I grew up in the 50's and 60's about 15 miles from Times Beach.
That was a huge environmental disaster for sure.

I recollect getting the mercury our of thermometers and playing with. It's fun stuff!

My doctor wants me to take sleeping pills to sleep; not drink vodka or bourbon. I told him it's too late for me to die young and those pills are not nearly as great as vodka or bourbon!

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I can't exactly prove this but if you research it you will find that COCA-Cola's original formula contained fluid extract of coca leaves for flavor. Friends, that is cocaine, pure and simple. I'm pretty sure they don't do that any longer.

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Come and take it!!

I once owned a Chevy pickup (1960) that has some kind of six cylinder engine. I say some kind because no one knew what it really was but apparently it wasn't a Chevy. It didn't have an oil filter. I think I got the oil changed one time in the couple of years I had the truck. I told them it didn't have an oil filter. They told me I was nuts, I just didn't know where to look. About a half hour later, they came back and said, No, I was right.

When I was a kid all the waste water in the house, except the toilet, just drained out into the woods. You'd see a big pile of bubbles at the edge of the yard and know my mother was washing dishes, or clothes or something. We had an old wringer washer that just hooked up to the kitchen sink, and you'd put the drain hose into the sink. That water just drained off to the creek (about 20? 25 yards past the edge of the yard), which drained to the Chickhominy River. It was nothing at all to see rafts of soap suds floating down the creek, or collected up in the eddy's. Fish didn't seem to mind. I remember noticing as I got older that I never saw those rafts of soap suds anymore. Took me a while to figure out why. Heck, I thought they were something natural.

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John 3:16 .

It was about 1970 that a company offered an oil filter that used a roll of toilet paper as the filter medium. The idea was to simply add a new quart of oil when replacing the TP filter and just throw the old roll in the trash.

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S&WCA #1955, S&WHF #818

We lived in Florida for a short time in the late 1950's when dad had to temporarily relocate to find work (people used to do that, even when travel was hard and inconvenient - nowadays they stayed glued to areas with high costs of living and moan about 'can't find a job and I can't afford to live here - where's my government check?).
I remember going in the family buggy to the drive-in theater (most cars had no air conditioning then and it was Florida . . . ) and there were small motorized carts with sprayers for the mosquitos that traveled between the rows of cars, followed after a short time by a motorized cart selling concessions/movie snacks. I'd usually fall asleep up in the back window of the car before the movie was over unless it was a western

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Qui plantavit curabit

Back in the VW air-cooled rear engine days, those engines had no oil filters. At least my two (a '66 and a '67) did not. I do remember that there were add-on aftermarket oil filters for the VW available, and they used a roll of toilet paper as the filter. I never bought them for mine. It was fairly simple to change the oil and I did that myself. I don't remember how often. My main VW problem was the short life of their mufflers. And they were not easily replaced. I had a friend who could do it quickly by dropping the engine. I paid him to do mine.

I lived in Florida (near Ft Lauderdale) for awhile in the early 1960s. I remember the mosquito sprayers at drive-in movies. I always thought they used DDT. It was legal then. That experience convinced me that I never wanted to live in Florida. Too much sand and too many bugs.

Never did that but I did creosote a lot of fence for a local farmer. Nasty stuff, but those wooden fences lasted 30 plus years till the farm was sold to a developer.

Many years ago, my dad poured the used oil in areas he did not want weeds like along fence lines, around outbuilding foundations etc.

Never a second thought. Ignorance is bliss and he was an engineer btw.

A bunch of my buddies were on a bike ride. Through a series of misadventures, one of the guys filled his tank with diesel, requiring it to be pumped out and gasoline put in. This left them with a 5 gallon bucket full of diesel. When they asked the people at the gas station what they should do with it, they were told, "Just pour along the fence line." This was post 2000 and in CA.

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The best I can with what I got

Cuyahoga River, Cleveland Ohio, 1969.

I lived in Cleveland at that time. There were many industries located along the Cuyahoga River, and most of them discharged untreated waste directly into it. Actually, there had been many fires along the river over many years due to all the waste flammable chemicals and oils disposed into it. But this specific fire led to the passage of the Federal Clean Water Act several years later. The basic CWA bans discharge of wastes into navigable waters of the US without treatment and permitting. And that includes just about all waste, including domestic sewage discharges, from point sources. The CWA actually grants the States the authority to manage and enforce the Federal Act. And that was the beginning of requiring every state to establish its own state environmental protection agency.

Given the current price of diesel, not gonna do that!

This past Thursday, heard that old tire advice about burning the storm downed pin logs I have. Burned 3 big brush/tree/stump piles without that after clearing what's now the pasture. Gas and waste oil mix did the trick.

Diesel helps additives cling to stuff as does other oils. Potato farmers in SE Idaho used diesel for vine kill if the frost had not killed them before harvest. That practice stopped when diesel hit $0:15 a gallon.

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Front sight and squeeze