Today is my 76th birthday. And I’ve been thinking about jobs that used to be, like milkman and TV repairman; things that I used to see all the time when I was a child, like a caboose and newsreels at movies; and things we used to do, like play mumbly peg and float on tire tubes, and I decided to make a used-to-be list.
Good riddance to some of those things, like segregation signs [“White Only”] and, oh yes, polio, a scourge when I was a boy, years before a vaccine wiped it out in the United States. But recalling some of the other things on the list, like running boards on cars and old radio shows, like “The Lone Ranger” and “The Shadow,” makes me a little nostalgic.
I know I’ve forgotten, or just failed to list, lots of things that were part of our lives and now are mostly gone and almost forgotten. Tell me other things you remember and I’ll add them to the list.
Alarm clocks. Oh, there must be some left. But it’s mostly i-phones alarms now.
Ash trays. They were ubiquitous, home, office, restaurants — everywhere.
Banking a fire. That way you didn’t have to start from scratch the next morning.
Barber pole. Until the last few years I wouldn’t even consider getting a haircut anywhere but a barber shop — with a pole out front.
Battleships
Blue laws, restricting business on Sunday
Blue plate specials
Bumpers on cars. When is the last time you saw one car pushing another one to get it started? Used to happen all the time.
Butter churn. I haven’t seen anyone churn milk since I was a boy.
Caboose, carbon paper.
Collect telephone calls, where the person you called paid. The caller asked the operator to “reverse the charges.”
Castor oil. It’s still around, but I don’t think errant children are forced to swallow it as punishment any more.
Chain gangs, inmates wearing chains, cutting grass on roadsides.
Chicken pox, four million cases a years down to a few hundred.
Cinder running tracks, replaced by tracks with synthetic surfaces.
Copyboys. See “Oh, Copyboy?”
Crew cuts
Crinolines
Disposable cameras
“Dixie,” the song. I haven’t heard it played in public in eons.
Draft, which ended in 1973. Big, BIG mistake. If draftees had been fighting, and dying, in Afghanistan that war would not have last almost 17 years — and counting.
Duck tails, a popular hair style in the 1950s.
Dunking for apples
Eight-tract tape cassettes and players
Electric street cars
Elevator operators. Oh, yea. Hard to believe but some elevators had drivers.
Encyclopedias
Extra editions of newspapers, “Extra, extra read all about it…”
Fans, hand held, often with a picture of a painting of Jesus on one side and a funeral home advertisement on the other.
Flash bulbs
Five cent cokes. Or 25 cents a gallon gasoline, for that matter. That’s what I paid for gas in 1960, when I graduated from high school. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $2.12 a gallon now.
Flip phones, going, going, going…..
Flip, also called as slingshot, made with a forked stick, two strips cut from an inner tube, and the tongue of a shoe. Used to shoot rocks at whatever.
Five diget phone numbers. The number at our farm, in the early 1950’s, was 63296.
Football helmet with no face mask. Been there, done that. See Making Boys Into Men.
Fountain pens
Girdles
Hadacol, patent medicine that was supposed to cure high blood pressure, ulcers, strokes, asthma, arthritis, diabetes, pneumonia, anemia, cancer, epilepsy, gall stones, heart trouble, and hay fever. A 12% alcohol content helps sales a lot.
Hair curlers. Oh, I know they’re still around, but not like they used to be, when they were a nightly ritual.
Hand crank starters on cars. Brother Pop drove a car he had to start by hand.
Hoochie Koochie shows at county fairs
Hoola hoop
Hopscotch
House calls by doctors
Mule or horse-drawn plows
Icebox, now known as a refrigerator
Ice picks to chip ice. You can still buy one but in the old days, every home had an ice pick.
Ice plants where you could buy a block of ice
Inner tubes for tires. And when they were just about worn out kids patched them, pumped them up, and took them swimming, in creeks and ponds.
Kodak film
Knickers. I actually owned a pair, back when.
