Golden Era Passtimes / Hobbies

[Fading Fast]

Does learning to spray paint count?

Mike

If for spray painting public property like subway cars, overpasses, bridges, etc., then it's a very NYC 1970s retro thing, but probably not Golden Era.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Black-crayon or pencil graffiti was much more the mainstay of the Era. Especially goatees, horns, glasses, and blacked-out teeth on advertising posters.

 

[3fingers]

In the process of spring cleaning and opening a couple of boxes from my mother's house I came across the aggravation board built by my grandfather. It has been so many years since I played the game that I will have to find the rules online to refresh my memory.

 

[Feraud]

Here is a piece I just finished and framed. The inspiration can be found in the Encyclopedia of Knots and Fancy Ropework by Graumont & Hensel

 

[belfastboy]

There was a short piece on the radio this morning about the original Mr Potato Head. It was a kit of eyes, ears, nose etc made to be placed on real potatoes. I reminisced to my wife of my favourite toy when I was 7 or 8...a potato gun. It was metal and fired a projectile of potato at a fair velocity. A potato in one hand the gun in the other. You plunged the barrel into the potato and snapped off the chunk. I created an air tight seal at the barrel and then with a squeeze the air shot the potato bullet. I was the first in the neighbourhood to get one but once seen all the guys bought their own. We had tremendous fun chasing each other, shooting each other. Although it greatly irritated my mother to be wasting good food....she was a child of the depression so wasting food was sinful and in her world this was a great waste of an edible item. The potato guns lasted the summer and we graduated to more sophisticated pursuits and when I was about 10 received my first BB gun. I still marvel that we were allowed to roam the neighbourhood, in packs, each armed with our BB rifles shooting at things animate and inanimate and each other.

 

[EngProf]

There was a short piece on the radio this morning about the original Mr Potato Head. It was a kit of eyes, ears, nose etc made to be placed on real potatoes. I reminisced to my wife of my favourite toy when I was 7 or 8...a potato gun. It was metal and fired a projectile of potato at a fair velocity. A potato in one hand the gun in the other. You plunged the barrel into the potato and snapped off the chunk. I created an air tight seal at the barrel and then with a squeeze the air shot the potato bullet. I was the first in the neighbourhood to get one but once seen all the guys bought their own. We had tremendous fun chasing each other, shooting each other. Although it greatly irritated my mother to be wasting good food....she was a child of the depression so wasting food was sinful and in her world this was a great waste of an edible item. The potato guns lasted the summer and we graduated to more sophisticated pursuits and when I was about 10 received my first BB gun. I still marvel that we were allowed to roam the neighbourhood, in packs, each armed with our BB rifles shooting at things animate and inanimate and each other.

Putting your two GE toy items together, a Mr. Potato Head character made a good target for our BB guns. As you say, we roamed the backyards, creek, and empty lots shooting at whatever. Since the creek ran right behind our house we very often floated paper and balsa boats and shot at the moving targets as they floated down the creek. More difficult than it sounds, and we wasted a lot of BB's on such activity.
Before we were old enough to get BB guns we played Army with real rifles. (true story)
My best friend's father had brought back two Japanese Arisaka rifles from the Pacific after WWII. In those days there was no ammunition available for those, and even if we had any, in those days kids were credited with enough sense not to shoot each other. So, the rifles were kept in the garage and anytime we wanted to play Army my friend grabbed one and I grabbed the other and away we went.
In the post-BB gun era we had real .22 rifles when we were still too young to drive. My cousin and I would put our rifles (they actually belonged to my uncle) across our bike handlebars and ride to the grocery store and buy ammunition. In those days grocery stores here (Nashville) sold ammunition (and would sell it to kids). We would each put up a quarter and buy one box of .22 shorts for 50 cents.
Speaking of passtimes, by careful rationing that one box would keep us occupied for a whole summer afternoon.
As a contrast to the so-called Modern Era, a lot of what we did as "passtimes" in the latter-part of the GE would to get a call first to the cops, then a SWAT Team, then mental health counselors, and we'd all be put in some sort of juvenile incarceration. (And it would go on our "permanent record".)
By coincidence there was a PBS biography this week of Dr. James Wilson, who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2018 for his cancer research. He is the same age as me, and in the show described fondly his bomb-making activity at the age we are describing here. We did that, also.
A colleague of mine - also the same age as me and Dr. Wilson, once said that if he had his way the admission test for engineering school would consist of two questions: 1) When did you make your first bomb? and 2) How did it work? If you didn't have a good answer for those two questions you were not worthy of admission to engineering school.
As one more data point, when our Chemistry Department chairman recently retired he mentioned that his childhood bomb-making activities led to his life and career in chemistry.
Put all this under the heading of why the GE was better than now.

