Things that make you smile

[Nobert]

View attachment 96551

Hmm, we have a bunch of pictures, taken by my great uncle, that have a similar border decoration on the prints. He was quite a talented amateur shutterbug. That kind of makes me smile.

 

[GHT]

Prior to my hip operation I had what the hospital called, an assessment appointment, it was with the surgeon who would be performing the surgery. Looking at the X-ray, his concern was that both hips looked to be in a similar condition, yet one was giving me grief and the other wasn't. Pointing this out to me, he recommended that I take a course of anti inflammatory pills, just in case the issue was about swelling. Earlier he had explained that the procedure was quite dramatic and that one in two hundred died on the operating table.

Handing me my prescription he said that if I was one of the half percent that didn't make it, and it turned out that I didn't need a new hip, I could find myself at the pearly gates with St. Peter going down his clipboard to see if my name was on it, at which point I might think: "Well that was a result!" I forgot to mention that the surgeon was a very affable Irishman, with a brilliant sense of humour.

 

[2jakes]

Prior to my hip operation I had what the hospital called, an assessment appointment, it was with the surgeon who would be performing the surgery. Looking at the X-ray, his concern was that both hips looked to be in a similar condition, yet one was giving me grief and the other wasn't. Pointing this out to me, he recommended that I take a course of anti inflammatory pills, just in case the issue was about swelling. Earlier he had explained that the procedure was quite dramatic and that one in two hundred died on the operating table.

Handing me my prescription he said that if I was one of the half percent that didn't make it, and it turned out that I didn't need a new hip, I could find myself at the pearly gates with St. Peter going down his clipboard to see if my name was on it, at which point I might think: "Well that was a result!" I forgot to mention that the surgeon was a very affable Irishman, with a brilliant sense of humour.

I’m smiling at your sense of humor which I admire.

I would've shoved that clipboard down his throat!

 

[1mach1]

Walks with coffee

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[EstherWeis]

Walks with coffee

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One of the highest on the list

 

[1mach1]

One of the highest on the list

Absolutely, love.

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[2jakes]

A day in the life of rural mailman Mark Whalon and his 1935 Plymouth coupe, in East Dorset, VT, Dec 1942.

Note WW2 gas ration sticker "C".

 

[3fingers]

My parents and later I had the same rural carrier for my entire life from my first remembrance into my 30s. They become like members of your family.

 

[Zombie_61]

My parents and later I had the same rural carrier for my entire life from my first remembrance into my 30s. They become like members of your family.

Though not as long-term, the carrier who delivered our mail when we moved into our current house in '98 was personable and conscientious, and we got to know her pretty well. Several years ago she was forced into an early retirement due to medical issues, and the carriers and the service ever since have been sketchy.

 

[GHT]

One of the early Christmas cards that dropped through the letterbox this morning.

Inside the caption reads:
I'm aware that it's Christmas Sir, but parking here is prohibited.

A couple of years ago, I received a parking ticket on Christmas Eve. Friends have never let me forget.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Brother Whalon must've been doing pretty well for himself to afford that fine all-wave radio-phonograph combination back around 1935. He's probably listening to Wayne King, Jan Garber, or Nelson Eddy records there, but you never know, he might be a 'gator in disguise.

That's how I remember old men dressing well into the '60s -- layers of flannel, wool pants, never a tie. Very few people in New England had central heating, with most houses heated by kerosene, coal, or wood stoves, and people dressed expecting to be cold most of the time.

 

[Bushman]

My parents and later I had the same rural carrier for my entire life from my first remembrance into my 30s. They become like members of your family.

Same here, though we don't live in a rural setting. We make sure to get our carrier a Christmas gift every year. She works hard for us every day but Sunday, and we never get our mail wrong.

 

[BlueTrain]

One--and only one--of my neighbors dressed like that sometimes, complete with breeches and high top boots. He was a linesman for the power company. He was a rough looking man with thick glasses and his son looked just like him. Yet they weren't at all mean or rough but they sure looked it. They were tough, though. There were some tough men in our neighborhood (our neck of the woods).

