Vintage Things That Have Disappeared In Your Lifetime?

[K.D. Lightner]

There were a number of boys I knew who had paper routes, most needed the money because they were from lower income families, some just had parents who had a strict work ethic and sent the boys out to deliver papers at 3:30 in the morning.

Most of them were never able to get involved in sports or school activities, some of them would fall asleep at their desks during school hours. And they had to go to sleep at 8 at night, so no evening activities, either.

It was grueling work because of the hours and the weather -- those little guys would be out in blizzards trying to deliver the papers. Sometimes their parents had to get up and help them if it was really bad.

My father had a paper route when he was a kid and refused to let my brother do it. Instead, brother was able to get a summer job at a local golf course caddying. To this day, he is an avid golfer.

Very few people now in my area suscribe to the papers. Mother still does, likes her a.m. paper to read with her coffee. I think it is a dying industry, soon to be as "vintage" as Burma Shave signs.

karol


karol

 

[LizzieMaine]

Very few people now in my area suscribe to the papers. Mother still does, likes her a.m. paper to read with her coffee. I think it is a dying industry, soon to be as "vintage" as Burma Shave signs.

karol

There are few things that depress me more than this -- but one of the few that does is that the fact that surviving newspapers are racing to dumb themselves down to meet the typical online presentation of news, filling up with glitzy superficial eye candy at the expense of actual journalism (I'm talking to YOU, Boston Globe.) Readers who care are getting fed up with it, and readers who don't care have already left.

Here in Maine, the Portland Press Herald is on its last legs -- which means very soon, our largest city will be without a daily paper. If that's not a sign of the apocalypse, I dunno what is.

 

[Subvet642]

This may seem a bit off topic, but I miss our milkman. When we were living in an apartment, we had a milkman (we only moved a year and a half ago). He's still around, but doesn't deliver to our town. We could get much of our groceries delivered: Milk (of course) eggs, butter etc., but we also could get some frozen pot pies and other dinners. The one thing I miss the most is the chocolate milk in glass bottles. Whole milk, real chocolate, real sugar, WOW!

 

[dhermann1]

Speaking of newspapers, The Christian Science Monitor, one of the all time great publications on the history of the world, just announced they will only be online from now on. They will print a weekend edition, but no more daily paper. That is a sad indication of the times. No more Christian Science reading rooms with the paper displayed in the window!

 

[Unlucky Berman]

I am not that old, that I could have seen things from the 40s disappearing, but what I remember most was that the country where I was born vanished back in 1990. After that glas bottles for milk vanished too and now we have this nice, what's this in english? Tetrapack? You know this things made of carton and tinfoils. When I was a child we collected these bottles from all over the neighborhood and got some money for them to buy some candys.
And I can remember that in the 80 more man wore hats, now only the really older ones have still the same models (well I think that are the guys from then, only that they are now old [huh] ) from that time (they looked a bit like the one from Rambo, with this small brims and bad taper).

 

[K.D. Lightner]

Speaking of vintage things that have all but disappeared, not only newspapers, but I am remembering magazines from the past I once read: Colliers, Life, Look Magazine (which was published right here in Des Moines).
How about Saturday Evening Post, that had some many Norman Rockwell paintings on it?

The funnies in the newspapers: L'il Abner, Laredo Crockett, Danny Hale, Maggie & Jigs, Nancy, Little Lulu, and, althought not vintage, I really do miss Gary Larson.

karol

 

[John K Stetson]

Smudge Pots, Afternoon Philadelphia Paper, Outhouses...

Just getting to this thread -

I've read that vineyard owners use smudge pots from time to time to protect
just-blossomed vines from late spring frosts...

I don't know if the Inky published twice a day, but I do recall the Philadelphia
Bulletin as the afternoon paper. The Bulletin Building is directly across from
30th Street train station, and now houses offices of the nearby Universities (Drexel, U of Pennsylvania Health Systems) and others.

My grandparents' house had an outhouse. This wasn't in a rural area, but behind a rowhouse in Philadelphia in a tiny yard. I recall the Big Day the team from Sears showed up and installed a tub and toilet indoors. I moved into this house many years later and we knocked the outhouse down. It was made of brick, so yes, it was the proverbial brick s*** house.

