderY:

I remember McDonald's as being a latecomer to the UK after Wimpy, but as >235 TeaBag88: demonstrates, my memory could be at fault! I've only ever been in McDonald's a handful of times, usually reluctantly.

I remember going to McDonald's with my auntie and my sisters, when it was a walk-up only fast food place. Hamburgers were 10 cents and cheeseburgers were 15 cents. There was a very limited menu, just burgers, fries, and soft drinks ("pop" to Midwesterners). I recall how cold it was standing in line (outdoors) to order at the window. It was the lap of luxury when they enclosed the waiting area with glass windows.

Anyone remember Tastee-Freeze ice cream shops? They also had walk up windows. We did not have a Dairy Queen near my house.

The first fast food place we had was White Castle with square slider size burgers for ten cents.

I guess there was a fast food outlet that we bought from. Glen’s Frozen Custard built their stand in my town the year we moved there:

http://glenscustard.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Glens-history.jpg

It was a summer treat to all walk up there and get a cone. Better than soft serve ice cream, but I couldn’t say why.

Oh! Egg yolks.

I ate my first burger aged 19 in probably August 1967. A Wimpy burger of course,and it was so delicious! It was lunch hour and I popped round the corner from the library,where I was a library assistant working and doing work experience while waiting to go to Library School. I have never forgotten the taste!I was away living in Africa in the 70sand Wimpey had disappeared. I was massively disappointed in the MacDonalds burger when we finally got their franchise around mid 80s. I doubt if I have had more than 4 burgers there in the last 35 years.......

A dime postage would send a post card anywhere in the world that received mail. In North Carolina, we had Charles' Chips, which everyone called Charlie Chips. They came in a large metal can. Regular potato chips or barbecue flavors. Putting the empty can outside on the stoop for recycling, with the payment envelope inside.

Milking Holsteins with the 'new' rubber suction cups that fit over the cows teats. I found one buried in the dirt at the old farm. I cleaned it up and gave it as a gag gift to my parents' friend, Paul. He was an old city boy who'd been in the Navy. His mind went straight downtown when he saw the size and shape.

Stooking grain, anyone?

>237 John5918:: Mention of stalls reminds me that going home from school in Bury (Lancashire) in the 50s there was a sort of handcart that sold hot potatoes. Perhaps a caning and a hot bottom if a teacher caught you.

>242 smirks4u: We had New Era chips in a can! "Penny post cards" later rose to 4 cents each for postage when I was a kid, and there was a mailbox on every corner.

>244 librorumamans: Never did it, but I know what you mean. City girl here.

>234 John5918: I could almost taste those from your descriptions. Nice. I think it was the book Little Women, where the daughters were sent walking to school, each with a hot pastry to keep their hands warm for most of the way.

>232 malarkeyus: Good point! If you remember Camphor Ice, did you also have Mercurochrome? All scrapes and minor cuts got this biohazard applied. You were supposed to blow on it, to help ease the sting of the now-outlawed medicine. I guess baby dragons got the worst of both worlds.

>233 2wonderY: Great memory! Also, pastel colored toilet paper was the rage for awhile. One commercial actually showed nine dispensers beside one toilet, to showcase all their colors.

>200 PossMan: In Swiss Family Robinson, I remember the family was under attack of a huge constrictor snake, which ate the donkey.
Regarding lunchbox inspections...In the novel The Lords of Discipline, the upper classmen always raided the freshmen food they tried to bring on base. The freshmen would be ordered to do push-ups as the older boys ate their mothers' home cooking in front of them. In revenge, the freshmen made a large batch of Ex-Lax fudge, painted the toilet seats with shoe polish, and took out the bathroom lightbulbs.

>250 smirks4u: pastel colored toilet paper

People of our generation in the UK will surely remember the hard, shiny, non-absorbent toilet paper (and certainly not pastel coloured!) which was all we had in those days. I honestly can't remember how/whether it actually worked, but that's what we used. I much prefer the modern soft absorbent bog paper.

>252 John5918: Probably the reason you forgot fish n chips is the same reason you forgot newspaper.😃

>252 John5918:

To us tourists from North America in the early sixties, this stuff provoked great curiosity as why anyone would have deemed it fit for purpose in the first place!

>249 smirks4u: Yep, Mercurochrome was always in our house and the go-to cut medicine.

>252 John5918: Absolutely! The colored toilet papers were later found to be a contributing cause of Hemorrhoids (piles) in a substantial lot of people. Thus it went the way of the avocado green vinyl couch.

>255 marell:

Or Merthiolate...

>257 Crypto-Willobie: Yes, indeed! We also had, throughout my childhood and possibly beyond, a rather large, round, red and gold tin of brown medicated salve. It was actually teat or bag balm and we used it on cuts and scrapes. We just called it “the brown salve.”

>254 librorumamans: still better than the squares of cut up newspaper we were "sold" (1 peso) in Mexico before we entered a public bathroom.

>254 librorumamans:

We didn't know any better at the time, but as soon as we realised that there were other types of bog paper in the world I think we had the same reaction as you - how could this be deemed fit for purpose?

