Factory Whistles Hooters All Gone?

[Ken001]

When I first moved to the city (being a country boy) 30 years ago it was normal to hear a succession of factory whistles and horns etc at midday and more around 4-5pm for the end of shift.

I’ve just realised that these sounds have disappeared. There is only a single lonely noise sometimes which I can’t identify but could be a type of school bell.

Do these audible signatures of the industrial age exist anymore?

[drewtwo99]

Oh man… I was just thinking about this the other day when I met someone who worked in a “factory” (I can’t remember now what this factory made), but I specifically asked if there was a steam whistle that blew at the end of the shift.

Sadly, my friend reported that there were no whistles! I was so sad.

[Smapti]

Here in Olympia, the old Olympia brewery had one that sounded every day at 5 PM until it closed for good in 2003.

One of the local microbreweries has since acquired a replica, which they blow at 5 PM on weekdays. I can hear it from my house about a mile away.

[RobDog]

I live just a mile or so down the line from Victoria Station in London (UK). I regularly hear the sound of a steam train blowing its whistle, which I assume is the Orient Express which still runs as a tourist / pleasure service. Very evocative.

Video linky: http://www.orient-express.com/web/uktr/british_pullman_video.jsp

ETA: Sorry, not a factory whistle like you asked for, but still an audible reminder of the industrial age.

[Princhester]

There’s one near me. Its a siren rather than a whistle though.

[owlfan]

My town, population 60,000, has one that blows daily at 8 am, noon, 1pm and 5 pm.

[pravnik]

They’re still very much in use at prison units.

[Springtime_for_Spacers]

There is still one in the centre of Sheffield (S Yorks) it belongs to a jewellers. There used to be a lot of small factory units around there so it was for the benefit of the workers and to advertise the shop’s wares.

[Fear_Itself]

So where are the hooters? I came for the hooters; I expect hooters.

[C.Montgomery_Burns]

Well, if it’s a steam whistle, you probably won’t find a lot of them because places don’t use steam as much.

[wheresmymind]

Whenever I’ve worked in that type of environment (warehouses mostly) a whistle would have been superfluous. When it was time to leave they simply shut down the equipment. The sudden silence was probably more jarring than a whistle would have been over the noise of the belts.

[BrotherCadfael]

@Fear_Itself

So where are the hooters? I came for the hooters; I expect hooters.

Well, you see… Factory workers used to whistle at girls with nice hooters, but they don’t let them do that anymore.

[Derleth]

Well, we all know what happened when the whistle failed to go off. Overtime gets expensive.

And the song itself.

(Like my knowledge of most pop culture from the 1940s, I know this due to the cartoons I watched growing up.)

[CalMeacham]

According to James Loewen in Sundown Towns and Charles Ogletree some town sirens and whistles had a more sinister significance – they were signalling the time blacks were supposed to leave the town limits:

I would get depressed. It wasn’t happy research. I heard that some towns sounded a siren at 6 p.m. each night, and the origin was to tell blacks to get out of town. When I first heard that story, I thought it was an urban legend. But I found enough proof that now I’m suspicious of any town that has a 6 p.m. whistle. Some of them just tell people it’s 6 p.m., but originally [some] had a racial connotation.

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/culture/articles/051001/1sundown.htm

Professor CHARLES OGLETREE (Harvard Law School; Head of Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice): Well, thanks, Ed. As you know, when I was doing research on the Tulsa race riots from 1921, I was astounded to learn of the literally hundreds of towns - now we’ve discovered thousands of towns around America - in the South, but not exclusively in the South, where blacks were told leave before sundown. There were sirens, there were notices, and the consequences of staying in those towns were death or other serious bodily injury.

And the good news is that that is largely historical, but it’s a frightening sense that people could not live in the community. They could work there, they could visit there, but they couldn’t’ be there after dark because of the strongly held feelings about segregation. And sundown towns were just that: if you’re black, get out of town before the sun goes down.

GORDON: Mm hmm. Jim Hunt, while those sirens may have gone away, there are certainly still areas in this country where when the sun goes down, minorities know that this is an area - a region you should not be in. That continues today.

Sundown Towns, a Historical Look

Amherst - History and Social Justice

[Ken001]

Fascinating and thanks all.

[Princhester]

WARNING: Derleth’s first link, at least for me, opened a new popup tab which could not easily be closed and I had to alt-tab-delete to get out of it.

[handsomeharry]

@Fear_Itself

So where are the hooters? I came for the hooters; I expect hooters.

We won’t go until we see some,
We won’t go until we see some,
We won’t go until we see some,
So show them right here!
(Christmas time, and all that you know.)