If you went back to the Golden Era, what would you notice first?

[Atticus Finch]

Interesting idea. I also think I would first notice the smell.

I grew up in Beaufort, North Carolina. In 1940, Beaufort was still a small town where everyone either fished or farmed. Every autumn, the menhaden fleet would show up having followed huge schools of migrating yellow fin menhaden down the Atlantic coast from Virginia. The fleet would fish almost every day for a couple of months...then, after Christmas, it would push on further south to the Gulf of Mexico. Each evening during the season, full-to-the-scuppers menhaden boats would line up at one of Beaufort's four fish processing plants to unload. On Sundays...and when the weather was foul...the boats would remain tied to Beaufort's waterfront docks...

...where they would sit stinking.

...and the four processing plants stank, too.

I know because I'm old enough to remember the last days of Beaufort's menhaden industry. I can remember the pungent aroma of baking fish meal and boiling fish oil rolling from the stacks of the fish plants, and the stench of rotting fish guts in the boats. Old timers would smile and say that it smelled like money. But it didn't. It actually smelled like rotting fish.

Those days are over now. The yellow fin menhaden was overfished such that the industry became no longer viable...and substitutes were found for fish oil and fish meal. So the menhaden fleet no longer exists. But it did in 1940. Here's a postcard from that very aromatic time showing the fleet tied to the docks at Beaufort. The weather looks fine, so it must have been taken on a Sunday...and yes, the painted in gulls look goofy, but the photo of the fleet is real.

And this is a photo my girlfriend took of Beaufort's last remaining fish processing plant. Abandoned for years, she took it just before it was torn down to make way for a new condominium project.

AF

 

[LizzieMaine]

Oh jeez, menhaden. We called them "pogies" here, but it's the same stinking greasy fish.

We had a plant here until 1989 where they cooked pogies down for fertilizer, and the smell was so bad on hot afternoons that people would call in bomb threats just to shut it down for the day. Finally some demented teenager set fire to the place and burned it to the ground. I covered that fire, and it was the most unholy thing I've ever seen -- the wood of the building was so soaked in fish oil after a hundred years that it burned like some kind of torch out of the pits of hell, flames jetting a hundred feet into the sky. You could see it burning six miles away, and the smell was indescribable.

 

[Stearmen]

I found some interesting photos of my town taken in 1940. The first is a post card of Pikes Peak Avenue, even has a stop light. Most of the buildings are gone, the Antlers hotel at the end burned down, the Chief and Ute movie theaters are gone. Almost all the buildings on the right are gone. Suprisingly, even though there were only 36,789 people living in town, there were two airports! The top, is the main airport, which still exist, and is part Peterson Air Force base and part civilian. The second, belonged to Alexander Film Studios, the largest film production company between New York and California. They also made Eaglerock biplanes between 1925 to 1932. Eaglerock was Charles Lindbergh's second choice to fly the Atlantic, Alexander turned him down. The last is the layout of the town in 1940.

 

[Dragon Soldier]

Oh Dear... The relative lack of private motor vehicles would probably be the most obvious thing. After that, apart from fashion and the like, what is most politely termed a "parochial attitude" from the people would be the most culturally different.

 

[Edward]

Oh Dear... The relative lack of private motor vehicles would probably be the most obvious thing. After that, apart from fashion and the like, what is most politely termed a "parochial attitude" from the people would be the most culturally different.

JInkies, yes. I should think in Belfast you'd also be struck by the sectarianism: contrary to the popular mythology that that only really kicked off with the modern phase of the troubles in the late sixties, it was rampant back in the thirties and forties. Basil Brooke, the 1st Viscount Brookeborough, was Minister of Agriculture in the old Stormont Parliament when, in 1933, he addressed an Orange rally on the Twelfth thus:

"Many in this audience employ Catholics, but I have not one about my place. Catholics are out to destroy Ulster...If we in Ulster allow Roman Catholics to work on our farms we are traitors to Ulster...I would appeal to loyalists, therefore, wherever possible, to employ good Protestant lads and lassies."

He would later become Prime Minister of Northern Ireland. Needless to say, those equally hardline and bigoted on the other side were also up to no good - in their case, mostly outside the tent as they either rejected the constitutional arrangements in place or often felt left unrepresented in those days prior to the Northern Ireland Civil Rights movement, when only property owners could vote (a system introduced precisely because it favoured one community over another).

While the much lower level of violence than what was yet to come would no doubt have been preferable in some ways, siege mentalities and old resentments were bubbling under, ready to spill over. The later problems seem to have been sadly inevitable.

On the plus side, it would have been nice to see the old place with fewer cars, trams running, and go looking for the old tailors. Memory suggest the Gobbins Path might still have been open then (farther up the coast), which would have been nice to see.