>259 Tess_W:

I didn't have to start using squares of newspaper until I moved to Sudan in my twenties. Arab cultures don't use toilet paper, they use water and the left hand, so bog paper there was difficult to find and very expensive - during those years of hyperinflation in Sudan the running joke was that it was cheaper to use banknotes as toilet paper than to use them to actually buy toilet paper. I used to receive the Guardian Weekly air mail edition, printed on thin air mail paper, which always arrived weeks late, but after I had finished the crossword and everybody and their dog had read it (there was so little reading material that anybody would read absolutely anything that came their way) we would cut it into small squares and hang it on a nail in the pit latrine.

>257 Crypto-Willobie: Yes! There were things we put on open cuts and scrapes then that would not even be allowed in a dairy barn today... Of course the letter of the law in the 1980's, for the US OSHA, stated that a popular product known as White Out should have been kept in a locked cabinet. Managerial oversight was required to open it for each usage. That never happened.

>261 smirks4u: I remember that.
Do you happen to know the name of the person who invented its competition, Liquid Paper?

We had an 'egg lady' and a milkman who came weekly. My mom used merthiolate religiously on all our cuts, etc. I really wish we could still buy, it worked so well.

We had a huge old iron range,massive and with a deep space for the coal,big oven at the side,a stand for the kettle which could be moved over the coal,and the kettle was always simmering.All cooking eating and living was in that room,as the kitchen - we called it the ''scullery'' at the back held nothing but a sink and kitchen cabinet holding food.On one side was a bathroom,and an outside toilet was on the other side(you had to step outside in the snow to go to the loo,)so the scullery was barely 7x7 feet, only used for washing up dishes
early on I distinctly remember - around 1956? - we didnt have an electric iron. there were two solid metal irons which were placed oover the fire.One would be heating while the other was in use.and you switched when it cooled down!
No wonder a whole dy was allocated to the ironing in all those old songs etc!
My mother thought she had died and gone to heaven when she got her first electric iron!
That range kept us alive in the icy winters (no radiators back then,that was the only source of heat in the house)But it had to fired up all summer,and that was a nightmare in the hot weather!
Does anyone remember blackleading those ranges?Hard hard job......The council finally removed them around 1959.

>264 dustydigger: Did you watch the BBC series Good Neighbors, original title, The Good Life? Tom buys one and Barbara is expected to bring it back to life.

New thread started: Early Closing: Wednesday.

>266 TeaBag88:

Where we lived it was Thursday afternoon. I think the reason was to compensate shop workers for having to work on Saturdays. All shops were closed on Sunday, of course, with the exception of newsagents who opened for a few hours in the morning so that newspapers could be delivered.

There was an earlier conversation on fish and chip shops. I watched a video yesterday which suggested that the first true fish and chip shop in London opened in the East End around 1860 or so. The idea of frying fish in batter apparently came from Huguenot and Jewish immigrants to the East End, and at some point an enterprising soul tried pairing it with chips. A genius.

>267 John5918: I remembered when I visited England for the first time in 2005, I had this "mystical" idea that fish and chips was something really special. After ordering it at an upscale restaurant, it was just the same ole fried fish and fries that we had in the US!

>268 Tess_W: Awwwh Tess, that wasn’t fish n chips !!!

Fish n chips is when you walked hungry for miles to get to a better f&c shop that was even cheaper, got in the queue, got served, put on your salt and vinegar from the counter, had it wrapped in newspaper and rushed out of the shop into the dark and the rain. Then you huddled in a shop doorway and shared it with someone you just could not live without whilst burning your fingers.

>269 TeaBag88: Lol You are so right! but as a child we lived 2 minutes walk from the most wonderful fish n' chip shop. That was the only takeaway food around those days,and my family had it twice a week.Maybe a third time because the breeze wafted the delicious smell to us and we succumbed.After all the meal was ridculously cheap,perhaps a quarter or fifth of todays cost.The smell would waft down the street when they were heating the lard. Yep,lard.Fish and chips was never the same once they replaced the lard fat with vegetable oil. And then they dared to replace newspaper with supposedly more healthy plain white paper,and now boring polystyrene cartons. Very boring.
Things went downhill from thereon........
I'm still in the same house,but no fish shop there now,its a chinese takeaway :0)

We have a chippie just down the street, supposedly the best in town. It’s disappointing. They do pretty well by current British standards, I suppose, but the best f&c EVAR came from the Curtin Takeaway back in Canberra (Curtin: suburb of Canberra). It’s usual in Australia to crumb-coat the fish (“breaded fish”, an expression I still find odd) rather than battering it, and so you get more fish and less stodgy fat-soaked batter.

And don't forget the pickled eggs and giant pickled onions.

.

>272 John5918: And don't forget the pickled eggs and giant pickled onions.

Yes, I remember seeing them . . . . . . Only for the rich though. 😃

>274 TeaBag88:

True enough. Couldn't afford them when I were wee lad, but I made up for it later in life!

