Life as it was lived then

[LizzieMaine]

That is interesting, was your Grandfather Catholic? Both of my Grandfather's wore their wedding bands their entire lives (one was working class his entire life, well the other started out as working class, and was during the Golden Age), one was a Catholic, well the other was married to a Catholic. As far as my Great-Grandfathers I only know for a fact that one wore a wedding band (he was Catholic). I simply don't know about the other three. So I'm wondering if it is part of the Catholic culture?

Nope, he was a lapsed Methodist. But the culture around here does tend to be very austere -- the old New England Puritan business and all. Anyone wearing lots of flashy baubles is automatically assumed to be up to no good, and there's still a lot of that attitude here.

In any event, he wore his wedding band until it split in half at the back -- and that was the only jewelery I ever saw him wear.

 

[skyvue]

I'm watching a silly Technicolor picture from 1951 called TAKE CARE OF MY LITTLE GIRL, in which Jeanne Crain heads off to college to attend Rush Week in hopes of being accepted into a sorority.

I've noted a couple of things of interest so far: In one scene that takes place at a sorority tea, there's an orchestra playing a soft ballad, and the dozens of women in attendance, each dressed in a formal gown, are paired off and dancing.

That's no great surprise -- I've known for some time that women frequently used to dance with each other on such occasions.

But as the scene progressed, I found myself wondering, how do they decide who will lead while they're dancing? And sure enough, a scene unfolds in which one gal, a rather rough-hewn sort who doesn't play by the polite sorority rules (is she meant to be a lesbian? I doubt it, but it's possible -- more likely, just an unrefined, unrepentant tomboy) asks another to dance.

Gal #1: How about it?

Gal #2: (with some disgust in her voice) I don't dance with girls -- it ruins your technique!

Gal #1: (leaning in) Well, then, you wanna wrestle?


Come to think of it, maybe Gal #1 is meant to read as lesbian.

Anyway, it was interesting to note that the "who leads?" question that came up for me was a (semi)legitimate one back in the day.

 

[ladybrettashley]

My dad doesn't wear a wedding ring because my mom made him. He does a lot of construction and such, and she was afraid it would get caught in something (and that was in '78). Probably a good idea, too. Maybe it has more to do with work than era, although i suppose many more people worked in jobs (or aroung the house/farm) where that would be an issue then than they do now.

And i remember my dad telling me about mailing a letter to his mom with her name, city, state, and a nickel taped to it instead of a stamp. It made it, too. That was probably the late '60s or early '70s, too.

 

[Caity Lynn]

As a rather tall girl, who dislikes sitting about at dances, and find the lack of men, particularly those willing to dance annoying, I'll dance with my gal pals, and I always lead. I CAN follow, and occasionally one of the gals will lead, but it's usually me.

I'm also a great one to grab a bunch of single gals and sway in a circle at dances for "slow songs" (aka those country songs they play during which couples get sickeningly close together exchanging those *cute* kisses)

 

[K.D. Lightner]

Re: The story. He was not wearing a wedding ring because he was cheating on his wife. The girlfriend found out he was married and was dishing him. Years ago, people were suspicious of married men who did not wear their wedding rings. What were they up to?

My father had a wedding ring but had to take it off in the day time when he started working at John Deere assembling tractor gears.

Re: Dancing. It was always common for gals to dance with each other, at least the fast dances, they still do it. Some folks danced alone. Slow dancing, probably earlier than my generation, though I saw a few teenage gals slow dancing. Mother said it was common for girls to do that, also walk down the street holding hands. It was, she says, a more innocent time.

Re: The good old days. The first house we moved in after my father returned from WW II, did not have an indoor toilet, nor did it have a refrigerator; we had an ice box -- an ice man delivered a block of ice every other day. We also had milk delivered daily.

We did not have a telephone until 1947 when mother was pregnant. She was alone in the house all day while father worked, and convinced him, for safety's sake, that they should have a phone.

We had a radio, but did not get a TV until 1951 and we were the first in our neighborhood to get one, an Admiral floor model with a tiny screen. We got three stations. My parents did not get a color TV until the mid-70's.

We had a pot belly stove in the middle of the living room. I was taught early on not to touch the thing. It was probably the main reason I never believed in Santa Claus -- I knew the stove pipe was attached to the chimney.

