Vintage Things That Have Disappeared In Your Lifetime?

[Fading Fast]

I come from a very small family as almost everyone - parents and grandparents - were only children or one of two. When I was born, I had my parents, two-living grandparents and two (seven-hundred-and-fifty-year-old) great grandparents.

The "greats" went by the time I was six and, then, my grandparents went when I was eight and ten. My dad passed away 28 years ago and, sadly, my mom's dementia is taking more of her every day.

My dad and his mom were the Golden Era to me. They both lived through it, were greatly influenced by it and, pretty much, still abided its culture and values (the ones they experienced anyway) when I was growing up.

I lived in two worlds as a kid: at school and with friends, it was the 1970s / at home and with my family, it was a blend of the '30s - pre-cultural-change '60s. As my family died off, that Golden Era world went with them except for what I carried in my head, at least until finding Fedora Lounge where I could share my thoughts, impressions and experiences of that time with others here.

But that world - that odd, insular world of my dad and grandmother - is a "vintage thing -" a living breathing embodiment of the Golden Era - that is gone forever from my life.

 

[Zombie_61]

I come from a very small family as almost everyone - parents and grandparents - were only children or one of two. When I was born, I had my parents, two-living grandparents and two (seven-hundred-and-fifty-year-old) great grandparents.

The "greats" went by the time I was six and, then, my grandparents went when I was eight and ten. My dad passed away 28 years ago and, sadly, my mom's dementia is taking more of her every day.

My dad and his mom were the Golden Era to me. They both lived through it, were greatly influenced by it and, pretty much, still abided its culture and values (the ones they experienced anyway) when I was growing up.

I lived in two worlds as a kid: at school and with friends, it was the 1970s / at home and with my family, it was a blend of the '30s - pre-cultural-change '60s. As my family died off, that Golden Era world went with them except for what I carried in my head, at least until finding Fedora Lounge where I could share my thoughts, impressions and experiences of that time with others here.

But that world - that odd, insular world of my dad and grandmother - is a "vintage thing -" a living breathing embodiment of the Golden Era - that is gone forever from my life.

Except for a few details, I see similarities between our immediate family histories.

I know nothing of the history of my "greats", and very little about my grandparents because they were all gone long before I entered the picture. But Mom and Dad were born in 1915 and 1913, respectively, so they were my personal example of the Golden Era. Their separate lives led them to the Los Angeles area of southern California where they met, fell in love, got married, bought a house in the suburbs, and started a family. So, having been born in 1961, I also grew up with that "blend" of the outside world of the 1960s and 70s, and the values of the Golden Era at home. Different times and different values, to be sure, but I never perceived them as being "at odds" with each other--it was simply a matter of assessing those values and choosing to adopt or reject them as I saw fit. Fortunately, the needle on my personal moral compass was guided by Mom's and Dad's example, so whether my decisions in life were ultimately proven right or wrong the foundation of those choices was to "do the right thing" regardless of the circumstances.

 

[LizzieMaine]

My family was pretty closely packed -- my maternal great-grandparents settled in a particular neighborhood when they landed in this country around the turn of the century, and they stayed there for the rest of their lives. My grandfather remained on the same block for his entire life -- he died two houses down the street from the house he was born in. My mother has lived on that street for all but about four years of her life. I lived on that street from the time I was four years old to twenty-five, with the exception of a six-month interval on the West Coast when I was twenty. My uncle and his family also lived on that street, and his widow only just moved off last year. My mother still lives there, and will die there. She's only been out of Maine four times in her eighty years. She has never flown or taken a train. And she has no plans to.

So the physical world I grew up in was pretty small, and there was very little in the way of encouragement to move beyond it. But it was a very collectivised neighborhood -- everybody took care of everybody else's kids, and there was little sense of territorialism or family privacy. There was no idealization of "the nuclear family" because everybody knew someone in their family who had traits which diverged from the supposed ideal. My father tried to suffocate me when I was three, so I wasn't sorry to see my mother throw him out.

Other than staying away from "those drunken O'Briens" on the other side of the block we basically roamed as we pleased and did what we wanted within the scope of the neighborhood. Nobody yelled at us to stay out of their dooryards or get off their property. If we saw something interesting in a garage and the door happened to be open we thought nothing of going in for a closer look no matter whose it was. Adults paid us little attention because they were too busy working to monitor us all that much, unless they saw us about to mess with a burning incinerator or lock someone in an abandoned refrigerator.