Whenever we visit England (which hasn't been for a while now due to COVID) we go to Harry Ramsden's in Brighton (where we stay with my nephew) for cod and chips plus everything - mushy peas, pickled egg, pickled onion, slice of bread and butter - and for dessert, bread and butter pudding with custard. And a pot of tea, of course. Superb.

Reading the above the message seems to be that the best fish and chips don't come from an upscale restaurant but from a local chippie. In Ramsbottom we had Brocklebanks among others.

>276 PossMan:

Agreed!

1961. Three teenage boys in town walked quite a way in the late evening only to find their fish and chip shop closed. A passing stranger directed them to another, quite a way off.

They found it, a long way off their usual haunts and the fish and chips were awful.

Dejectedly walking back they met three girls, strangers to them, looking for the fish and chip shop. They all laughingly told them not to bother, “Here you can have our’s they’re not very nice.”

Long story short: Those three girls married those three boys and they are all still together and in touch to this day. They sometimes meet up for fish and chips and a laugh.

I can vouch for this story because I know all six of ‘em.

>278 Novak:
Love that story!

How many oldies remember Desmond Dekker singing:

Shirt all torn up, trousers are gone
I don't want to wind up like Bonny and Clyde
Poor me, me ears are alight.

>280 TeaBag88: I do! I love that song and have it on my iPod. It’s called The Israelites.

>280 TeaBag88:

Not me.

How about Lonnie Donegan singing "My Old Man's a Dustman"? Bernard Cribbins singing "Hole in the Ground" and "Right Said Fred"? Tommy Steele with "Little White Bull", "What a Mouth (What a North and South)" and "Flash, Bang, Wallop!" (the latter from the musical "Half a Sixpence")? Stanley Holloway with "I'm Getting Married in the Morning" from "My Fair Lady"?

Speaking of Stanley Holloway, does anyone remember his comic monologues? "The Lion and Albert", "Sam, Sam, Pick oop thy Musket", "Three Ha'pence a Foot ", "With Her Head Tucked Underneath Her Arm", "The Battle of Hastings", and many more.

And again speaking of Stanley Holloway, I often wondered why Dick van Dyke, who to me at that time was a complete unknown and had the worst imitation Cockney accent I have ever heard, was cast as the chimney sweep in "Sound of Music" instead of the likes of Stanley Holloway or Tommy Steele, both of whom (to me at least) were much better known and could have played the part far more authentically.

>282 John5918: I think you mean Van Dyke in "Mary Poppins"?

>283 Tess_W:

Sorry, thanks, yes, of course it's "Mary Poppins", not "Sound of Music"! A slip of the typing fingers, or maybe all those films which used to appear with clockwork regularity on Christmas Day TV just all blur into one?!

Hey you guys, Please go back to post 280 and read it again . . . . carefully !

Hope it makes you smile, but . . . some fall on stoney ground. 😃

>281 marell: Your post 281 may help.

>285 TeaBag88:

I have gone back and read it again (and >281 marell:), and I even looked up Desmond Dekker, whom I had never heard of before, but it appears to have fallen on stony ground in my case. Would you care to give us the punch line?

>282 John5918: “My dustbin’s full of lilies”.
“Well, throw ‘em away then!”
“I can’t, Lily’s wearing them …”

Never gets old.

Oh, and >280 TeaBag88: I most certainly remember Desmond Dekker, but I can’t remember the punch line either. Or was it just the Jamaican accent?

ETA Wikipedia says “… few could understand all the lyrics …”.

>287 haydninvienna:

"My dustbin's absolutely full with toadstools."
"How do you know it's full?"
"'Cos there's not mushroom inside..."

>282 John5918:

Because Mary Poppins was an American-made movie (Disney) and over here Van Dyke was a major star and much beloved -- Bye Bye Birdie and the Dick Van Dyke Show (one of the great early sit-coms which also gave us Mary Tyler Moore). And a good dancer. As to his accent, fair enough; but I've never ever heard a Yank complain about it, only Brits. Most of us are not very good at parsing the intricacies of the British/Imperial accent system.

Stanley Holloway would certainly have made a good Bert, but he wasn't as cute as Dick. I used to have a CD compilation of Pick Oop Thy Musket etc.

Closing trivia -- who acted in both Fawlty Towers and Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy? -- Bernard Cribbins

I looked up the lyrics for The Israelites and the lines in 280 appear as:

Shirt them a-tear up, trousers are gone.
I don't want to end up like Bonnie and Clyde.
Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.

Depending on the site you look at, the lyrics vary slightly in other parts as well. Who is right, I don’t know because I also have trouble understanding the lyrics, but it’s a great song and I still listen to it.

>289 John5918:
“He found a tiger’s head one day
Nailed to a piece of wood.
The tiger looked quite mis’rable
As I suppose he should.
Just then from out a window
A voice began to wail—
Said ‘Oi! Where’s me tiger’s ‘ead’?
FOUR FOOT FROM ‘IS TAIL!”