Almost all the cars on the street were black. When you saw a red car, it was a fire engine. If it was yellow, it was a cab.

My grandmother had an old washboard to wash her clothes, my mother got a ringer -- had a hand crank you turned when you put the clothes through the ringer. Then, they were put up on the clothesline to dry. Indoors in the basement in the winter, outside in the summer. Nothing smelled better than freshly laundered clothes that were hung out to dry.

karol

 

[Caity Lynn]

The fact that I can't do all that stuff with my gal pals, annoys me. I still do. lol We walk holding hands, and call each other hun and doll, and don't care if people think we're lesbians. It's annoying. Why can't we go back to an innocent time?!

 

[Widebrim]

My father also told me that in his day (the Forties), they used to give very little thought to the start time of movies. The programs ran without stopping, including a second feature (often), a cartoon, a newsreel, and coming attractions. So they didn't worry about getting there at a particular time -- they just arrived whenever they arrived, and if they walked in on the middle of something, they stuck around until that movie or short played again and watched the part they'd missed.

My mother mentioned this to me several times. For us, it seems odd, but since the programs ran continuously, it kind of makes sense.

Regarding wedding bands, I have never seen one on my father (now age 91). I neither recall any reason being given for it (or any protests on my mother's part), but the fact that he worked as an auto mechanic is very likely the cause.

 

[Jack Armstrong]

Nope, he was a lapsed Methodist. But the culture around here does tend to be very austere -- the old New England Puritan business and all. Anyone wearing lots of flashy baubles is automatically assumed to be up to no good, and there's still a lot of that attitude here.

In any event, he wore his wedding band until it split in half at the back -- and that was the only jewelery I ever saw him wear.

My father wore his wedding band for over forty years, until he got a groove around the ring finger of his left hand -- he never took it off.

The decision was taken out if his hands (no pun intended) in the late Seventies, when he took a bad injury to his left hand, and the ring had to go. The hospital had to cut it off of him -- it would no longer slip off.

Personally, I don't wear my wedding ring. I don't like rings of any kind; they get irritating on my finger after a while. And I've never needed jewelry to remind me that I'm married.

 

[Jack Armstrong]

Regarding wedding bands, I have never seen one on my father (now age 91). I neither recall any reason being given for it (or any protests on my mother's part), but the fact that he worked as an auto mechanic is very likely the cause.

You're probably right. Wearing rings of any kind was frowned upon by mechanics in the Fifties, since getting zapped by a jolt from the battery or coil would turn it into a wraparound branding iron in less than a second.

I don't know if today's mechanics still avoid rings or not.

 

[Cigarband]

I'm an Electronic Technician these days and never wear any jewelry. Too easy to get zapped.

 

[mwelch8404]

In a spot less than 50 miles away from L.A. out in the high desert, our telephone rang two longs and a short - we were on at that time a two party line. The two longs and a short was a holdover from when I was younger and it was a four party line. This was until 1976 when I joined the Navy at 17.

As for the bread/bread crumbs & etc. in ground meats such as meatloaf, hamburgers or meatbals, the bread absorbs much of the fat while the meat is cooking, and fat is where the flavor is.

 

[Elaina]

I don't know if today's mechanics still avoid rings or not.

The ones I know don't wear them because they're afraid of catching them on something and hurting themselves. It's also why the ones I know keep short hair. I've noticed it doesn't matter if they're in car repair, or rig repair, the reasons seem to be the same.

Now. A mechanic can buy ME jewelry....

 

[skyvue]

I was watching a musical from 1933 called LET'S FALL IN LOVE (that familiar song is featured prominently in it), and there's a carnival scene that intrigued me.

In it, the familiar midway attraction that asks customers to throw a target, which, if they hit it, triggers a lever which triggers a trap door and dumps a clown into a vat of water.

We've all seen that, right?

Well, in this picture, the attraction instead features two scantily clad gals who fall out of bed when the target is hit.

I've uploaded the scene here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxvjaToaDQs

And I'll try embedding it here:

[YOUTUBE]
<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/ZxvjaToaDQs&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/ZxvjaToaDQs&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>[/YOUTUBE]

But I'm left wondering, was there ever such a carnival attraction, or did the movie makers come up with it? I'm inclined to think it's the former, but I have no evidence to back me up.[YOUTUBE][/YOUTUBE]

 

[LizzieMaine]

But I'm left wondering, was there ever such a carnival attraction, or did the movie makers come up with it? I'm inclined to think it's the former, but I have no evidence to back me up.