 

[John K Stetson]

More on (musical) Sonics

**************
The overly compressed sounds that eminate from an ipod is ANTI-MUSIC. Accoustically the ipod is a step backwards from an eight-track tape player and not much better than Edison's first record player.

While an audiophile system set up for playing vinyl is still superior to CD's, on a reasonably good system, a boom box or a walkman audio -wise CD's, HDCD's and SACD's will out perform any ipod as they are reproducing music that is there not music with the life compressed out of it.

Being the resident electronics geek among my friends, I cannot begin to tell you how many times in the mid 80's when CDs were introduced I had to explain why their newly purchased CD player sounded like crap when they connected it to the phono input on their receiver. Now I explain to older friends who have vinyl why it sounds like crap when they connect it to some device sans phono stage so they can rip it to digital storage.

I rip all my CDs in lossless format, am a member of the B&W music club
which is releasing music in alac and flac...I've come full circle with the ipod,
especially with compressed formats for it: it's almost like a RETURN to
cassette tapes and 8-tracks - useful for portability but not the highest fidelity.

One thing I do miss on most modern gear is beautiful, back-lit analog VU meters. I have a couple of vintage Marantz decks that have multi-color meters....

 

[K.D. Lightner]

Oh, that reminds me -- vintage things that I do not miss:

Outhouses, a long cold trek in the winter or, more than likely, a bucket on the back porch so you didn't have to make the trek. Also the smell and the flies in the summertime.

And speaking of outhouses, my grandparents, who were really poor, not only had an outhouse, but had newspaper in the outhouse to use for toilet paper. Ouch!

Refrigerators you had to defrost; of course, I always waited until the thing was a glacier and then put hot water on it to speed up the process of defrosting.

One electric fan to use when the weather got really, really hot. And, when that failed, you had to sleep outdoors, sometimes on the roof or backyard, sometimes on the back porch, trying anything to beat the heat.

Party lines. When you wanted to use the phone, there was someone on your party line and you had to wait for them to get off before you could use the phone. If you were really unlucky, you were assigned a party line with a jabbermouth.

Inappropriate clothing for winter: I went to school wearing thin headscarves and golashes that only protected your feet from getting wet. On cold, cold days, I would get to school with numb or burning feet and sore ears. Why no one believed in layering in those days, I don't know, but headscarves were what girls and women wore then, at least in the working class, and it wasn't until Love Story came out in the movies that it became stylish for women to wear stocking caps (thank you Ali McGraw).

There are probably other things that I don't miss, will have to think of them. But those are things that come to mind.

karol

 

[Justdog]

Nickle

Strange find in the yard in Canada. But as a kid tilly the yard for my Father I found a Buffalo Head Nickle on a mound. (The buffalo was on the mound. Never new what ever happened to that nickle.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Speaking of coins, I was cashing out the tills at work, and was amazed to see a half dollar -- the first one that's come thru here in at least a year. That got me to thinking about how it wasn't so long ago that they were regular everyday coins: when I was little, I often got my allowance flipped to me as a fifty-cent piece, and never thought anything of it. Now you can go a year or more without seeing one turn up.

 

[nico demouse]

This may seem a bit off topic, but I miss our milkman. When we were living in an apartment, we had a milkman (we only moved a year and a half ago). He's still around, but doesn't deliver to our town. We could get much of our groceries delivered: Milk (of course) eggs, butter etc., but we also could get some frozen pot pies and other dinners. The one thing I miss the most is the chocolate milk in glass bottles. Whole milk, real chocolate, real sugar, WOW!

I'm able to get some of our groceries delivered here by the Schwans company. I always feel very retro answering the door and seeing the big freezer truck across the street!

I miss the Betty Crocker catalog and clipping points off of box tops to save. I remember being a little girl and loving to look through the catalog and pick out things I would have when I was a grown up. I actually have the dishes and flatware I picked out when I was little. My mother ordered my flatware as a wedding present shortly before the catalog went out of business. And my husband actually had the very same dishes I liked as a little girl in his condo before we ever met.