This meant a lot of physical freedom, but also not a lot in the way of personal guidance. I received no moral guidance whatever from my mother -- given the abuse she took from my father, she spent the entire decade of the 1960s in a state of physical and mental shock. My father was incapable of giving any moral guidance, as he was a man of no morality whatever. My grandmother and I were very close, and she influenced me in a lot of practical ways, but she didn't give me a lot of moral guidance other than cracking me so hard across the face that I nearly fell over when she heard me say the "n-word" at the age of about seven, and warning me that all alcoholic beverages would lead the imbiber to an early grave -- her father had died drunk in a gutter, so she had reason to feel this way. And my grandfather worked long hours at the gas station, leaving little time for moral influence other than declaring the eternal stupidity of whoever happened to be managing the Red Sox at the moment.

My physical environment was basically that of the 1940s. I grew up in an old house full of old, worn things because nobody in our family believed in, or could have afforded to partake of, fashion or consumerism. Those things were for other people, not us. I was never taught this, I merely absorbed it as the normal way. When I discovered the writings of Vance Packard as a teenager they only reaffirmed what I'd been marinated in since childhood.

But don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that the single greatest moral influence on my life was Mister Rogers. I began watching him at the age of four, and whatever there is in me that's good came from the lessons he taught about how to treat people, animals, and the world around me. I had a chance recently to rewatch in bulk many of his shows from 1967-68, and I was astounded by how much of it I had internalized without even realizing, or even consciously remembering. Thank god my mother didn't park me in front of the TV while "Firing Line" was on.

 

[Fading Fast]

...But don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that the single greatest moral influence on my life was Mister Rogers. I began watching him at the age of four, and whatever there is in me that's good came from the lessons he taught about how to treat people, animals, and the world around me. I had a chance recently to rewatch in bulk many of his shows from 1967-68, and I was astounded by how much of it I had internalized without even realizing, or even consciously remembering. Thank god my mother didn't park me in front of the TV while "Firing Line" was on.

Coming from a not-religious-at-all family with a hostile-to-all-religions dad, while I learned basic morality - don't steal, cheat, lie / respect other people's property / treat others as you want to be treated / it's none of your business / etc. - from my parents and grandmother, most (not all) of that was taught as core tenets and not the result of an over-arching philosophy or religion. Never stated this way from my not philosophical or formally educated dad, but it was all A=A or, on his grumpier days (meaning most days), it was Ring Lardner edification: "shut up, he explained."

Then, I discovered "The Big Valley" (and many contemporary and subsequent TV shows) that had a Christianity-mixed-with-modern-'60s-liberalism ideology to it. It didn't convert me, but it opened my eyes to the idea of a "larger" philosophy behind morality and pushed me on the first steps of a search to find a philosophical system that worked for me.

And while, as noted, "The Big Valley" didn't convert me, it (1) gave me a life-long respect for Christianity and (2) caused me (to the constant consternation of my girlfriend) to be able to reduce most of life's moral conundrums down to one or another episode of "The Big Valley."

 

[tonyb]

I learned at an early age that dispensers of wisdom were mostly dispensing BS.

It was in later years that I gained something akin to insight into what motivated those habitual BS dispensers — my lying, cheating, often drunk and given to violence (that’s not the worst of it) stepfather among them.

Such characters are fundamentally weak and are in search of something to give themselves a sense of being bigger than they fear themselves to be. They crave something to latch onto, something on which to build an identity. So they adopt an almost religious, absolutist view of the world and their place on it. They often memorize quotations (or close paraphrases) from their favorite “philosophers” that they apparently believe succinctly state profound truths about the human condition but which are more accurately described as thought-terminating cliches. It’s as if saying something, repeatedly, somehow makes it so.

If the aim is for a lesson to stick, give me a good example over all the world’s hifalutin philosophizing, please. Talk is cheap. Show up when you say you will. Don’t lie. Don’t expect people to be better than you are willing to be yourself. Mr. Rogers would agree, I think.

 

[LizzieMaine]

"Sometimes people are good.
And they do just what they should.
But the very same people who are good sometimes
Are the very same people who are bad sometimes.
It's funny -- but it's true.
Isn't it the same for me and you."
-- Mister Rogers, 1967.

 

[Zombie_61]

...But don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that the single greatest moral influence on my life was Mister Rogers. I began watching him at the age of four, and whatever there is in me that's good came from the lessons he taught about how to treat people, animals, and the world around me. I had a chance recently to rewatch in bulk many of his shows from 1967-68, and I was astounded by how much of it I had internalized without even realizing, or even consciously remembering...

Coming from a not-religious-at-all family with a hostile-to-all-religions dad, while I learned basic morality - don't steal, cheat, lie / respect other people's property / treat others as you want to be treated / it's none of your business / etc. - from my parents and grandmother, most (not all) of that was taught as core tenets and not the result of an over-arching philosophy or religion...Then, I discovered "The Big Valley" (and many contemporary and subsequent TV shows) that had a Christianity-mixed-with-modern-'60s-liberalism ideology to it. It didn't convert me, but it opened my eyes to the idea of a "larger" philosophy behind morality and pushed me on the first steps of a search to find a philosophical system that worked for me...

