Vintage Things That Have Disappeared In Your Lifetime?

[tonyb]

I have one, "an Armstrong Quaker Rug," under my kitchen table, printed with a '30s style geometric pattern. It's worn quite well over the decades except for the part under the cat litter box.

Is it glued down, as were most I’ve ever seen?

 

[tonyb]

Linoleum, congolium and the like were replaced by vinyl flooring and subsequently renamed sheet goods in the flooring industry. But for the changing materials' components, it's all the same stuff. A somewhat less expensive means to cover large and high traffic areas. It is easy to clean and maintain. And, for the most part, it looks nice.

I recently replaced the bathroom flooring in my short-term rental with marble tile. (It’s only 45 square feet, so the high-end stuff wasn’t such an extravagance.) Two layers of flooring had to come up first: some peel-and-stick junk the previous owners had installed in their typically amateurish way, and under that some sheet product dating from at least three decades earlier. That original flooring was in better condition than the stuff installed atop it.

I’ve replaced all the flooring on the main floor of this house except for the faux-wood vinyl plank in the kitchen. I’m not crazy about the look of it, but I don’t actively dislike it either. And it’s in good shape so I live with it. And it has the great virtue of being waterproof, which is what you want in a kitchen.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I have one, "an Armstrong Quaker Rug," under my kitchen table, printed with a '30s style geometric pattern It's worn quite well over the decades, except for the part under the cat litter box.

Is it glued down, as were most I’ve ever seen?

Mine's just sitting on top of the tile floor -- it's small, more the size of an area rug than a full-floor model. I bought it rolled up at a secondhand store maybe 30 years ago, and had it out on my porch before I brought it into the kitchen. The parts not exposed to feline byproducts are still nice and shiny, despite no special treatments on my part, which suggests good linoleum is a lot less delicate than people believe.

When I retiled the kitchen floor seven years ago, I did a bit of exploration first -- underneath the cheesy '80s sheet vinyl I was replacing were several layers of linoleum, the oldest being that red-brick-looking pattern everybody has had on their floor at one time or another and which goes back to the mid-'30s. That was attached to the plain wooden floorboards. Usually you can date a linoleum floor by the newspapers underneath it, but none showed up in this case.

Incidentally, the felt backing on a lot of old linoleum contains asbestos. Handle With Care.

 

[tonyb]

...
Incidentally, the felt backing on a lot of old linoleum contains asbestos. Handle With Care.

Yes, indeed it does. Asbestos, and lead, is in many household goods and materials dating from not so long ago.

 

[Haversack]

I inherited a large, (11’ x 16’), Persian carpet from Mashad. It is too big for any of the rooms in my 1910 flat so has been cleaned, rolled, and wrapped for the past 20-odd years. When new, (sometime between 1930 and 1960), it graced the Montecito home office of Kirk Johnson, my grandfather’s employer. I fondly remember playing on it at my grandfather’s when young after he inherited it after Mr Johnson died. (Tracing all the interlinked objects in the pattern with Matchbox cars - each one a different city and the floral vines connecting them the roads). After my grandfather died, my parents had it in their living room in which was little trafficked. When they moved to smaller digs, it came to me. There is still no visible wear and the wool still has the soft, tough feel that my knees still remember after all these years. I am loath to just sell it but would trade it for a similar but smaller rug I could use. (Sort of along the lines of ‘my great-grandfather’s axe’). Until then, it sits up on blocks in the garage.

 

[LostInTyme]

The Encyclopedia

Do you remember going to the library to look up some fact in an encyclopedia? Those books of knowledge (no pun intended) that provided us with a bit of information on just about anything. Then we could write a report about the subject. Sure, sometimes we needed to have further references on the subject, and had to include a bibliography (remember that word?).

Anyway, this piece is about all those encyclopedias. We had a couple of sets in our house. One was really old, being handed down to my father when he was young, and one was new (World Book Encyclopedia, circa 1957). I remember my parents having to make payments on that set. I used them a great deal in junior high, then I started to notice that a few years later, in high school, they were good for old facts but were dated. My parents kept buying yearly updates for a couple of years, but soon stopped.

The news was happening so fast that even the publishers at The World Book couldn't keep up. I think this was the beginning of the end of the encyclopedia idea. Far too much going on in the world and the inability to stay with it all. Sure, the books were great references of what had been the past, but the facts were changing on many things and the information contained began to become irrelevant and/or inaccurate.

The sets of books became the dinasaurs of the twentieth century. Like pianos, no one wanted used encyclopedias. Today, either of these antiques can be had for a dollar if you're of a mind to own one. Something of the past that not many people desire to own.

There probablhy won't be many people who read this piece, written about something that there is little interest in, nor do I expect any commentary. It just fufilled my need to say something about a shared experience.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I still have and use a 1937 edition of the Britannica -- as noted, it's still good for old facts up to a point, but even more it's invaluable in understanding how the people of the 1930s understood the world they lived in. Knowledge is not merely "facts" -- it's as much interpretation of those facts as it is the bare bones of what happened when -- and you can't understand any historical period without knowing not just what people did but what they believed about it. An encyclopedia is a cultural snapshop of the time in which it is produced, just as Wikipedia is less a compendium of accurate information than a cultural melange of what a certain subset of people in 2021 think is important right now.

 

[LostInTyme]

L.M. an astute observation indeed. I often had the same thoughts when reading or re-reading the classics. Dickens, Poe, J.F. Cooper, Homer, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Harper Lee all had different ideas and ideals that can be discerned from their writings.

