Vintage Things That Have Disappeared In Your Lifetime?

[2jakes]

White tennis balls.

Or to be precise....off white & chewed up by my opponent!

 

[vitanola]

Natural gas or propane produces a bright white light if you use a fixture with a Wellsbach mantle. We used to have a travel trailer with a gas light in it, similar to a Coleman lantern.

Of course, and Weslbach burner, either upright or inverted, puts out just the same light with modern natural gas supply that it did a century ago with a producer gas supply, but open burners used on a modern natural gas supply do not give a correct impression of the light that they would have produced in their time.

Acetylene was a common illuminant in rural areas after the mid-nineties. Acetelyne generators were simple, reliable, and relatively safe. Water sould be dripped upon a pile of calcium carbide and the gas was the product. Acutely ne was burned in special "Y" shaped open burners. The light that it gave was brilliant white and practically free from flicker. Safer than kerosine, and nearly as economical.

 

[2jakes]

 

[ideaguy]

MANNERS...

 

[Fading Fast]

Kerosene lamps which were used on road construction sites.

Girlfriend's out with one of her girlfriends tonight. My work day ended. Sat down on our sofa, glass of wine in one hand (yup, live with a women, wine is the one intoxicating beverage we always have), remote in the other and decide to look into the "old" stuff on the DVR. I find "Remember the Night" and think, oddly, a Christmas movie sounds good and start watching (probably, in part, because I had just seen "Double Indemnity" and wanted to see MacMurray and Stanwyck together again). About twenty seven minutes in, they are driving, come to a detour and, lo and behold, seven or more kerosene lamps lighting up the "Slow-Danger, Detour" sign.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Hey, at least the Brooklyn Eagle is back in business!

 

[LizzieMaine]

Maybe now the Dodgers can come home.

 

[2jakes]

Marbles.
Although they are still available,
kids playing with marbles has disappeared.

 

[2jakes]

Baseball cards which included bubble gum.

I need to add that which was referred to as “bubble gum” was actually a
thin slab of powdery sweet card-board substance that turned rubbery
within minutes.

Different from the Juicy-Fruit, Double-Mint or Wrigley’s Spearmint gum.
These could be chewed for longer periods & if you were good, you could
make a “clicking” sound with the gum & teeth.

They are still available, but the ingredients have changed & it’s very difficult to
produce that clicking sound today.
These gums were not for blowing bubbles.

Bazooka & Dubble Bubble are what you chose to make bubbles.

There are other gums like Beeman’s, Black Jack, Chiclets, Clove, Dentyne & so on.
But my favorite were the baseball gum cards which also included a picture card of
my baseball heroes of the day.

Chewing gum as kids, was mostly for the guys, girls hated it.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Chewing gum as kids, was mostly for the guys, girls hated it.

I've always considered gum-chewing to be a revolting habit -- maybe from picking gum out of my hair once too often as a kid. When I see it stuck under the seats at the theatre, I am filled with a blind sputtering rage at the helot who put it there.

"Gum-chewer" in the twenties was a contemptuous slang term used by journalists to refer to the kind of people who read the sleaziest tabloid newspapers and the cheapest magazines.

 

[GHT]

"Gum-chewer" in the twenties was a contemptuous slang term used by journalists to refer to the kind of people who read the sleaziest tabloid newspapers and the cheapest magazines.

We used to use a similar expression. When someone was useless at what they did they would earn the sobriquet: Amateur. This was taken one stage further if they were as you described, and given the ultimate insult: Ama-chewer.

 

[GHT]

MANNERS...

To that you can add: Courtesy, respect, tolerance, caring, public duty.
All replaced by selfishness, avarice, rudeness, ignorance and on & on.
What an indictment of the me society we have become.

 

[Trenchfriend]

This very stupid-looking, gum-chewing people were very widespread in the 90's, here in (East)Germany. Today, it's rarely seen, because over the years it got about, what this behaviour tells about you.

 

[Madame Le Pipkin]

Hello. All new to me.
What happened to tins of Heinz vegetable salad.
Not seen here in Scotland for years.

 

[Stormy]

Manners and basic moral decency, if it hasn't been said already.

Could almost never be said too much

 

[Stormy]

Recess and PE class have been killed off. Now kids too often are obese, devoid of social and interpersonal skills, and suffering from ailments that only senior citizens used to have in the past.

 

[tonyb]

Recess and PE class have been killed off. Now kids too often are obese, devoid of social and interpersonal skills, and suffering from ailments that only senior citizens used to have in the past.

Got no kids of my own, and it's been nearly half a century since I was a primary school pupil myself, so I am indeed taken aback by hearing that recess and gym class are no more, at least in some locales.

How do they get the little buzzards to hold still at their desks without an opportunity to burn off some of that energy?

 

[Fading Fast]

Got no kids of my own, and it's been nearly half a century since I was a primary school pupil myself, so I am indeed taken aback by hearing that recess and gym class are no more, at least in some locales.

How do they get the little buzzards to hold still at their desks without an opportunity to burn off some of that energy?

Like you, no kids, but we live next to a school - a NYC public school - and those kids run around like mad at recess. That said, I have read that some areas don't allow recess anymore for insurance reasons. But again, at the school next to where I live, those kids burn off a lot - and I mean a lot - of excess energy at recess everyday.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Phys Ed classes are still around, but they aren't as prominent as they were from the early sixties to the mid-seventies. That period was something of a cultural anomaly, the heyday of the President's Council On Physical Fitness on Sports -- a Federal program implemented following a report in the mid-fifties criticizing the lack of physical fitness and education among American elementary school children, and arguing that they were fat and lazy compared to European kids.

Phys Ed in the actual Era, prior to this report, was a desultory operation at best, usually consisting of an underpaid math teacher in a dirty sweatshirt teaching kids to do jumping jacks and other stand-in-place calisthentics or other small-time indoor activities in a disused classroom. It's only when the Boomers were in grade school that this really changed, and it faded out pretty much at the same time that the last of the Boomers were passing thru the public schools. Of course, judging from some of the well-upholstered fifty and sixty-somethings I see around town here sucking double mocha lattes out of giant sippy cups, the lessons were not exactly those of a lifetime.

Full disclosure: I'm a tail-end boomer, I had compulsory phys ed from first grade thru the tenth grade, and I've gained ten inches around my waist in the last twenty years. I hated phys ed class.

 

[Fading Fast]

Since I don't have kids and only catch the occasional article, am I to understand that Phys Ed is not a regular part of most kids grammmar-highschool experience? Being, like Lizzie, a tail-end Baby Boomer (born in '64) they tortured us with gym class (and I like sports, just not the way they were forced down our throats by, sometimes, bullying gym teachers) every single year, if memory serves, three times a week.