My father was also a rural mail carrier and was probably acquainted with more people in the county than anyone. Before he got that job, he was a route man for a laundry in the 1940s (after the army) and 1950s, and drove a route that took him over pretty much the same roads he covered as a route man. But he never wore breeches.

 

[Cornshucker77]

You couldn't walk down my street on a summer night without hearing the Red Sox game coming thru every screen door. The big difference between now and then is that for the Sox, anyway, only about 50 games a year were telecast -- mostly on Fridays and weekends. All the rest of the schedule, radio was the only way to follow it, and this remained true well into the mid-1970s. It was a very big deal when WSBK got the Red Sox television rights in 1975 and announced they were going to telecast about a hundred games that year -- we'd never seen anything like that before. But even after that, radio remained the main thing in stores and gas stations and at the shore.

Today every game is telecast on NESN, and radio is a shadow of what it used to be. Where you used to spin up and down the AM dial and find four or five stations broadcasting the game at once -- more after dark -- now you have to twiddle around and try to fish WTIC out of the murk if you want to listen to the game. And when you do, you have to put up with ridiculous blasting music bumpers, bombastic "Ricky Radio" ESPN-style announcers, and every jock-scratch being sponsored.

I still listen to most of the games on the radio. Although one difference........I'm a KC Royals fan. I remember as you do that at one time radio was the only way to follow your team everyday. I started listening to Royals games in their first season (1969, I was 10 years old) and if we were lucky we would see maybe one game a month on an Omaha TV station. I do enjoy watching the games on TV but radio just has a special quality to it that I really don't know how to describe. I'll leave that to someone like Ken Burns.

 

[Zombie_61]

...I do enjoy watching the games on TV but radio just has a special quality to it that I really don't know how to describe...

It's probably because radio is "Theater of the Mind". Watching the game on TV you're hearing and seeing what's happening. But listening to the same game on radio, your mind fills in the visual that isn't being provided--envisioning the pitch, the hit or miss, the batter trying to beat the ball to first base, etc.--so you're subconsciously more involved and feel you're part of the game.

 

[Cornshucker77]

It's probably because radio is "Theater of the Mind". Watching the game on TV you're hearing and seeing what's happening. But listening to the same game on radio, your mind fills in the visual that isn't being provided--envisioning the pitch, the hit or miss, the batter trying to beat the ball to first base, etc.--so you're subconsciously more involved and feel you're part of the game.

Well said.

 

[LizzieMaine]

It was baseball that gave me the love for radio as a medium that's shaped much of my adult life. It doesn't make me smile at all to see what a pointless horror that medium has disintegrated into, but at least you can still listen to a ballgame.

 

[Trenchfriend]

It was baseball that gave me the love for radio as a medium that's shaped much of my adult life. It doesn't make me smile at all to see what a pointless horror that medium has disintegrated into, but at least you can still listen to a ballgame.

Is there the problem, that radio-stations partly are too much noise-reducting/compressing their microphones, so that the sound is clean but "dull" and boring, in the US, too?

 

[LizzieMaine]

That overcompressed, aggressive sound started in the sixties and has never let up. People don't know how good regular AM radio can sound because all they've ever heard is this ridiculous squashed up distortion. Of course, considering the level of programming you get nowadays, the sound quality is probably better than it deserves....

 

[Fading Fast]

It was baseball that gave me the love for radio as a medium that's shaped much of my adult life. It doesn't make me smile at all to see what a pointless horror that medium has disintegrated into, but at least you can still listen to a ballgame.

Radio and reading were how I survived my childhood in my house. It wasn't an easy home, but if I stayed off the radar, things went okay and radio and reading were how I stayed off the radar.

Radio was amazing - so many stations, so much information, so much variety. From music, to sports, to news, to quirky stuff (picking up a station 300 miles away) - I loved it.

Even when I moved out of my house, radio was my constant companion in my apartment - I had it on all the time. I had no idea I was catching the tail end of an era then, but I miss it now.