Remembering things that we took for granted but are mostly gone now

I'm not sure losing the door-to-door salesmen was a bad thing. I get people coming by still trying to sell me solar and stuff, and it's kind of annoying to have a pushy sales team standing at my door.

It did make me think of this, though:
https://youtu.be/ywibBYucL5U

I watched most of the video and quite frankly it's just the typical sappy nostalgia that I've seen many times in other videos.

Not just the door to door sales people but also the Mormons and Jehovas Witnesses. I'm glad those are gone.

Library on wheels? Wow!

I'm going to one next week that serves our area. I assume that's not a common thing in the US?

In answer to the OP's question... 'common sense'.

I have never seen one in my entire life. Heck, it's been years now since I even stepped inside a public library (not counting going there to vote).

Agreed

I do miss how cars used to look though, both in curves and in colors.

I haven't been inside a libary since colelge.

Look! Kids pretending to be Dave Crockett and playing with guns and fighting indians.

Coca cola and 7 up for babies. Cockroaches racing. Cocaine toothache pill. Whisky toothpaste. Dentist recommended cigarettes and several ads that today's women will find degrading and sexist and that's just in the first 5 minutes.

Really? I'd never have guessed.

"Remembering things that we took for granted but are mostly gone now..."

- Laptops with access panels and easily replaceable batteries.
- Guitar gods.
- My metabolism.

That's the trade-off you end up with when consumers want the thinnest and lightest laptop possible!

As for "guitar gods", who would be the most recent one? I can't think of anyone who came after Eddie Van Halen, Steve Vai or Stevie Ray Vaughn.

Maybe in Florida. They knock on my door at least once a year.

That's this messed up keyboard that sometimes types different things.

I have one of those on my phone.

The mobile library kept coming to our village with little custom; what there was was due to our execrable internet provision. When it was eventually upgraded from 0.4 thingummiies up to the dizzying speed of 50 thingummies, (fibre to cabinet, aerial copper wire to consumer) no-one patronised it for months. It has gone now.
I haven't attended a library for years, what with books being so cheap now in comparison. And a nearby town's bookshop has a most excellent vast selection of aviation related used titles to satisfy my needs with plain paper bags to sneak a tome past my dear wife...."how many books on the Battle of Britain do you need? good grief it only lasted 4 months! You must have at least two books for every day of the duration!".

LOL!!!! Thank you for that very entertaining post BD-123. I really do like your writing style.

Sounds exactly like me!

It's not just the UK where the internet sucks. Our only ISP in "town" ran their line to our neighborhood up a telephone pole then it dangled over the road just high enough so the school bus wouldn't take it out and wrapped it around a tree on the other side of the road. The line then ran down a hill and over a stream, across a 2 acre field that I have to mow and then over the surface of another small road to the line tap our houses are hooked to. When it snowed a tractor with a blade on it plowing the road cut the line. At one point we went without internet from early November to mid-March. It was also our TV provider too, so no TV. Talk about a possum trot holler hillbilly outfit. The kids whined a lot. The wife #%&*$# a lot. I drank a lot.

They have since improved the line immensely and the minimum is "up to" speed is 25mb. We got the "up to" package of 200mb but it rarely gets above 40. Still, its better than the dark ages we lived in. And for that I am thankful.

Going to school in the'50s a bookmobile would come around once a week. Two books per student allowed. At this point in time, we lived in what was countryside. Nothing but farmland between us and the city outskirts and even further to a library.

What the video didn't show was the man who would come around doing knife, scissor and other objects that needed sharpening. There was also a rag collector and the ice man with ice for the fridge which was great in the hot summers.

My neighborhood had a weekly or bi-monthly bookmobile service until the early 80's. It would park for an hour or so in a neighbor's driveway across the street. I also remember the 2 book checkout limit.

I was studying in a public library 2 to 3 times a week after dropping my mom off at the gym, until Coronavirus. I miss the environment as it felt more studious than my kitchen table.

I thought by this time my wife and I would be studying Russian together at the LSU Middleton Library, enjoying nostalgic study dates. But it's still closed (I think) while getting a name change because apparently this Middleton guy once said something racist. Besides, our favorite pizza places off campus are long gone and I'm getting too old to want to go parking afterwards.

