Vintage Things That Have Disappeared In Your Lifetime?

[Inkstainedwretch]

Quite a few candy bars that were common when I was young have disappeared. Some of my favorites were the Clark bar, similar to a Butterfinger but with a chewier center. The Butternut bar (Hollywood Candy Co.) was a favorite. A simple chocolate, peanut and caramel bar, its chocolate cover had a very distinctive flavor, similar to the Swedish Marabou. I don't think I've seen one since the 60s. The Mars bar is gone. This is not the British Mars bar, which is sold here as the Milky Way, but a chocolate-covered nougat and almond bar. I don't remember when it vanished. I know there are many others but those three stand out in my memory.

 

[Bertie.Wooster]

Carbonated Water+Syrup+ice=Classic Ice-cream soda, those are gone.....

 

[Stormy]

In education, great teaching has been replaced by common core techniques, strategies, and acronyms for the kids so they won't have to think too hard. All these measures just seem to confuse the kids more and make things far more difficult and time consuming for their teachers. Twenty years later, the kids won't even remember the strategies. They will remember good teachers.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I had one great teacher in my entire education -- one, and only one. Mrs. Alden in the third grade, who would read aloud to us every afternoon for half an hour after recess, bringing each book to life with all the skill of an accomplished radio actress. I don't believe she ever was one, but she could have been. She was an elderly woman with a "normal school" education, and I doubt she knew anything about theoretical education -- but she certainly knew how to transfix the attention of a room full of eight-year-olds.

 

[Trenchfriend]

My best teacher at secondary-school was our female German-teacher (German-grammar/German-expression/German-literature and history-lessons), we got the whole time from 5th to 10th grade. She was the only intellectual capacity and I could describe her as a female version of Cpt. Picard, teaching the philosophical way.

 

[kaiser]

I had one great teacher in my entire education -- one, and only one. Mrs. Alden in the third grade, who would read aloud to us every afternoon for half an hour after recess, bringing each book to life with all the skill of an accomplished radio actress. I don't believe she ever was one, but she could have been. She was an elderly woman with a "normal school" education, and I doubt she knew anything about theoretical education -- but she certainly knew how to transfix the attention of a room full of eight-year-olds.

4th grade for me, Mrs. Cass was my teacher, and she was cut of the same cloth.

 

[ChiTownScion]

My undergrad Constitutional Law prof and pre- law advisor, Charles A. Hollister. Prior to him there were some who were good, even quite good, teachers, instructors, profs. But no one before or after him was able to really kindle that fire inside of me, the desire to not only succeed or even excel, but to surpass all expectations.

He was a cantankerous old man, a cross between my concepts of Harry Truman and Harvard's Edward "Bull" Warren : he'd pull out his wallet and declare, "I'm a Marxist! MONEY makes the world go 'round!!" And when one pupil retorted that she believed that love made the world go 'round, be berated her for a full 5 minutes as to her gullibility (They became fast friends, of course.). He could ream you in class for not having prepared a case, and then joke about it afterward with you. Cajoling, goading, berating, teasing, joking- whatever it took to motivate a student: we all wanted to do our best for him in that class.

Sadly, he died in my second year of law school. Had he lived, he would have had first crack at tickets for my graduation from law school and my swearing in as a member of the bar: priority over mother, father, or girlfriend. Some people inspire you long after the last class session. He's done it for the past 40 years.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Metal ice cube trays seem to be pretty much extinct -- and may even be unrecognizable to those born after about 1975. The lever-action type familiar to Boomers was actually a postwar innovation -- it wasn't introduced until 1952 -- but the plain type you had to flex or bang on the table edge to release the ice goes back to the 1920s.

I prefer metal-tray cubes to the kind that come from the current silicone trays -- that tin-can flavor the tray imparted to the cubes was very crisp and refreshing.

 

[52Styleline]

Vermont Country Store

 

[Fading Fast]

Vermont Country Store
View attachment 61279

That odd / fun / quirky / attic-like store has its moments and is always worth a look see when the catalogue drops in.

Funny story - several years ago, my girlfriend was lamenting the disappearance of real tinsel - tinsel made of metal with heft - versus the new "fly-away" synthetic stuff. When she saw a notice from Vermont Country Store asking for product suggestions, she wrote to it about the old-style tinsel.

Not only did the company add it to its Christmas catalogue, but it obliquely referenced her request in its catalogue write-up of the tinsel (which was old-school metal and heavy) lifting, if memory serves, a line about the "heft and feel" of old tinsel right out of her letter.

We, of course, bought a ridiculous number of packages of it both to stockpile and to say thank you to VCS.

 

[2jakes]

When I was a kid during the holiday season.
No one in the neighborhood decorated their entire
yard, or roof with lights, plastic snowmen or reindeers.