>282 John5918: The only Lonnie Donegan song I remember is “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose its Flavor on the Bedpost Overnight.” My little grandson listened to it over and over again and chimed in with “Boom! Boom! toward the end of the song. We had so much fun singing along to that fun song.

>292 haydninvienna:

Now, one day while in a hurry
He missed a lady's bin
He hadn't gorn but a few yards
When she chased after him
"What game do you think you're playing"
She cried right from the heart
"You missed me, am I too late?"
"Nah, jump up on the cart!"

>282 John5918:
When I was little we used to go camping in N Wales, and one year every time we turned the radio on Right Said Fred was playing, so I soon learned all the words. I reckon they get through about seven cups of tea, which must be a record even for a Brit!

>282 John5918: But do you remember Frank Ifield’s She taught me to Yodel ‘Yodelayidee!’

>296 mlfhlibrarian:

I'd forgotten it, but thanks for the reminder!

>198 Crypto-Willobie: Classics Illustrated policy was to use only text from the original—-drastically reduced, obviously, but nothing added. I was addicted to CI. Can’t really separate my first encounter with, for example, David Copperfield in the CI version with subsequent impression of the work. CI illustrations for Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs gave me nightmares for years.

>22 2wonderY: A very late response to an old post, but “Evening in Paris” !!! That struck a chord. I see it was discontinued in 1969 but was “reformulated” in the 90s. Those little blue bottles. Whoa. A Proustian moment.

>61 John5918: Some English contemporaries express class disdain for the American refusal to be content with the teeth God gave them. Like getting a boob job or dying your hair, in their book.

>71 librorumamans: Dairy industry insisted on this in Canada.

>74 librorumamans: Ink Monitor! I recall dropping the watering can-like vessel. Bad scene.

"Sky King" on Saturday mornings.

Yeah, it followed "My Friend Flicka" on the same channel.

Oh, my favorite cartoon - Crusader Rabbit!

>305 TempleCat: and his sidekick - Ragland T. Tiger..I also seem to remember a two headed dragon - Arson and Sterno but that might have been another cartoon series.

>306 alco261:
And Rags, of course! I vaguely remember a dragon, now that you mention it, but was it a regular character in the series?

>303 Tess_W: I gather first generation astronauts all grew up as big Sky King fans.

Big Shout-out to Cherry Ames here https://journals.lww.com/nursing/Fulltext/2018/08000/The_legacy_of_Cherry_Ames.1...

I know this is an old thread But I wanted to add something...

My teenage son (born after 2000) has no idea how to dial a rotary phone. I grew up with a rotary phone.
But this happened last week. I swear this is true!!
My 19 year old son purchased a bottle of soft drink, in a glass bottle with a metal cap last week.
Remember everything has been pop can tabs or twist off caps for as long as he has been alive.
He had absolutely NO idea how to remove the metal cap.

I sat there and watched him for half an hour using a knife and all kinds of things trying to get that cap off.
I was also sniggering and trying desperately not to laugh!!!
When he eventually got frustrated he sat down and said "Well, that was a waste of money!!!"

So I walked over the cutlery drawer, picked up a can opener (which of course are still being made with the bottle opener hooks on them) and calmly opened the bottle for him.
He looked at me and in shock he asked "How did you do that??"
So I showed him the bottle opener part of the can opener works.
This really brought home to me just how much has changed even since I have been alive!!!!

Changing a typewriter ribbon. Interpreting Morse code. Witnessing a ticker tape parade. We’ve done it all.

>311 booksaplenty1949: I was tempted to buy a portable electric typewriter yesterday at the thrift store, just for the sensation of using it. It was a sweet model and in perfect condition.

How to use a map and compass.

As for the rotary dial phone, we were taught that the reason the UK emergency number for police, fire and ambulance is 999 was so you could dial it quickly and easily in the dark. Locate the last hole (0) by touch then step your finger one hole back and you have 9. Doesn't work on a key pad!

I was at a candy store in German Village (Columbus, Ohio) last week and they carried "old" flavors of chewing gum: Black Jack, Cloves, and Beeman. If I chewed gum, I would have paid $ for some Cloves and Black Jack--great memories!

They are filming a remake of Stephen King's vampire novel in my town, and they have completely made over part of a street to look like the early 1970s. The attention to detail is incredible, and they have brought in a bunch of old cars. Here's a short video that a town resident made which is sure to bring back memories!

https://youtu.be/tQXE2gZINZg

>315 vwinsloe: That is just the coolest thing!

>315 vwinsloe: Thank you. Fun to see. Although there is no such saint as “St Augustus.” But maybe that’s a plot point. Enjoyed seeing paper boxes. I recall when they were on the honour system.

Yeah. Trust boxes, we called them. Superficially a sad commentary on the decline of the social contract. More realistically, I suspect, a marker of the shift in revenue streams among the major media.

>316 Tess_W:. I thought so, too. Folks who live downtown, or who were detoured from their route to work every day for a week, were not amused. I was astonished at the level of detail, and I wonder how much will really be seen in the film.

I remember when women’s silk or nylon hosiery came wrapped in tissue paper in a thin box. This was before pantyhose.

