[Fun] I'm So Old I Remember....

most of the little towns i grew up in were like that. they had a popcorn machine in the lobby, and i think at most four kinds of soda. coke, squirt, 7-up and orange. (dr pepper didn't exist yet, or not there anyway, but i think you could get a cup of water but had to pay two cents for the cup). only one screen. the movie cans came on the mail train. and if one of the two people running it had to call in sick, they would have to close the candy stand and the ticket window while the movie was showing, so they could run the projectors. the popcorn, soda, and i think about five kinds of candy were it. the ticket window and the candy counter was the same person. (who was the daughter of the guy who owned the place and ran the projectors) i guess i was lucky, people didn't mess up the bathrooms yet in small towns in those days. they did carve their initials on trees and wooden picnic tables though.

ten years old, halloween, kids would drop water balloons from the tops of the store fronts, which were mostly false fronts and not real second floors.

yup look bars and cup a gold. if i remember right, look was like abba dabba only shorter and wider and coated with chocklet. i don't remember what cup a gold was though. i just remember seeing the name.

 

My Land Rover has one of those.

 

They were called trafficators.

 

I'm so old that I remember when all band-aids were pinkish skin tone.

 

mecurochrome, metiolate and isopropal alcohol. also always used to have sloans lynament in the medicine cabinet and first aid box, along with hydrogen peroxide.
mekessen's mouthwash. ivory soap and lava soap. mennen skin bracer. bay rum (a generic kind of after shave). bayer asperin. vicks vapo-rub and vapourizer. tiger balm and bag balm. preperation h. ex-lax (that looked like a hershey's bar, and nasty kids would slip it in each other's lunch box).
metamucil. geritol. phillps milk of magnisia. tums for the tummy. some of these came later of course. unguintine, in the red spray bottle with a top that made it look like a fire extinguisher.
baking soda to brush teeth with. an actual soda-acid fire extinguisher. a cast iron claw footed bathtub, when they were standard and no one considered them unusual or antique.
when a bathroom sink was called a bathroom sink instead of a lav. and was enameled cast iron and hung from the wall.

when both prongs of an electrical plug and outlet were the same size and orientation. and there was no grounding prong. shortwave radios had telescoping antennas.

 

Dippity Do! I remember when we had a toilet tank up on the wall and would pull a chain to flush. IR our oak wall phone with the crank on the side to ring the operator. (my# was 354R and my buddy Richards was 101W.) Haircuts were a dollar fifty.IR when the adults threw some kind of slick flakes in the street so that they could slide around at the street dances, which were often held.
I remember working on farms in the summer after school was let out. I drove a really small Caterpillar--a D2 and I pulled a gigantic grain harvesting machine that took four men to
run, separating the wheat from the chaff. (now the harvesters are air conditioned, have a radio and one guy drives and operates it.) We had a claw foot bathtub with no shower.

 

Bosco! I remember when all Buicks had little chrome surrounded holes in each fender. 3 , I think. And cars were very recognizable--now? All look like jelly beans to me.

I remember when clerks actually knew how to make change.

IRW-only Mexicans and musicians smoked the weed.

IRW--Parents are concerned about trashy music," in the papers concerning that evil Rock n' Roll. Also--"Does Rock n' Roll cause Delinquents."

 

Horrible job stacking bales of straw or hay init?

 

little kind of houses in the middle of nowhere along long walking trails like the pacific rim or appalachian, that no one owned or lived in, though you could camp over night in them if you wanted too. too far from any place for anyone to actually live in any way. some of them even had names. there was one i think built and maintained by the sierra club, about a days walk from where i once lived. that had no doors or locks, but had solid walls and windows, and no one messed them up. and they had places to cook and were stocked with non-perishable canned goods and things like that. and the idea was you brought things to replace the things you used. they had no power but i think they had an outhouse and may have had running water from a tap outside. no power or any kind of hook ups like you'd have if you built a place to live. just a way camp for long distance hikers.

the one i could walk to when i lived on top of donner summit at norden, was called the peter grub hut. not sure who he was, but i'm guessing he had something to do with the early days of the sierra club.

but that wasn't the only one. when i was little and people were fewer and the culture was less inclined to screw everything up that wasn't about money, i remember there being a lot of little primative shelters, for whoever came along and was considerate of what they were for. this is the kind of thing we've lost by equating thoughtlessness with freedom.

of course there's nothing new about people who think the economics of scarcity being gods gift to the planet. this was also at the same time there was mccarthyism, and a lot of very good talented creative people were being blackballed by it. but it was also a time, that while building codes already existed, and in principal applied to rural owner builders, weren't yet vigorously enforced against them.

i mean most people, well it seemed like anyway because i was young at the time, were mostly reasonable about most things most of the time, at least out in the woods where i grew up.