People can belittle the educational values and virtues of television and movies as much as they like, but I'm always fascinated when someone talks about how a particular TV show or movie influenced them in a positive manner. For me that started with a little sci-fi show called Star Trek, and specifically with Mr. Spock. Even though I was only five years old when the show premiered, Spock impressed upon me the values of intelligence and knowledge. As a result I learned as much as I could whenever I could because you never know when that seemingly insignificant bit of information might come in handy. That "philosophy" certainly served me well at my last place of employment, where I kept working while many of my co-workers were laid off simply because I knew and could do things they didn't/couldn't.

Speaking of religion, Mom was Catholic and Dad was Lutheran, so I grew up learning those Christian values. Some of them took hold, but even as a child I questioned certain aspects of what I was told and what I had read. Then Kung Fu premiered in 1972, and it was a real eye-opener for me. The Buddhist/Taoist philosophies expressed in the show may or may not have been authentic, but it was the first time I had been introduced to anything other than the Christian dogma that I had grown up learning. It resonated with me considerably more than most of those Christian teachings, and taught me wisdom exists in many forms.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I think education begins with a willingness to open yourself to ideas outside the ones you picked up at home -- whether those ideas come in via television, via personal contact, or via the classroom is really irrelevant. The important thing is to understand there are people who don't see things exactly as you do, but that doesn't make them your enemy.

As for religion, I had six years of Methodist Sunday School growing up, but I didn't really pick up a lot of education from it -- it was just something to get me out of the house on Sunday morning. I was -- and still am -- interested in the Bible as a document, but there was very little actual Bible study to be had in Sunday School, which eventually led me to quit. I did, however, become interested in the Methodist Social Creed, and found that more useful than any of the "religious" stuff that was discussed. especially the original version from the 1910s, before it was watered down for fear of antagonizing red-baiters. It's very discouraging to me that most of the prominent Methodists in public life today stand opposed to everything that Creed represents, even in its current gelded form. So much for "church" as a positive social force.

These days I don't consider "religion" to be Christian at all. Christianity is how you treat your neighbor, regardless of who that neighbor is or where he or she comes from or what he or she does to you. I don't see it as having anything whatever to do with the dogma you preach or the selective prooftexts you quote or even whatever book you wave around without opening it. I have no doubt at all that Christ himself would be the first to reject most of what's preached and taught in his name today by those who loudly proclaim themselves to be "Christians."

 

[tonyb]

KGNU, a “community” radio station out of Boulder, plays lectures by Alan Watts one morning per week.

Watts, who was among the early popularizers of “Eastern” philosophy in the U.S., croaked in 1973 at age 58. If not for KGNU, I would likely have gone to my own grave without knowing the first thing about him.

I wouldn’t have been any the worse for that. I’ve read a bit about Zen, and I find much worthwhile in it. But that Watts character was such a smug gasbag, such a haughty, omniscient, condescending jerk that I am stunned that any serious person would pay him any mind at all. He was practically a caricature of the beard-stroking, pipe-smoking bohemian pseudo sage of the sort found in every college town coffeehouse throughout the 1960s. That Zen survives in the U.S. would seem more despite Watts than because of him. I can’t handle more than a couple-three minutes of his shtick.

 

[3fingers]

^^^ It's Boulder. 'Nuff said.

 

[tonyb]

^^^ It's Boulder. 'Nuff said.

I like Boulder, and I am far likelier to find kindred spirits there than in, say, Colorado Springs.

But like so many of those “most livable” locales, with universities and spectacular natural settings and clean industries and hi-tech and biotech firms, where you can’t swing a cat without hitting half a dozen Ph.D’s and at least that many new-money millionaires, I just plain can’t afford to live there. A friend has a house there he bought for, like, 80 grand 30 years ago, which is appraised at 1.5 million now.

I avoid using the terms “liberal” and “conservative,” for a couple of very good reasons, in my view. But Boulder is chock full of what many call the former. Much like the relative newcomers to Seattle, where I lived in and about for 46 years, many in Boulder know the struggles of the poor and the working classes only secondhand, and only in the abstract. I thoroughly angered many a do-gooder in Seattle when I made the self-congratulatory “urban pioneers” the targets of my editorial jabs. They didn’t wish to hear they were pricing out the very “diversity” they professed to cherish.

 

[Zombie_61]

I think education begins with a willingness to open yourself to ideas outside the ones you picked up at home -- whether those ideas come in via television, via personal contact, or via the classroom is really irrelevant. The important thing is to understand there are people who don't see things exactly as you do, but that doesn't make them your enemy...

I absolutely agree with both. Wisdom is wisdom regardless of whether the source is an ancient text, a throwaway line from a movie or TV show, or something scrawled on a cocktail napkin. As long as it has meaning to me/you/anyone and can be put to use in a positive way, the source is unimportant. And I often learn more from people who don't see things as I do, because they bring ideas and concepts to the discussion that I hadn't considered. In the end we still might not see eye-to-eye, but any new information gives me a better understanding of the issue.

