Ya know your getting old when you remember

[emsvitil]

Wouldn't do the old folks any good now..............

The old folks aren't capable of hearing them anymore.

[Kevin Johnson]

I remember asking my Dad about cars that were driving around with a short rope trailing behind them. He told me that was to kill stray/feral dogs. Not sure if he was being facetious.

Yes, I remember curb feelers.

[enigma57]

I remember leather ground straps hanging from under the rear bumper. Saw a few curb feelers in the City. We lived out in the boonies and the closest town didn't have curbs back then so no one had curb feelers around there. No parking meters either. They did have hitching rings on metal poles (for horses) around the old courthouse on the town square, though.

I remember when I was in Juniour High (late '50s). The Jr. High was built in 1939. It was a 2-story building with high ceilings. Steam radiators. No A/C. No elevator. We had some students who had polio when they were younger. Most got around on crutches but one girl had to use a wheel chair. So 4 of us would pick up her wheel chair and carry her up and down the stairs. If we happened to have a class on the 2nd floor when there was a fire drill, that was great fun. We would go to the West end of the building and our teacher would open the large French doors leading out onto the tar and gravel roof. This was about 25 ft. above the ground and there was a metal slide that extended from the first story roof at the end of the building down to the ground. Our teacher would slide down first and then she would catch us (well slow us down a bit anyway) as we slid off the end of the metal slide. Everybody went down the slide except for our classmate in the wheel chair and 4 guys who volunteered to carry her down the stairs to the 1st floor and from there, down the front steps to ground level.

Happy Motoring,

Harry

[Joe-71]

You WIN! I do remember getting electricity, paved roads, and first school busses in third grade back in SC. I remember six party phone line with different rings, and lights hanging from center of room with pull string, and yes, outhouses. Indoor plumbing came much later. Joe-JDC

[Kevin Johnson]

I remember leather ground straps hanging from under the rear bumper. ...

Yeah, now that you mention them, I saw some of them as well.

The rope(s) had several knots near the end; I guess so it would bounce around and attract a dog's attention. I am starting to think the worst (this was in inner city Chicago).

[Kevin Johnson]

... The Jr. High was built in 1939. ...

I had an "Okie" mechanic friend that lived in Turlock, CA, across from a school of the same vintage (cough -- he predated it significantly). He had a metal detector and would sweep the school lawn and find Mercury dimes buried down about ten inches. That always fascinated me how the lawn did not "seem" to get any thicker -- judging from the sidewalks -- but objects would slowly migrate downwards.

[Kevin Johnson]

... I remember six party phone line with different rings, ...

I had a relative who worked as an engineer for Michigan Bell that would talk about them. At a garage sale I picked up a field telephone from WWII and he immediately called out its part number.

He described a lunch meeting where several engineers got deep into a technical problem. They suddenly came back to reality and realized they had been writing important notes and diagrams on the tablecloth.

[enigma57]

I remember when I got back Stateside in '68, Super Shell was around 32 centsper gallon here in Texas. The no name stations sold premium for 25 cents per gallon and occasionally had gas wars where the price of premium would be around 12 cents per gallon. I drove out to San Diego, California in Jan. of '69 during the mudslides and Super Shell was outrageous, around 43 cents per gallon if I remember correctly. I had to run it, though. Had a new SS396 Nova with the L-78 engine and anything else would make it run like crap and I'd have to get out and increase idle speed with a screwdriver just to keep it from dying at stop lights.

Worst price increase I recall as a kid in the '50s...... The local store down the road a piece had a Coke machine. A bottle of Coke was a nickle. We'd fish empty Coke bottles out of the bar ditch, wash them out and turn them in for 2 cents each. Coke Company would clean them again and refill them. One hot summer day, I walked down to the store for a cold bottle of Coke and there was a sign...... 'Cokes 6 cents'. Man! That was a 20% increase! Overnight! I was really bummed out. Only had a Coke once or twice a week as it was. Thought I'd been priced out of the market when they hit 6 cents and I might never be able to afford another Coke again. Such were the thoughts of 10 year old kids back in 1958.

Happy Motoring,

Harry

[learner1]

I remember party lines and diesel around .50 cents i think. My mom worked for the telephone company as an operator and would plug in jacks all day long to talk to people before they went to computers. My friends always thought it was cool when i placed a phone call from the corner pay phone and when the operator chimed in for more money it was my mom. My dad worked in dealership and i remember him saying how he thought they were going to go out of business when they raised the labor rate from $5 to $10 dollars. I remember pouring a 55 gallon barrel of used oil on the gravel road to keep the dust down and riding in the area under the back window of the car. I also remember having hair on my forehead

[Jginger]

I still remember our first phone, our ring was 3 longs and 1 short. sometime before 1950

[enigma57]

1954 was a big year for us. We moved into town. Got electric and running water. And a phone. It was a party line. Odd how it evolved over the years. When we first got the phone, we were on a party line and our number was Greenwood 39150. After a few years, it was GR 39150. And in the early '60s, we were no longer on a party line and our phone number had morphed into 4739150. There being no 'area codes' back then, we still had to dial 'O' and have the operator place a long distance call, though. That was a rare occasion. Only happened once or twice during the holiday season or when there was a death in the family.