It always amazes me, how many of my fellow men who are intimidated by a smart independent woman! Don't get me wrong, I do not suffer either sex well when they get in my face and try to intimidate me with their power trip. My mother always told me to marry up, that included, intellegence, I finally figured out, she was right!

Well, quite. It's interesting, though, how interest groups of all sorts find comfort in myths about "better times". I'm sure that misremembered history is as culturally important as the reality.

I would notice the change in the means of disseminating information. Instead of smart phones, they had street corner newsstands, and perhaps morning and evening editions of the newspapers.

People would perhaps notice each other and interact in person, instead of sending texts.

Mn. I would miss the web terribly - I thrive on the ready availability of information (even if one has to take much of it with a pinch of salt). That said, I imagine the pace of life in my own profession would have been much less stressful minus the often information-overload conditions in which we now operate.

 

[cchgn]

IMo, the first thing everyone would notice is how dirty and primative everything is (like dirt roads, etc.) and how poor folks really were( compared to now),

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

IMo, the first thing everyone would notice is how dirty and primative everything is (like dirt roads, etc.) and how poor folks really were( compared to now),

There's a book called The Good Old Days, They Were Awful! (1974) which gets into that. And quite often it was a different kind of awful rarely experienced today such as mounds of horse dung that were a part of the urban landscape of major cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

 

[Edward]

IMo, the first thing everyone would notice is how dirty and primative everything is (like dirt roads, etc.) and how poor folks really were( compared to now),

It would certainly be interesting to interview folks before and after that trip to see what they had confirmed, and what was simply romantic delusion that experience forced them to shed. I should like to hope those who overly romanticise some of the negative aspects of the period would come back disillusioned. Contemporary fetishisation of the war era is something I find deeply troubling, especially as those who lived through it begin to die out.

 

[LizzieMaine]

There were plenty of dirt roads when I was growing up, and I liked them fine. Kept the tourists away. As far as poverty goes, we had plenty of that when I was a kid, too. My first home was a cold-water apartment with stairs slanting at a 40-degree angle, and a bathroom down the hall. I didn't live in a house with central heating until I was six years old, and my grandparents never lived in one. As late as the mid-seventies we had friends who were living without flush toilets -- not as some rustic back-to-the-land deal, but because they'd never had them.

A lot of people don't realize just how much of the Depression lingered far into the postwar era. Middle-class prosperity only extended so far, and for a lot of people, it never arrived.

 

[Stanley Doble]

It was a different era. My mother was a little proud of the fact that her family had a car and a telephone right through the depression, which was more than the neighbors could say. These were not poor people. They were prosperous farmers who lived in one of the most technically advanced, and densely populated parts of Canada.

They lived in a large, 2 story brick house and farmed 100 acres of the best land in the county. They heated with wood they cut on their own wood lot and used an outhouse in the back yard.

Some time in the seventies I read a story about a landlord who was fined and his house was condemned because it did not come up to basic health codes. It had no running water, no central heat, no lath and plaster walls, no bathtub, no toilet, and no electricity.

Other than the lath and plaster walls the house my mother grew up in had none of those things, and they were considered well fixed.

 

[LizzieMaine]

It was a different era. My mother was a little proud of the fact that her family had a car and a telephone right through the depression, which was more than the neighbors could say. These were not poor people. They were prosperous farmers who lived in one of the most technically advanced, and densely populated parts of Canada.

Indeed. People had different expectations. My grandparents could have probably found a way to have central heating installed in their house -- we sold fuel oil, after all -- but they didn't see any reason why they should bother. Kerosene stoves were all they'd ever known, and they were perfectly satisifed and comfortable with them.

That's the ethos I was raised with: be satisified with what you have and don't worry about what you don't. I think most people who are truly contented with their lives eventually come around to that point of view.

 

[LoveMyHats2]

I would think the first things I would notice is no cell phones, no i pads, no computers and everyone taking care of business in such matters as in a store, no electronic devise telling the cashier how to count the price or the change. That people actually knew (most of them) how to do things personally with the "aide" or need of a gizmo to do it for them.

My Husband actually has an old cash register that you have to push buttons that look like an old manual type writer, I think it is from the 1930's? We like to mess with it as it has bells that chime when you total up anything and the cash drawer pops open.

 

[sheeplady]

I think I'd notice the food.

I think it would taste better (before everything was bred for shipping rather than taste), there would be a vastly different selection, and it would be highly limited by season. That and the canned goods would be much more basic and processed goods would be limited.

But I really would hope it tasted better.

 

[Foxer55]

Edward,

It would certainly be interesting to interview folks before and after that trip to see what they had confirmed, and what was simply romantic delusion that experience forced them to shed. I should like to hope those who overly romanticise some of the negative aspects of the period would come back disillusioned. Contemporary fetishisation of the war era is something I find deeply troubling, especially as those who lived through it begin to die out.

