Time for some fun

JustaDB

Ultra Member
- Holding choke plates open when the engine flooded
With a tail comb when you were by yourself. Melted more than one when the engine backfired.

- No seatbelts and no helmuts
No comment on the first & as soon as I hit the Montana border, my helmet comes off.
Hand milking cows, separating cream, and churning butter.
Yeppers. Mom & Dad didn't get the milking machine until after I moved out. Go figger...
 

Chicken lights

Forum Pony Express Driver
Another thread mentioned the internet and it got me wondering what we did before computers and the internet. I know lot of us on here predate the internet.

We remember:

- Phones with stretchy knotted up wires to the handset
- Phone dials you spun like a mad man with your middle finger. Might have started something.
- Party Lines
- two long and two short rings for the girls at the farm down the road.
- Shoe polish on the ear side of the handset.
- Box phones on the wall with a horn mic and a listening cone you held to your ear, and a crank to dial with.
- Rolling mercury in your palm.
- Oiling everything with PCB Oil - best oil ever.
- Heating with a coal fired water boiler.
- Snail mail to everywhere.
- Cheque books.
- Cigarette butts everywhere and ashtrays at meetings - I don't miss that.
- the day they put electricity down the section roads
- Handles to roll down car windows
- Holding choke plates open when the engine flooded
- Drying out distributor caps after it rained.
- Chrystal Radios
- B&W TV's & free TV channels
- Gasoline at 15 cents per Imperial GALLON. That's 3 cents a Litre........
- Walking to school or taking the city bus to high school
- Pay phones in booths on every corner
- Tube testers at the drug store
- Suspenders
- Soup Bowl haircuts
- Straight razors - why I let my beard grow
- Razor Stropps
- Tractors with big drive drums to run the shop.
- 5 and 10 cent chocolate bars
- Two dollar bills
- BIG Silver Dollars and EVEN BIGGER 5 dollar coins
- No seatbelts and no helmuts
- One speed bicycles and 3spd racers.
- Home made push carts with a 2x4 swing front steer axle.
- Tin can walkie talkies
- The milk man, bread man, coal man, fuller brush man, snake oil man, sheeny man.
- And best for last - snipe hunting with girls in tall grass.

I know I've forgotten a mitt ful. Anyone over 65 should be able to double the list. Only rule is that it has to be something you personally experienced about daily life that predated computers and the internet.
You're really old

How was the tin can on a string phone call?
 

Tom O

Ultra Member
Anyone here wear Points style shoes? Or get reminded of Brasso Brass Polish while seeing that new commercial on tv it looks like it’s done by the same designer.
Vintage apparently
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I remember when our school and church started to lock doors at night and weekends. They were ALWAYS open in case someone needed to get in! I remember my dad thinking the world really was going to hell when they had to start locking the church up.
I can't say that your dad was wrong...... And it hasn't improved any in recent years. Surely, this period of time will go down in the history books as the era of entitlement......
 

jcdammeyer

John
Premium Member
Buying a bag of powdered charcoal, a bag of powdered sulphur and some salt-peter at the small town pharmacy and mixing it all together in a piece of black iron pipe. Next step a few inches of Jetex fuse and voila
What could possibly go wrong
I actually did that. Misread the encyclopedia instructions that were likely deliberately written to protect me. I had the proportions correct for volume but one of them was by weight. So the gun powder made a nice flair but no explosion. I had packed a piece of 1/2" copper pipe with a soldered end cap. Mounted it on Meccano centrifuge to test the idea of a rocket motor. Lots of flame and smoke and it turned about 30 degrees. Failure.
After that my parents took away my chemicals.
 

jcdammeyer

John
Premium Member
Putting money in my pocket (no plastic)
Answering machines.
Video stores.
Hand drills (the original cordless)
Can't find my little one at the moment. The large one I bought at a swap meet in The Netherlands in 93. The smaller red one was my dads. Not sure if it came with him from The Netherlands or if he bought it here. Guess I should have a photo of a brace and bit too. I think I have one of those somewhere. Just not sure where.

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slow-poke

Ultra Member
+ Stylish/Vintage/Muscle cars, everything from a bug to an Eldorado
+ CB / Ham radios
+ Cutoff jeans
+ Sun tanning and Grand Beach (made Playboys top 10 list)
+ Hitch-Hiking
+ The creativity associated with being a bunch of mischief teenagers with too much time
+ Convertibles
+ Air travel before it morphed into what it is today
+ Bootlegging my dad's homemade wine for a dollar a bottle at high school dances
+ Our pet crow
 
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