I remember all of these, you?

[coltle6920]

Okay, here are a few:

Coal-burning fireplaces.

Factory whistles and lots of church bells.

Running boards on cars, being used to ride on.

Stores with overhead wires on which little baskets buzzed around, carrying small items, change, etc. The fancy stores went to pneumatic tubes.

Hand-cranked cash registers.

Most buildings, especially the many that were built of stone, almost black with coal soot.

All records were 78 rpm, thick and brittle.

Peddlers and junk men driving horse- or mule-drawn wagons, each with his distinctive holler.

Grocery stores that delivered your order and allowed you to run a tab.

Pressing irons that had to be heated on a stove.

Hideous massed electric curlers needed to achieve the Marcel wave for ladies.

Stone spring houses that were always cool enough that people kept homemade buttermilk in them in summer.

Twice-a-day mail delivery. Often you could mail a card or letter to a local address in the morning and it would be delivered the same afternoon.

Lumber yards smelling of creosote used to treat railway ties and fence posts--unforgettable aroma.

Solid steel fishing rods.

General stores where you could buy a shotgun, a pair of boots, stove polish, overalls, groceries, kerosene, ammunition and pocketknives.

I could go on, but time travel is fatiguing.

Did you by any chance have a blacksmith in your town? I would then concede that you are reeeally older than dirt!

 

[Gunhacker]

Im 65 and got all 15
I remember walking along the road looking for bottles to turn in for penny candy at the country store too.
first fast food was an artic circle burger at about age 15
never went to a real retaurant until I was an adult

Same here, 15 out of 15... and we used to look for the larger quart pop bottles which had the coveted .25 deposit... with one of those, I could get a pack of Hostess cupcakes (13 cents), a 1/2 pint carton of milk (10 cents) and 2 pieces of bubble gum (penny a piece)... life was good back then

Fast food for us came out on a Swanson TV dinner in the aluminum tray... and "fast" was the 30 minutes it took to bake, where dinner usually took Mom an hour to "throw" together... or it came from the guy outside with the Red's Tamale cart.

 

[vytoland]

fond memories.....you betcha....I was there when it was all going on...life was simpler and happier then.....we didn't have a lot of gadgets ( a lot of stuff we made ourselves from what ever we could scrounge up), but we had tons of fun with our family and friends.....

 

[Salty RI]

We were the first people in our area to get a TV after school all my friends would come over to the house and we would sit there and watch the test pattern, I'm supprised nobody mentioned the air raid siren's, our telephone when you picked it up the operator would say number please, fast food was the icecream truck, we also had a guy who rode around in a truck selling waffels and donuts nice and hot, boy were they good, there was the rag man who rode around in a horse drawn cart buying rags and newspapers, the man who used to go around sharpening lawn mower blades, kinves and anything else that needed sharpening, we still get milk delivered in glass bottles, it always nice and cold.

 

[Qball]

S
6. TV test patterns that came on after the last show and were there until shows started again in the morning. (There were only 3 channels !!

Three channels
You lucky ...... erh.. man
We only had one channel on the "blackandwhite"
All the commotion when cannel two started

And No Commercials.

 

[rwsmith]

The only thing I don't...

The only thing I don't remember were the tables with the individual jukeboxes. I think that's because there was no such animal in the backwater that we lived in. The only time I ever saw such a thing was just of few years ago and of course they were digital by then.

The first fast food I remember were 'Jacks' hamburgers for 15 cents that were so "Good, good, good".

 

[Cattledog]

I am older than dirt. When God formed me, He used pre-dirt.

 

[therevjay]

15/15 Do you mean they don't make ice trays with levers anymore?

 

[sqhead]

having an 8-track in my first car ,a 69 mustang and I remember telling my buddies that cassettes will never catch on,just a fad........dumb-dee-dumb-dumb 1000 posts,dang!

 

[Mike McLellan]

Carbon paper, mimeograph machines, Brownie cameras, milk chutes, air-raid drills, Smith & Wesson revolvers….

 

[shouldazagged]

Did you by any chance have a blacksmith in your town? I would then concede that you are reeeally older than dirt!

This is the home of Churchill Downs. We had blacksmiths and farriers. When I lived in Tennessee I spent summers with relatives in rural areas, and I'd bet the ranch there was a smith somewhere not far away.

 

[bobelk99]

I'm old. You can add rotary phones and drive-in movies..

That's really a big wood box on the wall with a crank to ring the operator. Rotary is one of those new fangled things.

 

[bobelk99]

Me too

This has been a fun thread to read.

I got a catalog in the mail "Cheaper than Dirt". Tweren't cheap.

Maybe older than dirt is not so old. I still look forward to each day. Mostly to see which part is not working well that day.

I search for a special quote and couldn't find it, but it was something close to "If you didn't know how old you is, how old would you be?"

I do not think I am 'old', but I have 60+ years of shooting/hunting fun behind me.

And most of my sense: today I have lost a red one gallon gas can, a pair of yellow gloves and a flashlight. Someone will probably run across them tomorrow.

 

[roarindan]

we only had two channels for the longest time, 'til ABC got around to putting up an antenna.Some nights we'd get to see the channel from "WMTW, Poland Springs, Maine"
I remember listening to WSM on the car radio when "the skip was in",( still in upstate NY)

 

[mr-mom]

I'm dirt......
Dave

 

[A10]

I remember when McDonalds came to town. The first fast food restaurant I ever heard of, though there were a few hamburger joints around. Their sign said "over 1,000,000 served"!

 

[eric1959]

I'm 55 and grew up in a factory town in Ohio with Amish farm country around it. Milk, eggs and butter were delivered by wagon (Amish fellow), potato chips and pretzels were home delivered weekly in big cans by delivery truck. The brand new interstate(I-75) had pit toilets and hand pumped water in the rest areas. 3 channels on the TV, we got the second or third color TV in the neighborhood when I was in grade school. Neighbors came over to see it! No central air, no rock and roll radio stations until I was 10 (the devil's music you know). The bus had electric power with antennas going to overhead wires. And I was able to ride my Schwinn to a store when I was 10 and buy my first firearm(my parents told me okay) and ride home with it(very carefully). I still have that shotgun.

 

[islamoradamark]

im older than dirt according to the survey

 

[Alk8944]

Airpark,

"My Dad is cleaning out my grandmother's house (she died in December)"

Believe that I have no intention of demeaning your Grandmother, but how old can you be? My Maternal Grandmother died in 1950 at 70+, and my Paternal Grandmother in 1953 at about the same age. My Maternal Grandfather would be 128 years old this year if he were still alive, and my Grandmother about 135!

I remember everything everyone has mentioned. When A&W was the only fast food there was. I learned to drive in a car without factory turn signals. We owned cars that still had ventilators on the cowling, heaters were options and hung beneath the dash (handy to bash your shins on!), and before there were automatic transmissions. Neighbors still had the old "Candlestick" phones with the separate earpiece and the microphone on the candlestick.

 

[motom]

I remember all except #3, milk delivery in a glass bottle.. At our home it was different, the cow delivered to the barn, it was my job to get the milk from the cow to the house. And I thought fast food was getting home from school, running in one door grabbing a slab of bologna and two slices of bread and bolting out another door!