 

[ChiTownScion]

A printer friend of my parents gifted a 1961 edition of Collier's Encyclopedia to me when I was seven. I'm not exaggerating when I say that, growing up, it was my most consistent companion. Anytime that a TV movie or program would spark interest in some event or person, I'd look up the facts behind what I had viewed on the tube. Articles would lead to other articles, and I'd often stay up well past my bedtime learning history, geography, and literature that was, supposedly, above my age level.

But even when I was seven or eight I'd note that the names of countries changed, independence to colonies was granted, and borders were readjusted. If I was hot on the trail of some gem of interest and the encyclopedia search resulted in a dead end, a trip to the public library was the next step. My childhood friends were of the same mindset- so I saw nothing abnormal about it.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Which brings up another good point. Some people labor under the illusion that "history" is immutable -- that the understanding that they were taught in school as children is *the* history, the "factual" history, and that any understanding that alters or adjusts some aspect of that is some kind of distortion or reinterpretation. It doesn't usually occur to such ones that the version of history they were taught was, itself, "a distortion or reintepretation" of what prior generations were taught, and so on as far back as you want to go. I've accumulated a number of old school textbooks spanning much of the past 150 years, and even the slightest glance at these books confirms that what kids were taught in the 1950s is just as different from what their grandparents were taught in the 1890s as what their grandchildren are being taught in the 2020s.

History isn't a rock. It's a stream.

 

[Zombie_61]

...Do you remember going to the library to look up some fact in an encyclopedia? Those books of knowledge (no pun intended) that provided us with a bit of information on just about anything. Then we could write a report about the subject. Sure, sometimes we needed to have further references on the subject, and had to include a bibliography (remember that word?)...

I haven't thought about it in a long time, but I definitely remember encyclopedias. Our town library was/is a little over three miles from home, so it usually involved bus fare and a longer-than-it-needed-to-be bus ride to the "uptown" area. As such, I'd spend as much time as I could at the library looking up interests that had nothing to do with whatever I needed the encyclopedia for in the first place. In fact, I don't think I've ever once looked through an encyclopedia and remained on target; some other subject always caught my attention as I flipped through the pages, and away my mind wandered.

...Some people labor under the illusion that "history" is immutable -- that the understanding that they were taught in school as children is *the* history, the "factual" history, and that any understanding that alters or adjusts some aspect of that is some kind of distortion or reinterpretation...History isn't a rock. It's a stream.

Depending upon the subject, I'm almost always interested whenever I discover some historical "fact" I'd been taught in school all those years ago has been thrown out completely and re-written/re-interpreted through a different looking glass. Sometimes it's merely a correction of erroneous reporting, other times entire groups having been deliberately omitted because they didn't fit the narrative of the day (Tuskegee Airmen, anyone?). Regardless, I couldn't care less about political agendas or any other reasons for deliberately distorting the truth; give me the facts and let me make up my own mind about the rest.

 

[LostInTyme]

One thing I remember distinctly because I was interested in them, were gangsters. They were conspicuous by their very absence from most research books, ie encyclopedias.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The problem with the Joe Friday approach to history ("just the facts") is that first you've got to decide what the facts are, and from whose perspective what is factual is determined. Many things have been taught as immutable facts that later turned out to be fabrications, and many things thought to be myths have turned out to have a factual foundation. Even "the facts" themselves aren't immutable. We don't even have to go back very far to experience this in our own history -- there are people here on the Lounge of the right age to have been taught a version of post-Civil War Reconstruction that was, in many cases, based on "facts" that were actually myths, legends, propaganda, and out-and-out fabrications. And, at the time, those were events less than a century in the past.

No two people witnessing any event will describe what they saw in identical terms. And all too often "historical facts" are the result of entire generations not being able to agree on what it was that they actually experienced.

 

[Harp]

Harper Lee all had different ideas and ideals that can be discerned from their writings.

Literature, like History is susceptible to chicanery. And literary protagonists distorted, authors pilloried.

Harper Lee for daring to applaud a male; Gustave Flaubert for admonishing a woman.

Time's glory is to calm contending kings,
To unmask falsehood and bring truth to light.
To stamp the seal of time in aged things,
To wake the morn and sentinel the night.

---Shakespeare

 

[Turnip]

An independent, copper wired and self powered telephone system.

 

[LizzieMaine]

An independent, copper wired and self powered telephone system.

Still have one at my house, the same one that I've been using for 25 years, wired to a junction block that appears to date to the mid-1930s. I'll use it until I'm the last one on the line.

 

[BobHufford]

Maybe on the way out. 18-wheelers. Now 14. So many country songs will have to be rewritten.

 

[Woodtroll]

Maybe on the way out. 18-wheelers. Now 14. So many country songs will have to be rewritten.

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Super-singles in this area were once on a surge, but the lack of sidewall stiffness seems to have left them to only a few applications here in the mountains. Still see them a fair bit on long-haul tractors passing through, but I'm not sure what the national trend is?

As far as "fourteen-wheelers", Barbara Mandrell was ahead of the trend with "Tonight My Baby's Coming Home" from 1973:

"Fourteen wheels a whinin' four big headlights shinin'
Him and that semi been away too long"

 

[BobHufford]

Super-singles in this area were once on a surge, but the lack of sidewall stiffness seems to have left them to only a few applications here in the mountains. Still see them a fair bit on long-haul tractors passing through, but I'm not sure what the national trend is?

Good point Regan. Prime is the big carrier here and I can’t recall seeing anything other than the super-singles in their fleet.

 

[Woodtroll]

Good point Regan. Prime is the big carrier here and I can’t recall seeing anything other than the super-singles in their fleet.

Interesting!