I remember my grandmother putting on cotton gloves before handling her hose so as to avoid snagging them.

Does anyone know when in history women started shaving their legs? Because of the advent of sheer hose or long before? With the fashions of the nineteenth century, there wouldn't really have been much point, surely.

Hi all us old farts (do you Americans use that expression?)

My mother was an "Overlocker" at the Hilton Hosiery Mill. They were quite progressive and provided a
kindergarten for us baby-boomers (early "50's") My first memory of Institutionalized food...Some good and
some dislikes I have retained till today (mashed potato!)

PS. ask anyone under our age what an overlocker is...
PPS. Unless they are into sewing :-)

>323 guido47: Institutionalized food

Ah, good old school dinners! Much as I still love mashed potato, the stuff we used to be given at primary school was grey and lumpy. Meat also tended to be grey and full of gristle. Dessert was usually coloured custard, not just the normal yellow one, either as runny as water or so thick that you almost needed a knife and fork to eat it, plus some form of stodgy pudding. It was all cooked at some central local council kitchen and was brought to school by a van, in large metal urns, which were then reheated in the school kitchen. Not exactly fine dining, but then British home-cooking in those days was nothing special either. The rule of thumb seemed to be to boil all vegetables until they were utterly tasteless and any goodness they might have contained had been leached out of them. But we ate it, anyway. No choice.

>323 guido47: For non-Australians: an "overlocker" (the machine) is apparently called a "serger" in the US. (My late wife was into sewing and owned one.) I didn't know though that there was a person/trade called an overlocker.

I don't know exactly how old guido47 is but he must be about my age. Hilton must indeed have been progressive if they were letting married women keep a job and providing childcare. My eldest sister in law had to give up her job when she married (about 1960).

>322 librorumamans: Men didn’t even shave their own faces, generally speaking, until the safety razor became widely available in the early 20thC, so I can hardly imagine women shaving their legs or armpits——neither visible except to intimates until fashions changed in the 1920s. German women still don’t.

My mother told me most women started shaving their legs in the 1940's. There were some bold ones in the 1920's & 30's, but by the 40's she figures 80% were shaving their legs and pits.

>326 booksaplenty1949: I believe that info about German women may be outdated---according to my aunt, who is stationed at Wiesbaden AFB.

>327 Tess_W: I should imagine the advent of sheer stockings/pantyhose meant that shaving became a must-if you’re wearing thick stockings the hairs don’t show through. That was presumably in the 20s, but they were very expensive so it would probably have been the ‘flappers’ who shaved their legs, not ordinary women, who probably continued wearing thick stockings. And I think using depilatory cream was more common than shaving in the UK, that’s what I used when I was a teenager, it was called Immac and had a really peculiar smell!

If any of us were ancient Romans we would probably have removed hair from various areas of the body...

One thing Boomers didn’t consider doing, AFAIK, was removing the hair currently targeted by the “Brazilian” wax job. There are worse things than being old, apparently.

>323 guido47:

I looked up overlocker on Google, as I had never heard of one, never having been involved in the rag trade, and found the definition. 24 hours later, this article appeared on my phone. Big Brother is watching our Google searches!

Understanding a Serger or Overlocking Sewing Machine

>331 John5918:

Granny Google will always be watching over you, ready to offer advice and helpful suggestions. Isn't she wonderful? Like Athena watching over Odysseus.

>329 Crypto-Willobie:

Most of us would have made it to ancient Rome only as slaves. Did male slaves get shaved? I have no idea.

>333 librorumamans: Eunuchs had no body/facial hair worries, I assume.

>334 booksaplenty1949:

That's a point!

When I was a kid there were two ways to die, natural causes and talking back to your parents.

- Instagram wisdom

>336 2wonderY: Thanks for the laugh! That was certainly true in my family!

>336 2wonderY:: Three ways if you add talking back to teachers.

In my formative years, my mother was well known in the neighborhood for her don't-give-me-any-crap attitude toward child-rearing and for her apparently lightning-fast reflexes. It was many the playmate of ours (siblings, at the time, five boys and two girls) who would be arrive home with welts in the form of her bony hand on the side of their faces.

I'm sure that in the current clime, she'd be arrested and sued, but back then, the parents would know about what happened before the urchin arrived home, and receive further discipline.

Yeah, when I was growing up, my mother was referred to as The Five Fingers of Death.

>339 WholeHouseLibrary: The Five Fingers of Death

The headmaster of our grammar (high) school was referred to as "Killer". Apart from his war-time record in Burma, he was reputed to have once broken a boy's wrist whilst administering corporal punishment in the form of the ferula, a leather strap with a whalebone core.

>336 2wonderY:
I got enough practice that I became adept at cutting a switch that would break at about the third strike.

>27 geneg: The Syncopated Clock was the lead-in music for The Early Show (regular movie presentation).

>342 AlexanderPatico: i remember that!

I’m sorting old papers. My mom saved A LOT of stuff for each of her children, bless her.