You definitely are an anachronism in many ways Mark!

I had to look that one up.

++++++++++

I thought I was losing my mind with Windows 10...

Minimize your browser and anything else you have open, then open two File Explorer Windows. Choose "Show windows side by side" (same as Win2k/XP's "...vertical...") from the taskbar. Your screen should fill with two equal file explorer windows (except that Win10 puts an ugly gap between the windows). If they don't fill the screen, reboot. This command seems to work for about 5 min. after a reboot, then no longer functions properly.

So in the spirit of the thread, and while sitting behind Win10 (for online), I miss a professional competent current version of Windows.

I pumped gas as teenager, had too clean every windshield and ask if they wanted their oil checked.

If I recall correctly, there are a couple of States in the US which still have full-service gas stations. I think New Jersey is one of those.

It was always fun trying to find the new filler location every fall when the new cars came out.

PM, there are some States where you can't pump your own gas.

I found one on my road trip to North Carolina last month. Spruce Pine, NC I think.


Old fashioned pumps, no way to prepay. He didn't check the oil or do the windows though. Still cool.

A great source of wonder, those magnificent and stylish U.S. cars to our young English eyes of the 1950's. Most people didn't have a car, though my father was given one as a disabled War Pensioner. A Ford Anglia, using a cumbersome and often malfunctioning hand operated vacuum clutch. Automatics were unknown over here. As was radios, aircon and even heaters.
I suppose a more recent comparison of the contrast between our two nation's automobiles of that time would be an East German facing a 10 year waiting list for a Trabant, viewing the latest Mercedes model.

Yeah, they were not always easy to find. Remember the ones that were behind the rear licence plate ?

I wish we could get Mercurochrome back. We had a little brown bottle of it for a long time. It had a little dipper/application stick in the handle(not a dropper) as I recall. Instant relief and fast healing. My sister and I used to call it monkey blood.

Remember it well, with its cancer causing agents. Reason for its demise.

And the ones behind the tail light.

I really got into the Davy Crockett stuff when I was about 10 years old. That would have been in 1955. The Walt Disney show was on prime time TV back then and I could hardly wait until they would show a new Adventures of Davy Crockett episode starring Fess Parker. His sidekick was played by Buddy Epsen--an old musical comedy star from the 30's and 40's who went on to play Jed Clampett in the Beverly Hillbillies. Fess Parker also played other characters in several Disney full-length movies such as Ole Yeller and The Great Locomotive Chase.

My coonskin cap was probably made of rabbit fur and it even had a vinyl top with a picture of Davy printed on it. I had both a toy flintlock pistol and musket that shot caps.

Fortunately, I don't have any pictures of me in that stupid coonskin cap, but I do have this one with my first cap gun and holster set when I might have been 4 years old in 1949. My dad got me some little cowboy boots and a pair of denim jeans that were so long that the rolled up cuffs came up to my knees. The little leather jacket was more Fonzie than cowboy, but I didn't care.

Can you imagine parents today buying a 4 year old a toy gun that was plated metal and could probably be mistaken for real?


Cheers

Great stuff FO.

I still have my Davey Crockett Alamo set tucked away in a chest.

Great image that FO! Lil' tough guy...." I know what you're thinking: "Did he fire six caps or only five?" Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I've kinda lost track myself."

'Davey....Davey Crockett! King of the Wild Frontier' was very popular here, along with the little-remembered 'Cisco Kid' and the 'Lone Ranger' of course.
I too had a coonskin hat now I recall.

BD, you jogged my memory. Iirc some cap guns had bullets that you had to put caps in.

I don't recall having a cowboy outfit as such,just toy guns but I did have a Batman outfit my mum made for me. Back in those days mum made a lot of her own dresses so a Batman outfit wouldn't have been too difficult.

What year was that photo taken Chucky? I'm guessing about 1969?

I don't think you'd be far out there Panzer. The van was my dad's work transport. I think it was a Ford Thames.

Mike Fink, King of the River!

I remember when DR's made house calls or at least sent a nurse if you were too sick to go out..

I wonder when the milk man delivering the bottles of milk to homes finally died out? I'm guessing sometime in the late 60's?