It was just a simple decor by the front window.
First & last time the old man decorated the window.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Used to be in Maine those who did outdoor holiday lighting left it up all year round, and only plugged it in in December. This was especially true of neighborhood grocery stores, where it was the thing to have a string of colored lights around the Narragansett Beer sign outside.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

When I was a kid in Beaumont, TX in the mid-50s it was a Christmastime ritual to drive around the neighborhood of the rice-and-cotton barons'mansions to see their Christmas displays. Beaumont was a crummy industrial town when I lived there, surrounded by oil refineries, but like so many Gilded Age towns it still had a neighborhood that testified to the 19th century days of the barons.

 

[Fading Fast]

Growing up, we lived near a river that, at one point (atypically), the bank was really high (more a Maine-like, high-up rocky cliff) and a house on top of it put up a Christmas light display in the form of a train with several cars.

It must have been ten or more feet high as you could see it from a great distance - it was very impressive. As a kid, it was one of the signs that Christmas was here when I saw that train.

Away from that, our very "Wonder Years" type of town didn't have any outstanding light displays that I remember.

 

[dnjan]

Not really vintage, but in the Christmas decoration theme:

A house we would pass while walking to church would put up a large Santa on their fence every year.
When very small (25 years ago), our son would gleefully point and say "Ho! Ho! Ho!"
And the first time we would walk past after Christmas when the Santa had been taken down, our son would point and say "Ho Ho Ho aw gone."

Of course now, the house has been knocked down and a mansion has been built in its place ...

 

[LizzieMaine]

The big municipal thing here was always to string colored lights along the telephone wires -- not bourgeois "tasteful white lights," but loud, gaudy proletarian C-9 Mazda lights in red, green, blue, and yellow.

Photo taken December 4, 1955. People would drive into town from miles away to gape at the spectacle.

This all ended in the early 1970s when the pole-mounted telephone lines were taken down and relocated to underground conduits. We still do some downtown decoration, but most of it is prissy and precious and makes me gag. The only thing that doesn't is the fifty-foot high fake Christmas tree made out of stacked lobster traps, topped by a five-foot-high fiberglass lobster holding up a giant red star. Now that's proletarian.

 

[Fading Fast]

⇧ I never really thought of Christmas light colors as having a political view as my girlfriend's - meaningfully upscaled from my family - family likes colored lights on their trees (the ones with the reflectors at their base) where as I've always thought the white ones were prettier. That said, it's all about time and place and sometimes I like the colored lights and sometimes the white - but I'm not at all wishy washy in my politics, just my Christmas lights.

That is a beautiful picture of your downtown.

 

[David Conwill]

it was the thing to have a string of colored lights around the Narragansett Beer sign outside.

Well, I know how I'm decorating next Christmas!

 

[LizzieMaine]

⇧ I never really thought of Christmas light colors as having a political view as my girlfriend's - meaningfully upscaled from my family - family likes colored lights on their trees (the ones with the reflectors at their base) where as I've always thought the white ones were prettier. That said, it's all about time and place and sometimes I like the colored lights and sometimes the white - but I'm not at all wishy washy in my politics, just my Christmas lights.

That is a beautiful picture of your downtown.

The theatre is just across the street from the Crie Hardware building. That building today is occupied by a trendy restaurant and a shop that sells $600 dresses made from $8 worth of fabric. That's the way things are now, which is why the incongruity of the Glorious People's Lobster Trap Tree makes me laff and laff.

Compare:

("Joe The Worker," atop the Soviet Pavillion, 1939 New York World's Fair.)

 

[Fading Fast]

The theatre is just across the street from the Crie Hardware building. That building today is occupied by a trendy restaurant and a shop that sells $600 dresses made from $8 worth of fabric. That's the way things are now, which is why the incongruity of the Glorious People's Lobster Trap Tree makes me laff and laff.

Compare:

("Joe The Worker," atop the Soviet Pavillion, 1939 New York World's Fair.)

A lot of the same crazy juxtaposition is happening all over this city as older normal-people neighborhoods are gentrified. It is, very slowly, happening to ours - at least, if it happens, our coop will be worth more (in theory).

Like your dresses, in our neighborhood you can now get a $1.50 cup of coffee or a $4.50 one: neither Starbucks, both decent and similar tasting - but the $4.50 one is in a hip looking place (exposed brick, natural wood tables, with young, good-looking people with tattoos serving you, etc.) and the $1.50 one is in a old deli (linoleum floor, overstuffed shelves and displays with random stuff, a metal counter of no design and cranky older men and "motherly" looking women serving you). Blind taste test - I doubt one in ten could guess which is which.

While not my political bent, Soviet art from the era of "Joe the Worker" is fantastic - I love its boldness and heroic vibe.