I tend to disagree with that observation. Notice, I said tend. I think people would find annoyances but I think they would find a way of life far slower than now which in itself would be, well, relaxing. I also believe they would find they would have much more control over their own lives and comings and goings than they do now. That would be truly comforting.

 

[Gregg Axley]

I think I'd notice the food.

I think it would taste better (before everything was bred for shipping rather than taste), there would be a vastly different selection, and it would be highly limited by season. That and the canned goods would be much more basic and processed goods would be limited.

But I really would hope it tasted better.

Good point Sheeplady.
I'd think the food would taste better too, mainly because it would lack so much of the artificial junk we have now.
As I watch old movies, I see the food they serve, and it looks SO good.
Except the Three Stooges Shorts, "tastes more like Southern comforter..."
The only problem I'd have is with the meat.
Back then they didn't take care of it nearly as good as they do today, as far as handling.
At least from what I remember reading.

 

[HoosierDaddy]

I remember as late as the '50s when you opened a loaf of bread it had a bakery smell(now has a chemical smell if you smell closely). Many foods were much more 'flavorable' then...AND you could easily find a good hamburger & fries ANYWHERE.
HD

 

[Stanley Doble]

I think you would find the food tastier at least the fresh produce but it would only be available in season. You would find everyone eating a very unhealthy diet, heavy on meat, potatoes, bread and overcooked vegetables and very few salads or raw fruits.

On the other hand, candy and soda would be rare treats and the portions small.

Markets were very local. In the north in winter it would be hard to find fresh produce other than potatoes, carrots and cabbage with some oranges and bananas from the south. You would see brands of candy and soda you never heard of and if you traveled 100 miles you would see completely different brands.

 

[LizzieMaine]

You wouldn't see an aisle of snack foods at the grocery store at all. There might be some local brand of potato chips, but as far as Frito Lay and Wise controlling ten percent of the entire store, that wouldn't exist. If you were on the run and wanted a fast, salty snack to munch on your primary option would be a five-cent glassine bag of Planter's Peanuts.

You would see *nobody* sauntering down the street licking at a big, frothy sippy-cup of corn-syrup choked coffee. Mentioning such a concoction would cause the average person on the street to roll their eyes and slowly back away from you.

Most of the canned goods would have been canned within fifty miles of the store where they were sold. Likewise grain products would have been much more local than they are today -- other than a handful of national brands, most of the flour and meal products on your grocer's shelf would have been regionally milled. Not only did this mean better quality in the cans and boxes and bags, it meant real jobs for local people in the mills, canneries, and packing house, and in the support industry surrounding them.

If you mentioned "nutritional eating" or a "vegetarian diet" to anyone they'd say "Oh yeah, the Lindlahr diet. I hear him on the radio sometimes. Did you read his book?"

 

[LizzieMaine]

I remember as late as the '50s when you opened a loaf of bread it had a bakery smell(now has a chemical smell if you smell closely).
HD

That's because that bread was baked, if not right in your town, then within a short drive of it. Up until the early seventies, most commercial bread carried a local brand, and was baked in a regional bakery -- and even the national brands, like Wonder and Sunbeam, were baked by a network of regional licensees rather than being baked in a few big central locations and shipped out in long-haul trucks. This locally-baked bread was distributed by local route salesmen who made daily deliveries to the grocery stores in small trucks -- not only was the bread locally-baked, it was *fresh daily* on the store shelves. And it didn't carry a gourmet price tag, and it wasn't marketed to the upper-middle-class as a specialty item. It was just plain, common bread and everybody ate it.

Today's packaged bread, whether the white balloon bread or "healthy wheat bread", is generally baked a lot further from you than it was fifty years ago, and it has to be pumped that much more full of preservatives to ensure it won't get moldy on the trucks. And once it arrives at your store, it stays on the shelf a lot longer than it used to, because the deliveries come in big industrial trucks two or three times a week instead of daily. Hooray for industry consolidation.

We're lucky enough here to have one locally-branded commercial bakery still in business -- it's in Lewiston, about an hour and a half from here, and that's close enough to ensure that the bread is at least reasonably fresh. That's a long way from what it was just thirty years ago, when we had six such bakeries serving the entire state, but at least it's something.

 

[David Conwill]

I'd have to find somewhere else to live.

My house was built in 1941, but even if I hit that year or later, I think the dentist and his wife that lived there until 1959 might object to me moving into their new house with them.

If I were transported right this second, I'd be in a marble bank lobby with a cathedral ceiling right to the second floor. Since the floors are now carpeted and the ceilings much lower, I think I'd likely notice that first.

I guess my first stop would be the cemetery to find a baby born around June 14, 1910 who didn't make it. Then I'd hit the recruiting office with his name and see if I could get into the USAAF. Or maybe hitchhike to California and get a job with Lockheed or Douglas.