whats the closest thing to Traveling back in Time? to get a feel of times past?

[vitanola]

Oh, wow!
Wow! What a beauty! Those machines don't grow on trees, do they?

This must be the month for it. I had to pass up a full CCCA Classic car, a beautifully restored 1927 Franklin, at a price that I could just afford, for I need to buy stock for the holiday season.

 

[MikeKardec]

Prosaic @ full throttle !

So I used the old manual push lawn-mower.
My “PF” flyers made it tolerable !

A wonderful quote from Ray Bradbury's, The Sound of Summer, Running:

"Somehow the people who made tennis shoes knew what boys needed and wanted. They put marshmallows and coiled springs in the soles and they wove the rest out of grasses bleached and fired in the wilderness. Somewhere deep in the soft loam of the shoes the thin hard sinews of the buck deer were hidden. The people that made the shoes must have watched a lot of winds blow the trees and a lot of rivers going down to the lakes. Whatever it was, it was in the shoes, and it was summer."

Ray wrote a lot of stuff that would fill the bill of traveling back in time, for a guy know for his Science Fiction he was very nostalgic.

On dealing with heat, when I was a kid in the 1960s I spent a lot of time on a citrus and date farm my mother's family owned in the area southeast of Palm Springs. Needless to say it could be very hot. My mother would put me to sleep laying on a damp towel under a fan. it worked pretty well and it's a trick I've used occasionally when stuck somewhere without air con.

Many homes had swamp coolers in that area in those days but now the humidity (I'm guessing it's from all the irrigation and golf courses and such) is so high that the swamp coolers don't really work very well. I got under on in SE Utah a few years ago and was surprised how effective it was when the air is dry.

 

[Stanley Doble]

I don't live in a hot climate but occasionally we get 90+ days in summer. On hot nights I take a tip from Benjamin Franklin and take a cold shower before bed (he recommended a swim) which cools the blood and allows me to sleep more comfortably.

 

[2jakes]

A wonderful quote from Ray Bradbury's, The Sound of Summer, Running:

"Somehow the people who made tennis shoes knew what boys needed and wanted. They put marshmallows and coiled springs in the soles and they wove the rest out of grasses bleached and fired in the wilderness. Somewhere deep in the soft loam of the shoes the thin hard sinews of the buck deer were hidden. The people that made the shoes must have watched a lot of winds blow the trees and a lot of rivers going down to the lakes. Whatever it was, it was in the shoes, and it was summer."

Ray wrote a lot of stuff that would fill the bill of traveling back in time, for a guy know for his Science Fiction he was very nostalgic.

On dealing with heat, when I was a kid in the 1960s I spent a lot of time on a citrus and date farm my mother's family owned in the area southeast of Palm Springs. Needless to say it could be very hot. My mother would put me to sleep laying on a damp towel under a fan. it worked pretty well and it's a trick I've used occasionally when stuck somewhere without air con.

Many homes had swamp coolers in that area in those days but now the humidity (I'm guessing it's from all the irrigation and golf courses and such) is so high that the swamp coolers don't really work very well. I got under on in SE Utah a few years ago and was surprised how effective it was when the air is dry.

Thank You !

I’ve heard of the name, but never took the time. It’s a beautiful Sunday & I’m heading to the book store
& see if I can find a copy. This is an old book shop that has 1000s of old books.

 

[tropicalbob]

I used to live directly across the street from the 69th Street Pier in Brooklyn, N.Y. At the time I had furnished my apartment, which was in a building erected in the late 1930's, entirely from items that had belonged to my grandmother and which were all decades old. One night a heavy fog rolled in over the harbor and I awoke to the sound of foghorns off in the distance. My first thought was that I was hearing a cathedral organ. Then I sat up and looked around and had the uncanny experience that I really was back in the 1930's. Never forgot it.

 

[2jakes]

First time in Chicago & I felt like I went back in time.

There are so many nice old buildings. I’m glad they have been preserved.

You might see this....

But I put on my Walter Mitty specs & this is what I feel.

 

[Juanito]

Visit any area with a high concentration of Mennonites or Hutterites. I grew up in an area that was predominantly Mennonite (very heavily) with a smattering of Hutterites and aside from the cars (they still drive stripped down, solid color base models), neither the area, nor the people have changed one bit in the last 40 years I've known. A few new houses, but stagnant population growth. No cable, no cell phones, no credit cards--cash, checks or monthly accounts at the local store, etc. Talking with my dad, he said it was the same as it was when he was a kid in the 1940's.