This is a bit of a long watch but it perfectly shows what American life was like in 1940. The very idea of door to door car salesmen would be bizarre for most people today. Oh and this was brilliantly riffed by the crew at Mystery Science Theater so enjoy!

I remember going with my dad on his milk runs some Saturdays in the early 60's. Riding through the countryside in a milk truck with the passenger's side door open and no seat belts. Would land him in jail and me in foster care today.

I can remember these.



Palm Dairy milk delivery. The very last day of delivery by horse-drawn milk wagon in 1955. The house was on the west side of Drinkwater Street where the Paris Street bridge is located, in 2015.

The horse would move on to the next house while the milkman was going up to the house. A lot of the houses had cupboards that the milk was put in. There was a door on the inside of the house. In the summer to keep the sun off and in the winter to stop the milk from freezing

Thanks for that photo KK! It was most certainly a different world and era.

Some of you old(er)-timers growing into boyhood had the prettiest girls to gawk at (MM not my favorite of the era, but even crazy looked classy in those days)...




...but you also had to endure Medieval torture...




Lol! Ok, maybe more like this...




...although even the 70's looked like a little shop of horrors compared with today...

Some of my huge crushes from many decades ago,


PIC #1 Ruby Keeler
PIC #2 Marika Rokk
PIC #3 Joan Blondell

Joan Blondell had aged a bit by the time she played the character of Lady Fingers--the dealers for the big final 5 card stud game in "The Cincinnati Kid" from 1965. They even hired a well-known West coast magician and card mechanic to teach her how to deal and look professional.



Still, she was quite popular as a comedic character in a lot of TV sitcoms of the period.

Cheers

I actually had the recording of the song on a .45 RPM record. I got by sending in 50 cents and a label from a Peter Pan peanut butter jar. They were the sponsors of the Wonderful World of Disney. The peanut butter company actually used the Disney Peter Pan movie artwork for the picture of Tinkerbell on the jar at the time. Since they are no longer associated, the character artwork is just generic now.

The Lone Ranger and the Cisco Kid were also favorites of mine. Around the mid 50's my dad ran a barber shop that was attached to the downtown hotel in my town. I was spending the day at my dad's shop and at some point he grabbed me and took me in to the hotel lobby to meet someone. To my surprise, it was the actor who played the Cisco Kid--Duncan Renaldo. He was wearing a business suit but was still sitting at a table in the lobby signing autographed pictures for anyone who wanted one. I was thrilled to death at the time.

He signed it personally to me and I still have it.



Cheers

Hey Pancho....

Hey Cisco!

Wow, holy flashbacks!

Great pictures. My Dad and Uncle had the Davy Crockett stuff in the 50's. I came later along and also loved the Fess Parker/Buddy Espen Davy Crockett movie and my own cap Kentucky long rifle in the 80s. Those guys were very heroic to me in their depiction of those men in the Disney classic. Davy going into Congress with his buckskins and speaking his mind, how he was with his wife and kids and his frontier and horseman skills, his interactions with Andrew Jackson and with the whole musical narrative throughout.

I was going to mention it earlier FO but I also miss good cap pistols. You were before my time but I still had metal caste cap pistols in the 80s. Heavy and solid enough that put the other junk to shame and that you could sling. My Dad even bought me a policeman's holster at a flea market in New Mexico. Didn't match at all but it was real leather and real cool to me. I also miss the rolls of paper caps. I think you can still get them online but it seems you don't see any real good cap stuff in stores anymore. I found a site online that makes amazing quality cap pistols. Replica level pistols made in Italy or Spain I think but very expensive. But I think they have moving parts and are pretty amazing quality.

I always loved the paper cap rolls the best though. There was something more satisfying about spooling and loading those in to your own "cowboy" pistol and seemed to sound, look and SMELL better than those little plastic ring variety. Plus you could scrape and ignite the paper caps with your thumb if you were feeling like a tough guy.

I just saw your photo of Cisco Kid with your story FO. That's awesome and a great memory. My grandmother often told me about an autograph photo she had of Tom Mix I believe.

Yep, would buy a bunch of them and then discovered that if you use a really big hammer like 5lb. Lay the roll on its side and let it fly. The resulting noise was Awesome when the entire thing goes at once.