The Old Timers Club

[PMS Witch]

Your post brought back a few memories. Sorry about the length of my reply. I was having fun with it and got carried away.

1. Blackjack chewing gum

Nope! Never heard of it. But as an excuse, as kids we’d be so excited over getting a piece of gum we’d tear into it without looking at the wrpper.

2. Wax Coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water

Yep! And I remember the tiny glass Coca-Cola bottles about the same size. They had tiny metal caps too: just like the real thing.

3. Candy cigarettes

Yep! My favourites were the liquorice with what seemed like real cigarette paper wrapping. I think they had a dusting of icing sugar on them too. I didn’t like the solid kind which seemed like a stick of sugar candy with the end dipped in red colouring.

4. Soda pop machines that dispensed glass bottles

Yep! Several kinds. Some contained water where customers could remove what they wanted and wipe it dry with a cloth. (Usually tied to the door handle – and not all that clean.) There was a machine that you could slide the bottles between rails to a dispensing trap door. Put in a dime and pull. And there were the kind where the bottles were in a giant wheel. Put in your dime and the wheel would turn a tiny bit, enabling you to pull out one bottle. (We always hoped for two!) Later, machines looked and operated just like the can dispensing machines we see today.

http://www.siliconinvestor.com/stocktalk/msg.gsp?msgid=15564412

5. Restaurants with tableside jukeboxes

Yep! The Commander and I visited a diner (another memory) and they had these at the tables. As I remember them, they took nickels: this one expected quarters. And the machine doing the real work was loaded with 45s. We played songs we haven’t heard in decades. We asked for Cherry Cola, but the kid working there had never heard of such a thing, and she didn’t know what a pine float was either.

6. Home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers

Yep! If you put the money in the bottle, it would be there the next morning. We used purple tickets for homogenised milk. On those special days we’d get chocolate, Mother would put two pennies along with the ticket in the empty bottle, and a note. Occasionally, we’d save the note, and when we’d scrape together two pennies, we’d get up early and do a bad thing. Fortunately, the chocolate milk would be with us much longer than Mother’s anger.

The paper stoppers that came with chocolate milk had a hole under the pull-tab. It was to accommodate a drinking straw. It would be one very long straw that could reach to the bottom of a quart bottle.

7. Party lines

Yep! And we’d try not to giggle when we overheard some really juicy gossip. A bit of a nuisance if one’s neighbours were afflicted with logorrhoea.

8. Newsreels before the movie

Maybe! In our theatre’s they’d play newsreels between features. (Almost all were black & white)

9. P.F. Flyers

Nope!

10. Butch wax

Nope!

11. Telephone numbers with a word prefix (Olive - 6933)

Yep! Digby 4 – 8022. And three and four digit telephone numbers in the small towns.

Wooden telephones too. http://www.siliconinvestor.com/stocktalk/msg.gsp?msgid=15418851

12. Peashooters

Yep! But only on the receiving end. PEA shooters shot white beans.

13. Howdy Doody

Yep! But I wish it was a Nope! I hated the show.

14. 45 RPM records

Yep! And 78 records too. I had a Jerry Lee Lewis Great Balls of Fire on 78, but nothing to play it. It wouldn’t fit the DVD on my laptop. Strange! The sales guy at Dell recommended I upgrade to the DVD player so I could read all media.

15. S&H Green Stamps

Maybe! We had Lucky Green stamps. They had a shamrock printed on them. We’d glue them into a booklet and when full, turn it in for really tacky stuff, which at the time, we thought was wonderful.

16. Hi-fi's

Yep! But we didn’t have one. We used a monaural record player with a couple of pennies stuck to the arm with a Band-aid because the needle was so dull it wouldn’t stay in the groove. One of the neighbours used a crank. (At least ours used electricity, (When it worked)) Much later, people played records in a big wooden piece of furniture. They looked like caskets.

17. Metal ice trays with lever

Yep! The levers never lasted. We’d run them under warm water to loosen the cubes. Our wet fingers would stick to them. I can still hear the crackling sound in my head when I think of them.

18. Mimeograph paper

Nope! (Is this the stuff that produced purple(ish) print?)

19. Blue flashbulb

Yep! But colour film and developing was prohibitively expensive. We only saw them used at weddings. They were blue to produce light similar to daylight, or 6,000K. White flashbulbs produced light at 3,200K or 3,400K, and were suitable for black and white film.

20. Beanie and Cecil

Nope!