 

i was thinking of the simpler ones, but some of the sierra club ones are like that. most were just a roof and walls. usually no one was there.
i'm happy to hear in some places they still are. ten miles is usually, though not always, far enough away from people who mess things up,
if that's as close as there is any way for them to get if they actually have to walk that far to get there.

 

I'm so old,I can remember the days when I could run to the loo and get in position BEFORE I shat myself.....oh,how I miss'em. [so does my carer]

SO old,that I can even remember driving to strange towns and actually asking directions,rather than owlishly following a sat-nav's directions straight into a duckpond!
I even recall my mate [I had one,in those days] telling me he'd just seen a beardoo. When I asked "What's a beardoo?" he said "Shit in the woods!"

 

i remember the henway and then gnu.

 

I remember when all good mechanics had a set of dickfers.

 

I remember our first family car didn't have turn signals. Instead there were mechanical flaps that rose out of the door posts on each side to indicate turning.

 

my family didn't have a car until the year i graduated high school, because we could go everywhere on my dad's pass because he worked for the railroad.

everyday shopping was an easy walk, although the little stores in the little town didn't have everything.
so we'd take the train to the next larger town or order things from a catalogue.

we always had a post office box and packages would be a notice to call at the window if they were too large to fit in it.

after my dad died, my mom kept up the rent on it without changing his name to hers and when she died,
i kept renting it without changing the name on it either, until four years ago when i moved to another town.
my dad died in 91, but he kept renting that p.o. box until 2012.

oh my dad's first car, in 66, was a 62 datsun pickup.
the one that looked like a chopped austin martin with a picup bed,
but it had 1 ton booster springs and a stronger frame then a ford pickup,
which was proven when the ford plowed into the side of us and became undrivable,
while our little datson only had a dent,
the edges of which showed the outline of its nicely strong and undamaged fraime.

i do remember the cars with a mechanical semiphore rather then turn signal lights.
when i was little, (in the early 50s) most highway trucks were like that too.
my folks just didn't have, need, or want a car in those days.

 

Just looked in the paper at --Cars of Interest. '62 Chevy Impala--30,000 dollars!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Damn, if I'd only kept what I'd bought over the years: 3 -37 Plymouths, 47 Ford, 50 Olds (my favorite all time), 49 olds, part owner -39 La Salle, 61 Chevy Impala, 55 Mercury, 55 Olds J2 , (3 carbs from the factory, 64 Olds 442, 2 -63 Chevy pickups bought years apart, 58 Chevy station wagon--(left that at the airport on Maui with the keys in it--what the hell--it was the 6os. Saw it later cruising in La Haina full of hippies, 53 4 door Chevy, 63 VW bug, 63 Mercury Meteor, One of those little bathtub looking Ramblers, some kind of Toyota-2 door, ( given some huge tires by a friend--they'd bolt up but I couldn't turn the steering wheel to the side, so I took a sledge hammer and beat the fenders up and out of the way--(what the fuck--I was a hippie!), 63 Chevy 4 door, one of those little VW station wagons, 63 Rambler 4 door--might have been an Ambassador, 91 Toyota pickup bought new, (it's in the yard now),4 wheel Ford pickup, another 50 OLds, 4 wheel idrive 53 Willys station wagon with a 283 installed, a little Ford Fiesta--year I don't remember----50 miles to the gallon until I had it smogged in California--dropped to 45 mpg, 4WD Ford pickup--from some time in the 70s, 40 Plymouth 4 door with side pipes, another 50 Olds which I traded for a Ford work pickup, a 12 foot Box Van--------OK, I know that there are others, but----a 63 Triumph Bonneville TT120-brand new and supposedly the fastest type bike on the market at the time--156 out of the factory--( I had up to about 140 one time with no shoes, no shirt, no helmet and obviously NO SENSE. If I had had a flat going that speed --they could have scraped me off the road with a SPONGE!---A Cushman Eagle and that's all I can think of now. And all I can say is -----Joel--you dumb sonuvabitch!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

i'd only have kept the trucks and vw's. that 30k would only be mint. although for a restoration hobbyist, but then why would he or she want to sell once they brought it up to mint.
oh good lord that bike and all. well my dad had an indian with the suicide shift that he rode the white line over sepulvida pass when it was two lane, some time around 51.
he somehow survived leaving it a metal pretzel in the sand by the road after "loosing it". ain't sayin i believed it or not, but that was his story anyway.
and after that, well he never had a car until 66.

car was the furst word out of my mouth, even before mama and dada, but once i started having them and when the trains started disappearing and seeing what roads for them did to the landscape,
i stopped caring very much for them. and that was even before wars for oil.