Letters, personal and handwritten
Lye soap, homemade. We washed clothes with lye soap at the farm.
Milkman who delivered to your door. When we moved to Raleigh in 1971 we had a milkman.
Movie cartoons, serials, newsreels
Mumbley peg. You played with a pocket knife, which almost every boy carried.
Newspaper hot type and all that went with it — linotype operators, stone, chase, hell box, pica stick, galley.
Nylon hose, with seams down the back.
Outdoor roller skates. Kids wore the skate “key” on a string around their neck.
Paperboys hawking papers on the street with the sing song chant, “Read all about it! Charlotte boy threatened by the Gaffney strangler…” That was my story, unfortunately. And I’ll tell you about it one of these days.
Paddles [some with holes drilled in them] used to spank naughty school children.
Peg pants, worn by boys with duck tails
Penny vending machines. Brother Dave and I owned some and I’m going to write about them soon.
Phone books
Phone booths
Picking cotton. Machines have taken over that job, too.
Plucking a chicken, after you’ve wrung its neck, or chopped its head off.
Polio
Pot bellied stoves. When I was in the first, second and third grades there was one in my classroom.
Privies. My elementary school in Glencoe, Alabama, had one for the boys, one for the girls.
Push lawn mowers. No motor. They were boy-powered.
Radio shows: “The Long Ranger;” “Dear Margie It’s Murder;” “The Shadow,” and many others.
Records and record players
Red Rover [“Red Rover, Red Rover, send [player’s name] on over!’]
Road maps. They’re still handing them out at state welcome centers, but does anyone use one anymore?
Rolling stores. One came by our farm weekly selling everything from needles and thread to candy and canned goods.
Rotary phones. Before that we had a phone at the farmhouse that hung on the wall. You turned a crank which rung a bell. When the operator answered you gave her the number and she placed the call.
Running boards on cars and trucks
Shaving cup, brush and razor. Razor blades are gone too, of course.
Slips
Smoking cigarettes anywhere and everywhere, restaurant, movie theaters, and hospital waiting rooms, too.
Songs: “I Walk the Line,” “All Shook Up,” “Great Balls of Fire,” “Earth Angel” and scores more.
Stamps that you had to lick
Steam locomotives, coal fired, puffing smoke and pulling trains
Straight razors and razor straps barbers used to sharpen razors
Switchboard operators
Switching children, whipping them with a branch from a bush. I heard a woman tell her child, “I’m gonna cut the blood out of you!” meaning, I’m going to switch your bare legs so hard specks of blood will pop out.
Switch blades, in the 50’s a lot of boys carried them.
Taffy pulls
Tax tokens, valued at one-tenth of a cent. Alabama issued them from 1937-48.
Telegrams. We got a congratulatory telegram on our wedding day. Fearing bad news, Donna would not open it until after we were married.
Telephone party lines. People sometime listened in on each other, for entertainment, I guess.
Teletype machines in newsrooms. They were music to my ears — here’s what they looked and sounded like.
Tomb stones, there are plenty of them around, but not as many new ones as there used to be.
TV repair shops
TV shows: “I’ve Got A Secret,” “The Ed Sullivan Show;” “I love Lucy;” “Playhouse 90.”
Two-bedroom, one-bath houses
Typewriters. I wrote with them for decades, and had a tiny callus on the side of my thumb, from hitting the space bar, to prove it.
Vent windows on cars that you could turn backwards and force air into the car
Videos, video stores
Wash pot, wash board
Wash pot, women built a fire under them to heat the water, and then poked the dirty clothes with an old broom handle. They washed the clothes on a wash board.
Water buckets and dippers. That’s what we used before running water. You filled the bucket from the well, and used a dipper to get a drink.
Water meter readers
“White” and “colored” public drinking fountains and bathrooms
Wood cooking stoves. See “A Warm Memory.”
Wooden vaulting poles
And what’s on the way out now? Brick and mortar stores? Email? Newspapers?
Coming Friday: Good Eye