In a box full of baby gift cards (from my birth) is a hospital bill for 1955. I fell and injured my left clavicle. The fee for the emergency room visit - $1.00

This may be just a U.S. thing but does anyone remember the Burma Shave advertising signs along the highway? They were a simple series of 5 or so red signs spaced out a couple of car lengths apart usually posted on some roadside fence. Each sign had part of a sentence with white lettering and the last sign said "Burma Shave" Some were just cute jingles and others were actually catchy ways to remind you not to do things when you were driving...

For example

He Tried to Cross
As Fast Train Neared
Death Didn't Draft Him
He Volunteered
Burma Shave

I remember seeing them as a kid.

Later on in life, I was a member of a bicycle touring club in northern New Jersey, and we made sets of signs like that to offer encouragement to cyclists doing the Century ride. For whatever reason, they rejected my submission to place some at the 98-mile point that read:

The Last

Two Miles

Is Like

The First

Hundred.

Burma Shave

>345 alco261: vaguely

An article in Ars Technica about the Curta hand-held mechanical calculator, which I had forgotten about, reminded me that older baby boomers are the last generation that will have learned how to use log tables. In my area the high school version of these came in a slim grey hardcover book of about sixty pages and included the trigonometric tables as well as the log tables. I inherited my older sister's copy.

>348 librorumamans:

And the slide rule.

>349 John5918: I had a friend in college who had one of those pricey new calculators. He brandished it with some glee.

>350 2wonderY: I have my Curta right here next to my Christian Becker Chainomatic precision laboratory balance (another mechanical item that was done in by electronics). :-) Dad bought it for his field work and he made the purchase just months before the first Texas Instruments TI2500 4 banger (no memory storage!!!) pocket calculator came on the market. He used it for a number of years and finally gave up and bought an HP pocket version.

Since I mentioned the Chainomatic - how many of us remember having to use a precision mechanical balance?

>351 alco261:

A properly precise balance was used in my Chemistry labs and also in at least one of my Physics labs. We still have our slide rules and log tables. The CRC tables I carried to class everyday was my father's that he used in college.

>351 alco261:
>352 hailelib:

I still have my slide rule from Chemistry 1970.

>349 John5918:
I was just wondering the other day whatever happened to my slip stick! I used to have a little purse-sized book with the trig and log tables as well. Not that I'd have any use for those things now, but I do kinda miss them....

>354 TempleCat:

I still have my slide rule but the log and trig tables seem to have disappeared. Not sure if I'd remember how to use any of them any more!

>351 alco261:, >352 hailelib:

Yes, I remember the balances. Again, not sure whether I would be able to use one properly now.

>351 alco261:

I am madly envious of your Curta!

With the death of Gary Brooker, lead singer of rock band Procol Harum, "you know you're in your sixties when" ... you remember A whiter shade of pale the first time round.

>357 Cynfelyn: Yes!

>357 Cynfelyn: Not clear to me what you mean by "the first time round," but I could absolutely name that tune having heard only the first note.

In season 4 of Line of Duty, DS Arnott is confined to a wheelchair after an attack. While being questioned by him, one of the nasties sarcastically calls him Ironside. I realized that I must be really old if I could get the reference instantly.

>360 librorumamans:

I used to enjoy Ironside, and also Perry Mason, which I think also had the same lead actor.

>361 John5918:

Indeed it did!

I'm not a TV watcher, but my husband is. He has been enjoying a daily episode of Gunsmoke (20 seasons) and I have been joining him. To my total surprise, I am quite enjoying it. The stories are very formulaic, but what a cast of future stars appear on many episodes. I also like the humor of the Doc.

>361 John5918: Loved Perry Mason!

>363 Tess_W: My husband watches Gunsmoke and Wagon Train almost every day. I'm kind of impressed with the icons who were guests on Wagon Train. I was watching one episode and realized the guest star was Bette Davis!

>352 hailelib: >355 John5918: I think all of the balance scales in my high school were stolen by a few of local druggies. My husband shared a locker with one of them and, even 45+ years later, talks about the pharmacy his locker partner had.

>351 alco261: I remember my father's HP calculator, which used reverse Polish notation. He was an electrical engineer. When it was time for me to buy a calculator, I also purchased an HP and to this day, even on computers, I convert to reverse Polish whenever I need to calculate something. Just a habit I never lost.

>367 krazy4katz: I owned at least 2 HP calculators with RPN. Those things were bulletproof. Like you, I still use RPN even on the calculator app on the phone.

ETA You can still get them! I offer you this one, which is a model I once owned.

>368 haydninvienna: I have that one in my desk drawer! I don't know if it still works. It certainly needs new batteries. Loved it!