I also miss those little holes in the back of the medicine cupboard that were for disposing of your safety razor blades.

 

[dhermann1]

Coinage

Speaking of 50 cent pieces, that reminded me of all the different coins that are no longer seen. As a kid in the 60's I sold the local paper in the summer, and we all used to compare notes on the coins we found. Of course silver coinage is now long gone, Mercury dime, silver quarters plus the Buffalo/Indian Head nickel. Silver dollars all got hoarded. But the ones we looked for most were pennies. We always hung on the the steel pennies of 1942, but the real Holy Grail was a 1909 VDB, or even more Holy, a 1909 S VDB, We all figured we'd be able to retire if we found one. We still got the occasional Indian Head penny.
That Walking Liberty 50 cent piece was one of the most beautiful coins ever minted.
Speaking of pennies, one form those Indian Heads often took was the squished souvenir. You stuck one in a gadget at Niagara Falls or whever you were visiting, and it stamped it with an imprint of the place, and flattened it out about an inch long. You could still see the Indian Head pattern, because doing this was most popular at the turn of the last century.
That reminds me of another category of souvenir, the silver teaspoon. I have a 1939 NY Worlds Fair spoon that is my most prized possession. I also have a 1933 Chicago Fair spoon that my mother brought back from that fair, and a souvenir spoon from California that my grandmother brought back from a trip out west in 1912.

 

[John in Covina]

penny imprint

I'll run across these penny imprinters occasionally and usually get one when time and change permits.

Collectable spoons are pretty cool too and a real holdover when you find a location that still has them.

 

[Ace Fedora]

Mo' Money

I can't believe I didn't think of this earlier, but I don't remember the last time I came across a one or two-dollar bill since the introductions of loonies and twonies...

 

[skyvue]

The sizzle grinder. An older gentleman who came to your house either on foot pushing his equipment, or in a van with sharpening equipment installed. He would sharpen lawnmowers, knives, scissors and whatever you had.

I'd heard for some years that there was at least one old-style blade sharpener who traveled the various neighborhoods of NYC offering his services, but somehow I'd never encountered one before.

But sure enough, late this afternoon, the wife and I heard the "clang-clang" of an old bell, and we looked out the window to see the Mike's Sharpening Services truck making its way slowly down our street. A sign on the truck boasted that Mike (or the fellow sharpening in his stead these days) has been in operation since 1942.

I have some old scissors I inherited from my grandfather, whom I loved dearly. They're part of a set with a letter opener and I'm very fond of them, but they've never worked very well.

So, having spotted the truck going by, I quickly dug through my "junk" drawer, found the scissors, and went running out (without a coat for fear of missing my chance).

The truck carried an older man, his son, and an appealing old dog. The two men couldn't have been friendlier -- nor kinder in fussing over and lavishing praise on my granddad's scissors -- and for six bucks, they oiled, polished, and sharpened the blades. (I wonder, now, if I shouldn't get the handles polished, too, so they match.)

Mostly, I love being able to partake in tiny ways of life as it was once led. I feel the same kind of lift when I get my shoes shined, for example, or when I'm able to take a ride on the Nostalgia Train, as I did last month.

I've included some pics of the truck below (a couple of them regrettably blurry) and some pics of the scissors and letter opener (click on the images to see larger versions, if interested).

 

[univibe88]

found the scissors, and went running out

Running with scissors

Great story :eusa_clap

 

[Sleepy LaGoon]

The Noon whistle.

Any small towns still do this?

 

[LizzieMaine]

The town where I grew up was still blowing the "dinner whistle" at 11:30 every morning as late as the '80s -- I'll have to ask my mother if they're still doing it.

It was an air-raid siren mounted on a pole halfway down our street, and if you were walking by when it went off you'd jump ten feet in the air.

 

[pretty faythe]

We had one fire station that used to do this. In the most unusual area too. hmm. I think it stopped in the 90s. I remember hearing it during the weekends riding around on my bike during jr high, which was pre 90s,