Vintage things that have blessedly disappeared in your lifetime

[tonyb]

We have threads here devoted to vintage things that have disappeared in our lifetime, vintage things that haven’t disappeared in our lifetime, and vintage things that reappeared in our lifetime. But how about those everyday things we are happy to leave in the past?

While taking the trash down to the curb this morning I was again reminded of how superior these wheeled plastic bins with attached lids are to the galvanized steel garbage cans we had in decades past. The new ones aren’t quite indestructible, but they don’t rust, they don’t dent, their lids don’t blow away, they hold more and they’re a helluva lot easier to handle.

I still resent being tasked with cleaning the garbage cans when I was a kid. This was before the age of the plastic kitchen garbage can liner bag. Refuse was put in the kitchen and bathroom receptacles until they were filled and then dumped into the big can outside. It became a smelly, sometimes maggot-infested mess stuck to the interior of the can.

 

[LizzieMaine]

My childhood dentist -- a bitter WWII Army dentist who never reaccustomed to civilian life, and who treated all children like draftees. After he slapped me across the face for crying, we moved on, but I've never forgotten how profoundly I disliked him. I still carry a good bit of his handiwork among my molars to remember him by.

 

[tonyb]

My mom found a cut-rate dentist in some small town a half hour drive or more away from our home in Madison. (Dental insurance? Never heard of such a thing.)

A sign on the wall in the waiting room read “Painless Dentist Upstairs,” with a hand with the index finger pointing upwards.

It was a one-story building.

 

[tonyb]

I have a few pieces of vintage luggage — a couple of trunks, suitcases, a skate case, etc. They look cool and they serve practical functions — as a console table behind a couch, a coffee table, a TV stand, and storage of bedding and periodicals and whatnot.

But for actual use while on the road? Give me a suitcase with casters and a retractable handle, please. It was a perhaps overdone comedy bit in movies from 50 and more years ago, before we determined that wheels on suitcases might be a good idea, that had the out-of-towners clumsily shlepping their luggage from place to place.

 

[Turnip]

That below is a standard steel ash bin, also used for any other kind of waste, used up to 1970s West-Germany while many households still used coals for heating, some even for cooking.
These were heavy as hell and moving them around was quite a pain. So was shoveling coals in the cellar when a new delivery arrived, dragging coals from the cellar to third floor and ashes retour, not to forget all the dirt around oven, cellar…

 

[tonyb]

^^^^^^^
You’d want a steel can for such purposes. And for oily rags.

Friends and relatives worked as garbage men going back 50 years and more ago, when we were all still young and capable of doing what garbage men had to do back then, before the wheeled plastic bin became the standard, which was to go from house to house with a much larger container (called a “hook,” for the part the garbage man put over his shoulder) and empty those household steel cans into that larger container until it became full and had to be dumped into the truck. It was hard work, for sure, and sometimes dangerous and nasty, what with what might be found in the garbage. But it paid relatively well, as well it should have. They had a good union contract, and the guys who stuck with it and who survive to this day (some are no longer with us) have a decent pension.

 

[Turnip]

Same here, waste has for decades been a local, public business and so the workers were in public service, until that business had been sourced out in the delusional privatization wave of 1990s and early 2000s.