When I started Baylor in 1979, you could go into the lobby, tv room, and dining room of any dorm, but men couldn’t go to the halls in the women’s dorms and vice versa. Not even parents. There were two football game days a year when you could visit the dorm rooms regardless of gender for about four hours. There was an 11pm curfew Sun-Thurs and midnight Fri and Sat.
I considered myself lucky because in 1974, women were not allowed to leave the dorms unless they were dressed in dresses or skirts and wearing hose.
My cousin started her career teaching in 1984. She was a home school teacher. Girls who were pregnant had to be home schooled once they started showing.
In the town where I was born and my mother still lives, they finally stopped having counter checks in 1985. Every store and church had a batch of blank checks from each of the three banks. You would get your items together and when the clerk rang you up, you’d ask for a check on Hometown National or First National Hometown or the other one I can’t remember. One was green, one pink, the other yellow. Then you’d just write a check and sign it. It was up to the bank to figure out the name and account number.
I think Stamp Collections are a thing of the past too. My grandfather had a Stamp Collection in a big binder with hundreds of pages he handed down to my father and apparently the Stamp Collection itself was basically currency back in the day, he would take it to the pawn shop on occasion when he needed quick cash and the stamps were all treated as face value so minus the pawn shop fees it was actually a lot of money he would get from it. He would always get it back from pawn though so my family still has it.
Has anyone mentioned buying liquor and cigarettes for the parents from the corner store? I think the first few times I had a note from them, eventually they knew who I was and just filled the order.
I was quite young, I don’t think they allowed teenagers to do it.
Unless maybe you mean the idea of stamp collecting as a near-universal schoolboy hobby, or something that at least one member of every extended family was into. Yeah, that level of cultural ubiquity has passed for philately.
But it still exists, like coin collecting; it’s just a much more specialized hobby than it used to be.
Another item in that category might be social bridgeplaying. There are still a lot of dedicated bridge players out there, but the days when it used to be an absolute mainstay of at-home entertaining for most of the middle-class population are gone.
In the Ottawa suburb I grew up in in the 70s there was “the egg man” once a week. He was a farmer who would deliver eggs one evening a week. My mom would leave a big plastic bowl with some cash in it on the front porch each week.
Same at my college in the mid-70s. We did an article in the school paper, explaining scientifically why female coeds were incapable of pregnancy between the hours of 12 and 4 on Sunday afternoons. We had graphs and charts and an expert in a lab coat and everything!
Indeed; I collected both stamps and coins as a kid, and I knew several classmates who did the same. Those hobbies (and others like model railroading, model rocketry, etc.) are still out there, but they’re a lot more niche now. The “local hobby shop” which handles supplies for those sorts of hobbies is also an endangered species, and much of the retail end of those hobbies is now online.
A good friend of mine has worked for Mystic Stamp Company (one of the big US stamp dealers) for the past decade, writing copy for their sales materials.
My parents (both in their 80s) are lifelong, avid bridge players. When I was getting ready to head off to college, my dad asked me if I wanted to learn how to play bridge. I said “no” – I knew no one in my generation who played it. My dad, who had attended the same college that I did, was convinced that I needed to know how to play bridge to have a social life at college, as that was his experience, 30 years earlier. (Instead, I played Dungeons & Dragons, and through that, met a circle of friends which I still have.)
Even now, I can’t think offhand of anyone among my friends who plays bridge with any regularity.
I think another hobby that used to be much more widespread is keeping aquariums with tropical fish. My father got into it in the 1950s and 1960s and there used to be several small stores in the neighborhood that just sold fish. Now there might be a small section in the back of a large pet store.
We had a local pet store which specialized in tropical fish (though they carried stuff for other pets, too), which had a huge assortment of fish, aquariums, etc. They lasted until about a decade ago, when I think the owners decided to retire, and couldn’t find anyone willing to buy the place.
The local Jewish Federation had an avid mah-jongg club that met at least once a week before covid. As most of the players are elderly, it’s been on hiatus this past year. I’m wondering if it will start up again when the pandemic is over.
Coin collecting: The Boy Scouts offer a merit badge for this. They used to require an actual collection of coins, but dropped that requirement.
An interesting read “Currency of the Heart”. A person who worked at the public call desk of the U.S. Mint settles his father’s estate, and also relates some of the calls he got at work. (Interesting side note: He also stated that one of the more frequent “freedom of information” filings is from people who want copies of the U.S. Mint’s mailing list - to try and sell other items to coin collectors.)
Stamp collecting: (Sorry, no cite. I wish I could recall the source.) Someone who collected “first day covers” took their entire collection to a dealer who offered “$20 a pound”.
I used to be a coin collector - in the days when you collected one coin for each year (maybe one or two more if there were different clearly visible mint marks on them). Today - you have to look for large date, small date, double die, etc.
And an American collector can get overwhelmed by the coins described as “flowing hair”, “draped bust”, “capped bust”, and “Liberty” standing/seated/walking - not to mention Barbers, Indians, and eagles.
Same story at our FL condo with many retirees. Many women from the 75-and-up crowd would meet 2x/week for a couple hours of mah-jongg and yakking. I suspect it’ll restart as COVID recedes. But not yet.
During the 5 years I lived here pre-COVID I did not see any of the younger residents join in; not even the ones who aged into the demographic. Clearly it’s generational.