 

[ChiTownScion]

I think education begins with a willingness to open yourself to ideas outside the ones you picked up at home -- whether those ideas come in via television, via personal contact, or via the classroom is really irrelevant. The important thing is to understand there are people who don't see things exactly as you do, but that doesn't make them your enemy.

As for religion, I had six years of Methodist Sunday School growing up, but I didn't really pick up a lot of education from it -- it was just something to get me out of the house on Sunday morning. I was -- and still am -- interested in the Bible as a document, but there was very little actual Bible study to be had in Sunday School, which eventually led me to quit. I did, however, become interested in the Methodist Social Creed, and found that more useful than any of the "religious" stuff that was discussed. especially the original version from the 1910s, before it was watered down for fear of antagonizing red-baiters. It's very discouraging to me that most of the prominent Methodists in public life today stand opposed to everything that Creed represents, even in its current gelded form. So much for "church" as a positive social force.

These days I don't consider "religion" to be Christian at all. Christianity is how you treat your neighbor, regardless of who that neighbor is or where he or she comes from or what he or she does to you. I don't see it as having anything whatever to do with the dogma you preach or the selective prooftexts you quote or even whatever book you wave around without opening it. I have no doubt at all that Christ himself would be the first to reject most of what's preached and taught in his name today by those who loudly proclaim themselves to be "Christians."

"If you see a man who sings too loud on Saturday night, and prays too loud on Sunday morning, go home and lock your smokehouse. "

Harry S. Truman, self- professed "Footloose Baptist"

 

[3fingers]

"If you see a man who sings too loud on Saturday night, and prays too loud on Sunday morning, go home and lock your smokehouse. "

Harry S. Truman, self- professed "Footloose Baptist"

An old favorite from Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others.
"The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons."

 

[3fingers]

. The important thing is to understand there are people who don't see things exactly as you do, but that doesn't make them your enemy.

My youngest son and I had this very discussion tonight.
I see this as the greatest hindrance to ever making any meaningful progress in any area of disagreement. I don't know exactly when the seed was planted that if we don't agree on something than I am left no option except to hate you. This is true in politics and in other areas of our lives. It isn't new by any means but in the last 20 years or so it has gotten worse.

 

[tonyb]

Sometimes “the way people see things” presents a real threat to the rest of us. So yeah, such characters are my enemy, and it’s my duty to make that known. Silence in the face of toxic philosophies is cowardice.

 

[scottyrocks]

Sometimes “the way people see things” presents a real threat to the rest of us. So yeah, such characters are my enemy, and it’s my duty to make that known. Silence in the face of toxic philosophies is cowardice.

Unless I am misunderstanding you, I used to feel the same way. Then, during the ensuing argument, I came to feel that I was banging my head against a wall, so I don't bother anymore. No one is changing anyone's mind.

 

[tonyb]

Unless I am misunderstanding you, I used to feel the same way. Then, during the ensuing argument, I came to feel that I was banging my head against a wall, so I don't bother anymore. No one is changing anyone's mind.

You are misunderstanding me.

I suffer no illusions that I will change the minds (such as they are) of the doctrinaire, but I do push back.

So no, I don’t expect to win over the true believers, for their beliefs are not subject to reason. Their very sense of themselves is wrapped up in their “philosophy.”

Those who promote a toxic vision of how humans ought relate to one another, those who make a civic virtue of simple greed, are indeed my enemy, at least in that regard.

May the god of your choice help us all should they prevail. But I’m not relying on such divine intervention.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I look at it this way -- the people, the individuals, are less my enemy than the ideas are. There comes a time when it becomes necessary to take action against harmful ideas -- and that inevitably means taking action against people -- but even then I can't accept the idea that you have to fundamentally hate those people as individuals in order to take that action

That doesn't mean being artificially lovey-dovey in a hypocrtical way. There are a great many people in the world that I dislike, some of them rather intensely -- a few for personal reasons, some because they're so contrary to human decency in what they do that human decency demands that any decent human being oppose them -- and I'm not going pretend that I don't intensely disilke them for what they believe and do. But I don't *hate* them to the point of denying their own right to human dignity -- because I just don't think I have a right to do that.

 

[tonyb]

Beware the wolf in sheep’s clothing, and especially the wolf who doesn’t know he’s a wolf, even as he’s lunching on a stray lamb.

Of late I’ve noticed an increasing tendency to expect others to be finer people than they are willing to be themselves. In their minds, apparently, the righteousness of the cause gives license to shabby behavior in its promotion. It’s distressing to see those with whom I share similar goals take such a tack, not only because it often harms the innocent, but because it is ultimately counterproductive.