 

[MikeKardec]

As a late twenty-something I used to live at Park La Brea a 1940s planned community in central LA. A couple of blocks to the north was the Farmers Market and Fairfax District, neither of which had changed in many years and to the south was the Miracle Mile and Museum row ... also fairly stable throughout my life up until then and moderately stable since the 1930s. It was amazing waking up the first morning and hearing the doves cooing (these doves only live is a certain part of LA), a sound I hadn't heard since childhood.

I was back a month or so ago to hear a lecture on Egyptian mummies and was amazed at how similar it felt even though the neighborhood had filled in and modernized a bit. Park La Brea is now gated but it still is about 160 acres of 1940s architecture and even though the Farmer's Market has been surrounded by a weird theme park like shopping area called "The Grove" (should I mention there isn't a tree in sight) once you get inside the walls of the old Farmer's Market it is still LA's kazbah, a place of narrow alleys and such a myriad of booths that even an adult can get lost there just as I did as a kid.

From the Miracle Mile to the Los Angeles County Art Museum to the Tar Pits, Park La Brea, Pan Pacific Park the Farmer's Market, and the Fairfax District there is still a lot of consistency. In a town known for it's aggressive remodeling, that's pretty good. When I lived there in the 1990s I was surrounded by people and places that had never left the past behind and even today there's more than echoes of what it was once like 50 to 80 years ago.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

Years ago I toured a 15th century house in Glasgow, Scotland called "Provand's Lordship." Like most Scottish great houses it was rather small and austere. At first it was a typical tour of an old house until I stepped alone into one of the rooms fronting on a cobblestoned street and at that moment A horsedrawn wagon passed below the window, out of my sight, but the sound of the clopping hooves and the ironbound tires of the wagon sent me right into a historical fugue state. I might have been standing by that window any time from Tudor to Victorian days, the sense of stepping back in time was so intense.

 

[MikeKardec]

Wow! What a magical mystery tour you had. Very cool.

 

[2jakes]

Wow! What a magical mystery tour you had. Very cool.

Thanks, it was quite an experience !

Btw, is the Chinese Grauman’s theater still active as far as showing movies ?

I saw the original Star Wars there.

The lady who played the Princess Leia, did a promo at the Broadway Store.
But she didn’t appear too eager to be there.


On my day off, I went to the Universal Studios for pocket money. If you went early, the
film crew would hire folks for crowd scenes.

One I recall was "Paradise Alley” with Stallone as the main character.

He was sitting in a barber chair having make-up put on.
I asked the make-up lady afterwards, why, if this was supposed to take place in the 1940s,
was his hair long. Since that was not the style for men back then.

She replied in a very NewYorkish manner....
“Listen sweetie...you want to tell him that...then be my guest...go for it !

I didn’t...but found out that they made adjustments in the script to allow for it !

 

[MikeKardec]

Thanks, it was quite an experience !

Btw, is the Chinese Grauman’s theater still active as far as showing movies ?

I saw the original Star Wars there.

The lady who played the Princess Leia, did a promo at the Broadway Store.
But she didn’t appear too eager to be there.


On my day off, I went to the Universal Studios for pocket money. If you went early, the
film crew would hire folks for crowd scenes.

One I recall was "Paradise Alley” with Stallone as the main character.

He was sitting in a barber chair having make-up put on.
I asked the make-up lady afterwards, why, if this was supposed to take place in the 1940s,
was his hair long. Since that was not the style for men back then.

She replied in a very NewYorkish manner....
“Listen sweetie...you want to tell him that...then be my guest...go for it !

I didn’t...but found out that they made adjustments in the script to allow for it !

The Chinese is still there, usually quite the mob scene it's even more of a tourist attraction that it used to be. I have no idea about Carrie Fisher but stars are rarely comfortable in public, though it's often their job to act that way, people desperately want their attention and usually don't know what to do once they get it. Being drooled over probably gets old pretty quick! It's hysterical Stallone wouldn't cut his hair, as the writer/director of that film you'd think he'd care more ... though we don't know what his next gig was going to be and what he'd need to look like (that's probably giving out a lot more credit than is due but I'm trying to be fair.).

 

[LizzieMaine]

It used to be quite the thing to spot various low-level celebrities around here -- this is a very popular spot for a certain type of media figure. Walter Cronkite used to sail his boat up here every summer, as did Dr. Benjamin Spock. Jonathan Frakes of "Star Trek" and his wife Genie Francis used to have a place a couple towns over from here, and Kirstie Alley owns a house out on one of the islands, where John Travolta has been known to spend a weekend.