 

[belfastboy]

Putting your two GE toy items together, a Mr. Potato Head character made a good target for our BB guns. As you say, we roamed the backyards, creek, and empty lots shooting at whatever. Since the creek ran right behind our house we very often floated paper and balsa boats and shot at the moving targets as they floated down the creek. More difficult than it sounds, and we wasted a lot of BB's on such activity.
Before we were old enough to get BB guns we played Army with real rifles. (true story)
My best friend's father had brought back two Japanese Arisaka rifles from the Pacific after WWII. In those days there was no ammunition available for those, and even if we had any, in those days kids were credited with enough sense not to shoot each other. So, the rifles were kept in the garage and anytime we wanted to play Army my friend grabbed one and I grabbed the other and away we went.
In the post-BB gun era we had real .22 rifles when we were still too young to drive. My cousin and I would put our rifles (they actually belonged to my uncle) across our bike handlebars and ride to the grocery store and buy ammunition. In those days grocery stores here (Nashville) sold ammunition (and would sell it to kids). We would each put up a quarter and buy one box of .22 shorts for 50 cents.
Speaking of passtimes, by careful rationing that one box would keep us occupied for a whole summer afternoon.
As a contrast to the so-called Modern Era, a lot of what we did as "passtimes" in the latter-part of the GE would to get a call first to the cops, then a SWAT Team, then mental health counselors, and we'd all be put in some sort of juvenile incarceration. (And it would go on our "permanent record".)
By coincidence there was a PBS biography this week of Dr. James Wilson, who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2018 for his cancer research. He is the same age as me, and in the show described fondly his bomb-making activity at the age we are describing here. We did that, also.
A colleague of mine - also the same age as me and Dr. Wilson, once said that if he had his way the admission test for engineering school would consist of two questions: 1) When did you make your first bomb? and 2) How did it work? If you didn't have a good answer for those two questions you were not worthy of admission to engineering school.
As one more data point, when our Chemistry Department chairman recently retired he mentioned that his childhood bomb-making activities led to his life and career in chemistry.
Put all this under the heading of why the GE was better than now.

You reminded me of my very low key bomb making. We would scrape the heads off wooden matches and pack them into a spent .303 shell casing with a fuse. It was more of a rocket than a bomb as we would place it on a piece of wood at about a 45 degree launch angle, light the fuse and watch with glee as our rocket spanned the length of our very long yard. We lost interest fairly quickly as scraping the matches was tedious and the reward very short lived. On the chemistry side of things my junior year of high school chem teacher passed me under the proviso that I would never ever take another chem class in my life. He was the only chem teacher and knew that if he flunked me I would be back the next year as I needed one science class for Uni entrance. I swore to honour his request as keeping it would be the easiest thing I ever promised to do.

 

[Bugguy]

Autographs... my mother collected hundreds of them from Golden Era movie stars. Sometime along the way, my sister grabbed them all. Probably sitting in a storage shed in the Michigan UP getting moldy.

---------------------------------

As for me, I became interested in stamps after my mother gave me envelops full of cancelled foreign stamps. As a kid, I was pretty quickly overwhelmed and dropped the hobby till I joined the stamp & coin club at the local Boy's Club in Chicago. I started collecting uncirculated US commemoratives - singles and blocks.

I have a nice collection of them in a stock album, but their value is little more than face value. I can barely get someone to look at them on EBay- even at face value.

Same for my collection of uncirculated 1960's Korean (ROK) stamps - I can't even attract a low-ball offer.

I guess I'll just hold them and try to con my granddaughter into taking them. Pass on the white elephant. Otherwise, what do you do with them? Too nice to toss, but no value.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I have an old hardbound album of stamps like that, mostly common US stuff of the twenties thru the sixties, few of which are good for anything except postage, but they're fun to sit and look at on a rainy day. What more could you want?

 

[Edm1]

I never really set out to have era hobbies, guess some things are just always good.

Coin collecting
Amateur Radio. And use mainly a straight key and CW.
Gardening
Hiking and camping
Shooting.