Such an attraction positively did appear at the New York World's Fair in 1940 -- it was called "De-Bunk-Her," and featured a rotation of college girls in pajamas who got dumped out of bed when a target was hit by a thrown baseball. Life magazine featured a multi-page spread on the attraction in its 6/24/40 issue. The New York Public Library photo site offers a image here.

The fact that it was featured in a movie seven years earlier suggests that it was common well before that, as a variation on the familiar "Drown The Clown" tanks.

 

[skyvue]

Such an attraction positively did appear at the New York World's Fair in 1940 -- it was called "De-Bunk-Her," and featured a rotation of college girls in pajamas who got dumped out of bed when a target was hit by a thrown baseball.

Very interesting -- thanks for the info, Lizzie.

 

[Mr_D.]

Common gasoline was commonly used for spot-cleaning laundry and removing stains on woolens. A housewife would go down to the corner filling station with a glass jug and buy a nickel's worth at a time, and would store it in the shed or on the back porch until needed.

Makes perfect sense. Being a mechanic, I use gasoline to clean parts wash my hands at the end of the day. and clean up oil/grease off the floor.

It's perfect and would make sense if the woman's husband worked with greasy machines all day.

 

[LuckyLady]

I've always found my grandmother's stories fascinating and slightly wonderful about how it just wasn't done for lady to leave the house without a hat and/or gloves; not due to some damning social or religious requirement, but simply for the elegance and femininity that was so valued back in those days.

 

[miss_smith]

I have found the more serious fiction of Josephine Lawrence to be very enlightening on the golden era. I've find her books difficult to find in America, but when I lived in Canada my school library had all her books.
Let Us Consider One Another, the only one I managed to read there, was a great study on discrimination at the time, although not what a modern person would expect - it was all about catholics, protestants and jews and how intermarrying was not acceptable. There was also a shrewish wife who made her "alcoholic" (her daughters insisted he was so) husband sleep in the basement whenever she thought he'd been drinking. I think my favorite bit though, was when two newlywed couples stayed up all night because that was how long it took to bake a cake!

 

[skyvue]

As some of you know, I've been serializing on my blog, CladriteRadio.com, a 1938 etiquette guide for young men called Manners for Moderns.

In the chapter that will go live next Tuesday, on dating etiquette, I came across the following passage:

Having that "easy, casual manner" that all fiction heroes seem to possess is simply knowing etiquette so well that you never have to stop and think what to do! That's something, thank goodness, that every man can have whether he has five cents or fifty dollars in his jeans, and there are times when it's worth more than all the money in the world.​

What caught my eye about that passage was this: whether he has five cents or fifty dollars in his jeans.

My parents, who grew up in Oklahoma in the thirties and forties, always told us that jeans were worn only on the most casual of occasions -- when working outside or at a blue collar job or when involved in leisure activities like hayrides, etc.

So I was surprised to see the author of Manners for Moderns speak specifically of a young man's jeans, not trousers. It seems almost the equivalent of a contemporary etiquette expert writing, "That's something, thank goodness, that every man can have whether he has five cents or fifty dollars in his sweat pants...."

Have I been so wrong in my assumptions about how frequently jeans were worn by the average Joe in the 1930s?

 

[LizzieMaine]

What caught my eye about that passage was this: whether he has five cents or fifty dollars in his jeans.

My parents, who grew up in Oklahoma in the thirties and forties, always told us that jeans were worn only on the most casual of occasions -- when working outside or at a blue collar job or when involved in leisure activities like hayrides, etc.

So I was surprised to see the author of Manners for Moderns speak specifically of a young man's jeans, not trousers. It seems almost the equivalent of a contemporary etiquette expert writing, "That's something, thank goodness, that every man can have whether he has five cents or fifty dollars in his sweat pants...."

Have I been so wrong in my assumptions about how frequently jeans were worn by the average Joe in the 1930s?

"Jeans" in this sense was simply a bit of amusing commonly-used slang for "pants." I think the origin of the phrase was in pulp western stories, where cowpokes and galoots would declare they "didn't have a nickel in their jeans," and from there it made its way into the public, with the comic value in hearing such a phrase come from someone who ordinarily wouldn't be caught dead in dungarees.