Calling home was different when I went into the service in '66. It involved saving a bag full of quarters (about $5.00 bucks) to feed the pay phone on base or down on the pier. There would be a long line waiting for the phone and we had a maximum of 5 minutes no matter how many calls we were going to make. If you couldn't squeeze it all into 5 minutes, you got in the back of the line and waited for your turn again. And if anybody hogged the phone, they'd end up in the drink. If you were just returning from several months at sea and there were 1,800 sailors and Marines aboard your ship and a goodly percentage of them wanting to call home, it took a while, as there were usually only 1 or 2 pay phones on the pier.

Mail call was interesting as well. It came infrequently when we made port. Mail orderly would drag a big bag of mail to our shop and pass it out. Later after mess call, we would knock off work if we didn't have watch and sort it out by return address and postmark date on our rack (bunk). Had to do it that way and read them from earliest to latest postmark in order to make sense of them, as we might not get mail for weeks or in some cases months at a time.

I cannot even begin to imagine what it would have been like if we'd had 'smart phones' and 'social media' back then. Or how any security could possibly have been maintained. I don't have such a phone even now. Just don't want one. We have a land line and we turn the ringer off the phones and answering machine when we hit the rack at night or just don't want to be disturbed.

We went out to dinner last weekend and I could not help but notice that many of the people in the restaurant were playing with their 'smart phones' and not communicating nor interacting with those at their table at all. Very sad. It was as if with heads bowed, they were in some way worshiping the damned things. Which prompted me to remark to my wife how much better life was before 'smart phones' and 'social media'. And I wondered if these people were capable of unplugging from their Borg-like existence in the 'collective' and having independent thought...... Or whether they were addicted to that stuff to the point of experiencing withdrawal symptoms if deprived of it for any length of time.

Best regards,

Harry

[MadBill]

In a thread titled "Ya Know You're Getting Old When..." one can count on well-aged respondents, but I have a growing suspicion that Speed-Talkers' median age is about sixty! At 76 I plan to be at this for a few years yet, but it would be nice to know that there's a following generation or two to fill in the eventual gaps.

We don't have polls/surveys on S/T anymore, but I'd sure like to be proven wrong by a show of hands...

[Kevin Johnson]

I am 58 but plenty of my customers are much younger. Last week a nineteen year old; a twenty something studying to be a machinist; a twenty something hoping to study neurology. I gave the last one the email address of one of our members who just got their PhD after studies at Harvard and in the Netherlands (studying neural science).

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Aside: Cocktail Part Effect variant

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_party_effect

So, I am waiting in line at the register in Walmart...

Suddenly my mind registers someone saying the word "research." BING!

I turn to the young woman speaking to her Mother behind me and tell her that this is the first time that I have ever heard that word uttered in a Walmart.

I ask her what she is studying and she told me veterinary science.

I told her that I was very impressed as that is an even more competitive field of study than that of medicine. When I left I wished her well with her studies.

[hoodeng]

Big families, after the war the breeding program exploded, there were six in our lot. At church on Sunday we were only a middle size family, some had ten! It was also not a problem for toddlers to be on halters me included, mum must have looked like a charioteer at times.

Wire telegraph in department stores, and getting lost in the same and being held up on the telegraph terminal station by the boss yelling at the top of his voice "Has anyone lost this child!?"

On the very rare occasion we went into town on the bus i recall going over the Mile End freight yard bridges, it was all steam as far as the eye could see, i ended up working there some years later when they were dismantling all the steam infrastructure, the Islington workshops had steam locos lined up the full length of a back siding of the workshops waiting to be broken up. One regret, not enough photos, although i am staggered at the stuff that crops up in archives if you know where to look.

Cheers.

[hoodeng]

A lot were huge, no mater how small you were! Two memorable sounds of steam were max tractive effort fully loaded on an incline, absolutely hammering!! and the sound when at max speed on the flat.

The video was taken some years back when the UK Mallard,"Flying Scotsman" was bought out to Australia for a tour, the loco next to it is a 'South Australian Railways Northern class 520' ,Mallard ran on standard gauge and 520 on broad.
In the 70's they used to run 520 through the Adelaide hills on 'Steam Ranger' tours, i was working on track maintenance at the time and had the experience of being in a tunnel manhole when it came through under load, nearly as good as the start line with fuelers!



Cheers.