 

[Feraud]

I needed a proper sheath for this knitting tool. Gathered up some cord and went to work. The main part of the sheath was done with what is called crowning. It creates the circular pattern you see. The top is a modified Diamond Knot.
The cord and tool were both made by Mikko Snellman. A heck of a nice guy who makes incredible marlinspike related tools and accessories.

 

[green papaya]

going to the public library to do research the old fashioned way

 

[Feraud]

An ocean plait bend mounted on a small plaque.

 

[ChrisB]

You reminded me of my very low key bomb making. We would scrape the heads off wooden matches and pack them into a spent .303 shell casing with a fuse.

Home made black powder and nitrogen tri iodide were my modus operandi.

 

[belfastboy]

Home made black powder and nitrogen tri iodide were my modus operandi.

We never possessed that level of sophistication!

 

[MichaelRhB]

I have always loved model trains ever since my first O scale Lionel in the early '60's. Model trains have come a long way in the last 60 years and are now digital and can be computer controlled.

This is my European HO layout:

 

[Feraud]

That is some lovely work MichaelRhB!

I'm sure the model raiway guys are aware of this but the rest of us might not be. Check out Rod Stewart's amazing model railway.
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-50403561


'In between making music and playing live, Sir Rod has been working on a massive, intricate model of a US city for the past 23 years.

He unveiled it as part of an interview with Railway Modeller magazine.

He then phoned in to Jeremy Vine's BBC Radio 2 show to rebuff the host's suggestion he had not built it himself.

"I would say 90% of it I built myself," he insisted. "The only thing I wasn't very good at and still am not is the electricals, so I had someone else do that."

Sir Rod has released 13 studio albums and been on 19 tours during the time it took to build the city, which is modelled on both New York and Chicago around 1945.

"A lot of people laugh at it being a silly hobby, but it's a wonderful hobby," he said.'

 

[Edward]

Amateur Radio, the ORIGINAL internet...

Ha, my Dad still has my CB Radio somewhere. My grandmother bought it for me asa present for passing my eleven plus (as she had one for my cousin a few years previously, at the height of the CB book in the early-mid eighties). Dad set it up in the car, and we used to chat to all sorts of folks, including a regular, Belfast based crowd every morning when I was being driven to school for a while. Nice folks, I often wonder where they are now, over thirty years later... I do have a fantasy that one day while I'm still able I could afford an electric-powered camper with a motorcycle rack on it, for road trip holidays. I'd put the radio in that and try and convince some friends to go with us and get CBs too, proper convoy. So much more fun (if slightly less private) than a mobile phone!

Would like to shoot poor defenceless pheasants too.

I'm not a hunter, but as an eater I can highly recommend pheasant - roast pheasant has a flavour I can only describe as being like really good chicken.

Would Bridge count?

Various forerunners of the game go back as far as the mid 1500s. A game of Bridge as we know it today was represented as an epic battle in Alexander Pope's satirical The Rape of the Lock which was first published in 1712, so I'd say it qualifies as vintage!

Black-crayon or pencil graffiti was much more the mainstay of the Era. Especially goatees, horns, glasses, and blacked-out teeth on advertising posters.

And I'd be prepared to bet sooner or later if you hunted the graffiti back in those days you'd find a 'funny willy' as well. Plus ca change...

 

[Edward]

It occurs to me that the very idea of having a hobby is fast becoming seen as out of date, old-fashioned. I find that very sad, tbh.

Me, I read (fiction and non; Irish history in the c.1912-23 'Revolutionary period' remains of deep fascination), play guitar (badly), collect music (especially on vinyl now), and I plan to get back into my old wargaming hobby when we have finished home redecoration. I used to be all about the sci-fi, though now I'm getting into alternative history stuff like A Very British Civil War (Britain in chaos in 1936 as various factions fight for supremacy after Edward VIII refuses to abdicate and instead tries to intiate a dictatorship), and Secrets of the Third Reich (Hitler defeats D-Day by releasing horrific chemical weapons that cause zombies. WW2 still being fought in 1949 with Allied and Axis both using zombies, vampires, werewolves, and a shot of alien techonlogy - jump packs and the like. Weid War 2 genre stuff).

Edit: some might consider my interest in this game a hobby, tough tbh I just see it as 'my clothes'....

 

[Feraud]

Practicing Turk’s Heads knots. Below are a 3, 4, 5 pass. You can double or triple the leads for a fuller knot.
There are a lot of online resources for learning these knots but I followed C.L. Day's The Art of Knotting and Splicing.