>367 krazy4katz: I was in the Navy on board a destroyer when HP came out with their HP-35. They had a big two page centerfold ad spread in Scientific American. My issue arrived during a morning mail call so I didn't get a chance to look at the magazine until after work hours. I was laying in my rack reading through the magazine and when I came to the centerfold ad, without thinking I held up the magazine and said out loud," Jesus, that is UNBELIEVABLE!" The other guys just saw the shape of the magazine (it was the same size as Playboy) and the fact that I had the centerfold open so everyone jumped out of their racks and rushed over to mine. The first guy there took one look and said, "Oh for f!!k sakes - it's just alco's d!!ned science mag!" They triced me up in my rack and left me to read the rest of the magazine in peace. :-)

When I got home I returned to my graduate studies and by that time HP had come out with the HP-45. I needed to do a lot of calculating for my thesis so Mom and Dad bought me one as an advanced graduate present. I still have it and it works just fine. Over the years I purchased a couple of more advanced versions and I still use an HP when I'm doing quick calculations in the course of a project.

>370 alco261: They triced me up in my rack

"Rack" I know, but "triced'? Not a word this landlubber has encountered.

Your rack was the platform that held your mattress - all of the platforms were hinged to either a central frame if you were away from the side of the ships hull or hinged directly to the hull interior. The racks got in the way during regular working hours so you trice them up - lash them up and out of the way - memory says they would be at about a 30 degree angle from their "deployed" position.

>372 alco261:

Cool! From middle Dutch trijs = pulley or windlass, and that from Low German trisse = hoisting rope. And thus 'in a trice' = with one pull. The OED is wonderful.

Daughter and her family are vacationing in the Washington DC area this week. She spent her first 9 years in Rockville, MD, so her memory reel is running on overtime. She asked me about a particular vivid memory, and I was able to help her with the details.
She remembered a lunch incident on an outing with her sister and me. It concerned pickle slices:

“It was the counter waitress at the G.C. Murphy five and dime store in Gaithersburg. You two were quarreling over the few that came with your sandwiches. She heard you and plunked down a whole bowl of them.”

I think I’ve mentioned my own childhood memories at the five and dime.

Ah! And I recall this when I was pregnant with her:

I remember when it was still on Market Street. On the east side, above 8th street. When I was pregnant with you and moving to Hamlin for work, and Buck was on the road working, I bought a cheap gold colored wedding band there to wear in that small small town.

>374 2wonderY:
I grew up in Rockville, but my Murphys was in Twinbrook Shopping Center.

>375 Crypto-Willobie: We lived in the Maryvale neighborhood in the smallest house in the county. It started out as a cinder block garage and had been converted and a bedroom/bath added under the eaves. Tight fit for a family of four, but we were happy.

Binmen and other nostalgia. The Guardian/Grauniad has quite a lot of nostalgia in an article - too much to ennumerate but here is a link:-
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/nov/15/who-remembers-proper-binmen-faceboo...
Someting for everyone.

>377 PossMan:

Thanks for posting an interesting article, which I had seen but not read in this morning's Grauniad - as soon as I saw the word "Facebook" in the sub-heading I switched off. But now I've read it, I find it interesting. There's a healthy (or at least harmless) form of nostalgia, which hopefully is what this LT thread fosters, as opposed to a tendency to co-opt a particular, usually biased and incomplete, rose-tinted history to bolster political narratives and ideologies.

Having said that, a few things did bring back warm memories. Binmen, of course - Lonnie Donegan's My Old Man's a Dustman comes to mind, but so does the less well known Lid of Me Granny's Bin from the Northern Ireland Troubles. "You only had Lucozade when you were ill", a dripping sandwich, rag and bone men, playing in bombsites, one pound notes, queueing to use a phone box, playing in the street and yelling “car!”, French cricket, jam sandwiches, scabby knees, skipping, Routemasters (although I consider the RM to be a latecomer to the scene of London buses, and my fondest memories are of the older Regent Type), hot chocolate from the vending machine after swimming lessons, coal fires, the slipper, the cane, the ruler, getting a thick ear, cumbersome lawnmowers, ink wells, duffle coats, tin baths, marbles, Jackie Charlton (and Bobby Moore), forgetting your PE kit, bus conductors, bob-a-job week, wooden ice-cream spoons, Snakes and Ladders, to highlight just a few of the Grauniad's picks. Plus steam engines on the railway, electric milk floats delivering milk in reusable glass bottles to one's doorstep every day, trams and trolley buses, the (in)famous London smogs, me dad going out into the street to scrape up the dung from the coalman's horse to put on his rhubarb patch... the list goes on.

>378 John5918:
“ the dung from the coalman's horse to put on his rhubarb patch”
Black gold! I’ve been known to do this after the rare horse and rider pass.

Also, dustmen.
There was a shabby old man who traveled our alleys pulling a child’s wagon and collecting any likely junk from peoples’ trash. I once expressed sorrow for him to my mom. She said, don’t worry; he may be the richest man in town. I wish she had gone into more detail now.

>378 John5918:: I don't think we ever had a bombsite to play in but I remember lots of air-raid shelters. Ususally not very savoury. And as for milk a local farmer used to come round and ladle milk from a churn.

>380 PossMan: When I was a small child I had an uncle who had a dairy farm near Warwick (in Queensland, Australia) and did milk deliveries. I went on the cart with him once, my vague memory tells me.

In summer, bits of ice out of the back of the milkman's truck, anyone?