Alley is the one celebrity you don't want to approach in public if you spot her here. She's been known to snarl the heads off old lady tourists who ask her for autographs in the grocery store. We locals know to give her a wide berth.

The only celebrity I've ever met -- and I've met a few -- who ever actually impressed me was Eddie Driscoll, the host of a local TV kiddie show on one of the local stations when I was young. Met him in a parking lot when I was eight, and he was one of the nicest people I'd ever talked to.

 

[ChiTownScion]

I think that the closest I have come to time travel were isolated "moments" at certain Civil War reenacting events (and they'd never last more than a few seconds) back when I was active in "the Hobby."

I particularly recall a national event outside of Franklin, TN a few years back. We were camping on land that had been utilized for the same purpose back in 1864 by John Bell Hood's Confederate Army of Tennessee. The first rays of the rising sun were appearing, and all I could see around were the tents of sleeping soldiers and their campfires. The only sounds were the low murmurs and the coughing of those waking up, maybe the snort of a horse in the background. The smoke of the campfires hung like a low cloud. For a few precious seconds I "was there." And then the distant sound of a semi truck on a nearby state highway- and the moment passed.

 

[Stearmen]

I think that the closest I have come to time travel were isolated "moments" at certain Civil War reenacting events (and they'd never last more than a few seconds) back when I was active in "the Hobby."

I particularly recall a national event outside of Franklin, TN a few years back. We were camping on land that had been utilized for the same purpose back in 1864 by John Bell Hood's Confederate Army of Tennessee. The first rays of the rising sun were appearing, and all I could see around were the tents of sleeping soldiers and their campfires. The only sounds were the low murmurs and the coughing of those waking up, maybe the snort of a horse in the background. The smoke of the campfires hung like a low cloud. For a few precious seconds I "was there." And then the distant sound of a semi truck on a nearby state highway- and the moment passed.

I can remember the same thing late at night, on the ramp, the big WWII engines pinging as they cooled down, a Big Band playing Moon Light Serenade in the hanger, lots of people milling around in dress Pinks & Greens. It was magical!

 

[Fading Fast]

I feel time travel in a few ways.

One is when I'm out in nature - in particular up in Maine and am on a part of the coast where you can't see many modern things. For example, at Portland Head Lighthouse, standing outside the lighthouse, looking at the coast and ocean you see the same rock formations from a hundred years ago, based on early photographs. I always think about how someone standing there in the early 1900s was taking in nearly the exact same view and details as I am today - feels very much like time travel to me.

Another example of this is when we hike to the top of a mountain and you come to a clearing where all you see is valleys and mountains with almost no modern buildings, etc., in sight. Again, it feels like a trip back in time to me as I am experiencing something very similar to how it has been experienced for hundreds of years.

Another way is when I wind up in an older section of NYC, in one of the more run-down areas that hasn't been gentrified and I see or go into an old building from +/- a hundred years ago and you can feel what it felt and looked like to someone of that period. I've been in some older tenement building where almost all the original details are still intact - floors, walls, stairs, windows, moldings, radiators and even the gas lights that were converted to electric (probably in the '20s) are still being used. And many of the bathrooms have all the original fixtures. It is an awesome time-travel experience. Just looking at some of these old building (and NYC has so many of them) from the outside, gives me a bit of that feeling.

To a lesser extent, I also get that feeling when I use an old appliance - we have a 1940s Bakelite radio with a very rich of-the-period sound, a warm glowing dial bathed in yellow light and vacuum tubes that take a few minutes to warm up that gives me a feeling of time travel. We also have an old egg cooker from the 1920s that was very modern in its day - whenever we use it, I think about how someone was cooking their eggs this way back in the 1920s. The same goes for an old intercom, old lighter and some old furniture pieces we have - with just a little imagination, they can all take me back in time a bit.

 

[Blackjack]

Staying in a cabin in the Northwoods and fishing on the same lakes you fished on 50 years ago, the visiting Little Bohemia and seeing the room Dillinger was in when it got shot to pieces by the Feds...

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[Trenchfriend]

The smell of sunshined, degassing carbolineum-soaked sleepers on older railroad-tracks.

 

[AvavanBlythe]

In regards to the OP, I've always wanted to try a living history or similar for mid to late 40s. I already do 14C, and I'm slowly working my way into reprints of 40s sewing patterns. I just have no idea where I'd look for my local area. I suppose I feel a bit nervous of the idea too. Medieval tailoring is nothing like vintage tailoring, and I worry about the usual: garb snobs snickering about what isn't period.

 

[PrettySquareGal]

Some more stuff here: http://www.thefedoralounge.com/showthread.php?8799-Temporary-Time-Travel