21. Roller skate keys

Yep! I found the skates pinched my toes. I guess the clamps didn’t fit the soles very well. Our keys would fit two sizes of screw, but I only remember using the larger size. When I think of these old roller skates, I’m reminded of the rhyme…

A rich man drives a Cadillac.
A poor man drives a Ford.
My old man drives a roller skate
Nailed to the bottom of a board.

22. Cork popguns

Yep! At a carnival, I tried to knock over a package of cigarettes with a dollar bill wrapped around it. The cork popped out, but flew randomly. The guy’s dollar was safe and secure. Anyway, we should’ve known better – Nobody lets you win dollars for nickels. The cork made more noise than force.

23. Drive-ins

Yep! And I had the opportunity to baby-sit kids who were probably conceived at one.

24. Studebakers

Yep! Father drove a 1951. I think they were the ugliest car on the road. (If you ignore Citroens and 1961 Dodges)

25. Wash tub wringers

Yep! I was so used to using one of these so I bought one for my first house. I had to hunt around to find it. When I went to get rid of it, nobody wanted it, so I sent it to the dump.

Does anyone remember bluing? It came in lumps and we’d add it to white laundry.

26. Clothes lines

Yep! I remember the fun we had playing among the sheets in the summer. And the frozen towels in February! We’d imagine they were toboggans; thought we dared not try to ride them. The Commander calls clothes lines solar powered clothes dryers

27. Radio drama

Yep! The whole family would sit in the living room and listen. We had a big wooden radio with vacuum tubes. When it would quit working, we’d pull the tubes and take them to the corner store where they had a tube tester. The tube tester had dozens of sockets where we’d plug in our tube, wait for it to warm up, and then we’d know which tube to replace. (Always the most expensive one)

We bought a television set in 1953. I can remember watching figure skating the first night we had it.

28. House calls

Yep! If we were sick, the doctor would come to the house. He’d bring his toolkit in a black bag. If it was serious, he’d give us a drive us to the hospital -- this never happened to me, but my sister was once taken. Penicillin was thought to cure everything, and on every doctor’s visit, I’d get a jab in the behind.

29. Storm windows

Yep! Every fall, it would be a family project. Get the storm windows from the cellar, clean the glass, and exchange them for the screens. They would have wooden frames, weigh a ton each, and had ventilation holes drilled near the bottom, which would be uncovered by a pivoted board we could lift from indoors.

30. Ice delivery

Yep! Our ice was delivered to the back door. The guy would carry a block with black tongs and put it in the ice-box. This was replaced by an electric refrigerator. Early refrigerators were not frost-free. We’d need to de-frost the freezer. This always made a mess. We learned not to waste our breath asking Mother for money or cookies when she was busy with de-frosting.

31. Polio

Yep! We had a kid in our class who wore leg braces and used crutches. When I lament the passing of the good old days, I’m almost never thinking of the dreaded diseases.

A visit to the dentist before pneumatic high-speed drills wasn’t much fun either.

32. Russians

Yep! We’d have practice drills where we’d file into the cellar at school. We’d stand against the foundation walls and wait for the bombs to fall. They never came, and when we returned upstairs, our classroom and desks were still there, with our homework assignments still on the blackboard. No surprise holiday today!

33. Hot water bottles

Yep! We’d fill them with hot water and take them to bed in winter. With luck, we’d be asleep before they’d cool. If we awakened in the night, we’d kick the ice-cold thing unto the floor. The noise would awaken the household, and eventually, you’d hear others’ landing with a thud too.

34. Cod liver oil

Yep! We’d get a spoon of this stuff regularly. I can still taste it as I type. Kinda wish I hadn’t thought of it.

Castor oil: another wonderful memory! No wonder we seemed healthy – no sane child would admit to feeling ill! Do they still use Castor oil in racing? One whiff at the track and the memory lasts a lifetime.

Senna: Oh my! The memories. If we thought senna tea was an awful experience on the way in, it was a bit of Heaven compared to the effect it achieved on the way out! (I don’t know if senna is spelled correctly)

Hot mustard: Mother would mix mustard, apply it to our chests, cover it with a cloth, and have us remain still. It would feel hot! It would bring relief too: For Mother -- while we were still.

35 Ships

We had a number of people in our neighbourhood who were recent immigrants. They arrived by ship. Although aeroplanes existed, I never met anyone who had travelled on one.

36 Dinosaurs

Nope! These roamed the earth a bit before I arrived. I once had a teacher who behaved as if she had a few in her class at one time. I guess they made quite an impression on her.

I know it’s cheating to provide a few more answers than there were questions just to get over twenty-five. That’s an additional test: knowing right from wrong, and another thing that seems to have disappeared in recent years.

Cheers, PW.