>380 PossMan:

I never got into an air-raid shelter, but I do remember playing in abandoned pillboxes. Also usually not very savoury.

This thread has grown so long that I can't remember whether we've mentioned this already, but does anyone remember Meccano? Metal pieces with pre-drilled holes that you could bolt together. As Wikipedia says, "The system consists of reusable metal strips, plates, angle girders, wheels, axles and gears, and plastic parts that are connected using nuts and bolts. It enables the building of working models and mechanical devices." Tremendous fun, and very educational. You could make almost any mechanical object out of it. I just saw a YouTube video of a Meccano steam tram, which brought back the memory. Not that I could afford the fancy stuff like electric motors and steam engines, though - I just had the basic kit. You don't see it in the shops any more, although I believe they still make it in France. I think it had a different name in the USA.

>384 John5918: - yes, I do. In the US it was the Erector Sets which were made by American Flyer - same principle and same issues as far as set types were concerned. The basic set did have a clockwork motor (wind-up for those not familiar with the jargon) so you could power something like a truck. The more expensive sets had electric motors and all kinds of specialized shapes. Pre-boomer (1930) Erector even made an Erector kit for a NYC Hudson locomotive - when they show up on the collector market they command a rather substantial outlay of funds.

>384 John5918: yes, my younger brother got a meccano set, which he wasn't very interested in. I was madly jealous. You could make a pendulum clock with it. I got barbie dolls.

I remember making cranes with mine in the 50s.

My grandfather bought a large Meccano set as a way of amusing himself as he recovered from -- I think -- a heart attack (before my days). By the time it came to me it was a bit depleted, so I couldn't construct all the things illustrated in the manual, but I spent happy hours messing about with it.

Thinking back as an adult: what an excellent way to teach fine motor skills, imagination, patience, basic mechanics, and lots else. I doubt that screens do any of this.

Wikipedia mentions that Meccano was in mid-century owned by the makers of Tri-Ang and subsequently Airfix. Both are brands I had forgotten but each of which bring back memories, especially Airfix model planes, I think? Like Lancasters?

>389 librorumamans: Airfix is still going, now (I think) owned by the Hornby train people.

Yes, Airfix is still going strong and I have some Airfix products on my Africa themed model railway, including a DC-3 which is part of the humanitarian airlift scene in the desert section of my layout. When I was young I made many Airfix kits, including of course the famous Lancaster and Spitfire ones.

When I was a wee lad I had a Triang model railway. In the last few years I have picked up odd bits and pieces of Triang in second hand shops in UK. A friend tipped me off that if you spray the Triang cattle wagons with aluminium paint, they look almost identical to old Kenya Railways cattle wagons, so I have a rake of them, as well as various other odds and ends. They're not good runners, though, as the wheel dimensions are very coarse compared to modern standards. I have some new fine scale wheels on order and I'm going to try replacing the old wheels.

>391 John5918: How many cattle wagons are in a rake? (Now that's a sentence I never thought I'd write!)

>392 TempleCat:

A "rake" (or a "consist") is not a fixed number, but just a set of wagons or coaches which make up a train. I have three of the Triang cattle wagons, standing in the siding next to the cattle loading dock. I also have several other "rakes" of vehicles, including a set of eight South African main line coaches, another of three South African suburban coaches, a set of five Pullman dining cars, and a rake of eight or nine fish vans. I've also made up a hospital train from four random coaches painted white and adorned with red crosses. Apart from the South African coaches, most of these cost me almost nothing, cobbled together from old items given to me from friends' attics or bought second hand.

>393 John5918: Wow, your layout must be huge! I had heard of the term "consist" wrt railroads, but "rake" is a new one to me. Thank you for clarifying. I was picturing, sort of, a field with a hay rake followed by a baler and an array of wagons to carry the bales.

>394 TempleCat:

It's built in a shipping container, 40 foot by 9 foot! See https://www.librarything.com/topic/307229#n7988392

>395 John5918: Now *that's* a model railroad! I found your coaling stage intriguing, laughed at the monkeys stealing luggage, totally recognized the open roof pit latrines and your yellow Sarissa building with the walled courtyard was pretty close to identical to a place I spent a night in in Tunisia.

It was late and a young lad hesitantly gave me directions to what he called "an Arab hotel*" It looked almost exactly like your model, the wall, courtyard and building. Our room had a dirt floor, straw mattresses, an open window-shaped hole high up in the wall and a rope pull for a door handle. Despite some concern for creepy-crawlies, we slept well and were out early in the morning. Cheapest hotel room I've ever stayed in - equivalent to 25 cents for the night for me and my family!

Your models did bring back memories. Very authentic!

* The kid's words, not mine. One of the best hotel rooms I've ever stayed at was in an Arab hotel. It was a suite in the Funduq Omar al Khayyám in Benghazi, Libya - marble everywhere, a bathtub one could swim laps in, huge bed.

Keypunch machine and the keypunch card. We had a keypunch machine at home so my Mom could do it at home.

Almost 400 posts.....need to start page 2 here: https://www.librarything.com/ngroups/1375/Readers-Over-Sixty