We had Eagle Stamps here. I remember getting a clock-radio for my bedroom.
We also had Tax Stamps. I was pretty young at the time, but I think you got them for paying sales tax on large items like appliances or cars. They came in all different denominations and colors. You gave them to charity, who redeemed them for part of their face value.
I didn’t realize you were a fellow SoCal type. 
I was there from birth through finishing college then left, never to live there again. At least so far.
But yeah. S&H were a declining brand in the early 60s-early 70s there, while Blue Chip was the growing brand. Then suddenly they both just … evaporated.
Another thing that’s gone is the Mill Coin
In the USA they were primarily used for sales taxes. They were common in Missouri and I guess some other states as well. My wife has some of the Missouri ones in zinc and plastic.
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I remember my mother telling me about mill coins, but that was before my time.
When I was a wee tyke, our playgrounds were paved with cinders. Very sharp edges, lots of scabs on knees and elsewhere.
Coal clinker? Unburned stuff from coal furnaces. My grandfather would shovel it out of our coal-burning furnace and put it on the path around the side of the house.
The coal deliverers hated our house since the basement window with the chute to the furnace was around the side and they couldn’t bring the truck in there. They had to put it in hods and carry it in on their backs.
We eventually got an oil burner and could just fill the tank with a hose.
I remember a cartoon cut from a magazine someplace, that for years was taped up inside a cabinet door in our kitchen. In today’s PC world it would definitely not fly. A proud father was sending off his daughter and new son-in-law, shaking the latter’s hand. The cartoon was old enough to have the young couple both wearing hats. Anyway, the young woman and her mother were looking at the older guy in consternation, as he was saying, “Be gentle and considerate with my daughter, son. But if that doesn’t work, belt her one.”
I had one as a kid. Fifty cents a week netted me $25 plus interest when I closed it out at the end of the year.
There was even a little cartoon they ran at the local theater promoting them.
I’ve been searching for the cartoon online for years, and haven’t found it.
It features the Husband, concerned about his CHristmas biils – you can tell, because he has little dollar signs ($) circling his head the way stars circle the head of someone who’s been hit in the head in a cartoon.
A little bearded man shows up out of nowhere and says “Here’s your check!” It covers all the bills.
Wife comes home and puts a check into sleeping husbands hands. He wakes up. THe Check is Real! Wife explains that she joined the Christmas Club and explains how it works.
Husband says “THat was smart!” Wife, walking away, says that she didn’t think of it. A little guy with a beard told her about it." Husband reacts ("Boing!! Camera shakes side to side)
Cartoon end with little bearded guy in a sled – looking a lot like SAnta in a red suit – telling the audience to Join the Christmas Club!
Another of those lost cartoons from my youth. I’m still looking for the badly-animated one they ran every January that told you that “Aliens have to Register every January” I thought they were talking about extraterrestrial aliens (and the way they were drawn, they could have been), which was way cool.
That was a plot point in an episode of “Mork and Mindy,” as I recall. Mork, who knows that he is an alien on Earth, discovers (perhaps via your cartoon) that aliens must register with the government every January. Not realizing that “aliens” in this context means “comes from some other place on Earth,” and not “outer space aliens,” off he goes to the necessary office to register.
As best as I can remember, the clerk expects Mork to declare that he comes from some other country, and to produce his green card. Mork has no green card, and explains that he comes from the planet Ork. After some confused back-and-forth, the clerk dismisses Mork as a crank, and Mork never worries about registering as an alien again.
I distinctly remember in 1998 something happened on Christmas Day that required my family to go out and actually find food on Christmas, as we weren’t able to prepare the typical traditional Christmas dinner like we normally did. Me and my dad drove around our city for a solid hour looking for food but nothing was open. McDonald’s and the other fast food restaurants was closed, Denny’s was closed, every single grocery store and Wal-Mart was closed. Even a lot of gas stations were closed. Absolutely nothing was open.
We wound up finding a pizza place that was run by an Indian family and were glad to be able to get a giant pizza for Christmas Dinner, but what’s crazy is that in the past decade pretty much everything is open on Christmas. Now that I have a job that requires me to work on Christmas occasionally, I have more trouble getting fast food on New Years Day than I do on actual Christmas.
Bob Hope had a running gag (which is probably a good one for "Jokes that need explaining) - whenever he encountered some weird American cultural practice, he’d ask “Where does an alien go to register?” (Hope was born in the UK - and the joke meant, basically, “This weird thing is reminding me that I’m not really from here”)
Before homogenized milk, there was the cream top milk bottle. The bottle had a neck at the level where the cream separated, then it spread out again to a spherical shape. You’d put a special goose-neck spoon down to the neck to seal off the milk from the cream, and pour off the cream.
And “vacation clubs”. The only difference from years ago is that they used to mail me a check - now they just transfer the money over to my savings account.
That’s neat. I never saw a bottle like that, not even in the 50’s, though my mother did used to pour the cream off to put it in her coffee.
I can still get cream top milk as an option around here; the milk from the larger companies is all homogenized, but some of the smaller dairies produce non-homogenized milk.
My dad grew up outside Boston (ie, cold winters) and told me stories about how that cream would come out of the bottle as a blob after being brought in from the box outside where the milkman had left it and warming up slightly. I hadn’t thought of that in years and didn’t really understand what he meant until reading this thread. I’m still not sure if I buy that it happened as he described
I think I know what he’s describing and yes it would do that for either of two possible reasons: one is that very thick cream, as you might get from Jersey cows or if the bottle had been sitting for some time, will indeed often come out of the neck of even a standard milk bottle as a blob; the other is that if the bottle was sitting outside in cold weather, the contents would start to freeze sooner at the narrower top of the bottle, so what came out might have been partly frozen. I’d bet on the first reason, if it weren’t for his specifying cold weather, because I’ve had that happen recently with creamtop milk in a standard glass milk bottle at ordinary refrigerator temperatures. Maybe in the summer they didn’t let their milk stay outside as long because they were worried about its going bad.
I found one on the beach a few years ago. I had no idea what it was, but figured it out with the help of the internet. It was metal, but couldn’t be zinc (it would have been dissolved long ago in the salt water. Must have been tin. I have no idea what I did with it.
There’s a bit of a tradition forming in the USA to go out for Chinese food on Christmas (or Eve). Because from roughly the '70s to 2000s those were about the only places open that day. AIUI the practice started among Jewish folks and later spread to the Gentiles.
Back about 1991 I was working a trip and we arrived in NYC at about 7pm Christmas eve. The hotel was in one of the predominantly Jewish areas in Brooklyn. The hotel restaurant was closed for the holiday and we were famished. Out into the snow we went. Stumbled upon a Chinese joint with a big neon sign advertising that everything was Kosher. It was packed. We got the table near the kitchen, probably because we didn’t exactly resemble the rest of the clientele. The food was wonderful. And much appreciated at the end of a long day.
I ain’t from around these parts… in that context, what does a hod look like? The only hod I know of is Brickie’s Hod - are we talking about the same thing?
j
I used the wrong word. They used heavy canvas sacks that they carried over their shoulders.