My parents belonged to a bridge club when I was a kid. They played every week, rotating among various people’s houses. About once a month or so, the bridge club would come over to our house one evening; it would be my job to set up the card tables in the living room. I was eager to learn to play, because I associated bridge with being “grown up.” I was sure that when I got to be an adult, I would also join a bridge club and socialize like that.
Like you, I ended up doing role-playing games instead (though never D&D, strangely enough). I still don’t know how to play bridge, and I don’t know any of my friends who do.
Not liquor. My parents weren’t teetotalers by any means, but they never sent me to the store for booze.
But cigarettes? All the time. There was a drugstore (remember when drugstores sold cigarettes?) on the corner. It wasn’t a chain, and the owner and workers knew the family. Mom and Dad often sent whatever kid was around down to the corner for a pack of cigarettes.
When I was in my late 20s, my girlfriend’s (now wife’s) grandfather attempted to teach her, her sister, and me how to play bridge; I susepct it was because all of his old bridge partners were dead, and he missed playing.
I have no doubt that he knew how to play, but he was terrible at trying to explain the game to anyone else. After an excruciating evening of that (and lots of arguments between him and my future sister-in-law), none of us ever spoke of that evening again.
Yeah, there used to be (maybe still are) companies that sold “first day covers” in pretty albums with fancy pictures purely as collectibles. Those covers were carefully hand-stamped and then sent to the buyer inside packaging; they weren’t ever intended to go through the regular mailstream by themselves. Most serious stamp collectors had no interest in them even back then; they fell into the same category as collectible plates and Avon bottles and Hallmark ornaments and other gewgaws intended primarily to look pretty. Now, serious collectors still aren’t interested, and relatively few people collect stuff just to sit around and look pretty, so there’s very little market.
Your local Goodwill or other thrift store probably has lots of collectible plates sitting around too: somebody paid $35+ back in the day for a “limited edition” plate with a panda or John Deere tractor or teddy bear or whatever, and now it can be yours for a dollar or so.
Aquariums remain pretty popular (13 million American homes have pet fish, as of 2019), but the retail end has been hugely affected by the general trends in retailing. Aside from the tank itself and the fish, you can buy the supplies and equipment much more cheaply online from major pet retailers, which destroyed the bread-and-butter of the local pet shop. A shift to smaller, often plastic/acrylic, aquariums rather than the glass or glass-and-slate monsters of the past means you can actually buy the tank online too, and the rise of overnight/two-day shipping means you can buy the fish online too.
On the subject of vanishing hobbies - I don’t know, was trainspotting ever a thing in the US, or was that a uniquely British thing? As a kid I had friends who were both model railway enthusiasts and trainspotters, so once or twice I got dragged along with them - down to the station, a platform ticket for a penny or twopence (IIRC - something like that) - and yes, a platform ticket was exactly that, a ticket that (just) allowed you access to the platforms. Then hours of ticking off the numbers of locomotives in a book and drinking cups of lousy tea.
Oddly, I was not a convert. I assume it is more or less a thing of the past - you just don’t see groups of boys (no girls, obviously) spotting trains on stations any more.
The US had (and still has) has what we call Railfanning. The guys (99.9%) who do it are “rail fans”. It didn’t seem to be so much collecting loco numbers, but guys would go hang out at busy junctions and watch trains all day while listening to the radio commo on a scanner.
I don’t do it in person, but always enjoy seeing the trains I encounter in my daily travels around town. I sometimes blow an hour watching vids such as these. Or just plain old railroad vids. Crossing mishaps are an especially guilty pleasure. Watching a million pound lb. train annihilate a 50K lb. truck is … nice. And the people are usually long gone so nobody gets significantly hurt.
I’ve been, on and off, into model railroading since I was a little kid – I bought a new N scale train set last summer, in part to deal with my COVID-related blues. I suppose I’m a bit of a railfan, too, though I’m not among the guys who hang out all day to watch trains.
I live a few blocks away from the “Racetrack” – BNSF’s triple-track main line running west from Chicago, which carries a mix of freight and passenger trains (when I was going into the office every day, I’d take the commuter train on that line). I’d sometimes see a few railfans gathered trackside by my train station – and, as @LSLGuy notes, they’re almost uniformly guys, and also largely senior citizens.
So were we, but back in the days you could find old, collectable coins in your change. I got a volunteer job selling the school milk for 7 cents, and always carried extra change I could swap out for indian head pennies, Barber dimes, V Nickels, older Buffalo nickels, Standing Liberty Quarters and what not. My biggest find was worth something like $5 back then.
How’s that working out for you? I was an HO modeler as a teen, but was more into operations than layout & scenery construction. I’ve watched both N & Z scale with interest since they were invented.
Nowadays I don’t have the room and if I did the fiddly bits of maintenance would probably piss me off more than playing with it made me happy.
I’ve considered poking into virtual train ops on a PC, but that seems painfully lame. Like riding a moped and certain conjugal activities better unmentioned on the 'Dope, it might be fun but you don’t want your friends to find out you’re doing it.
As a child back when Orange County had far more trees than people Mom used to take us to downtown Santa Ana to shop. No trip was complete without a visit to the Santa Ana station to see the Sante Fe Daylight or one of the others come through. Old warbonnet paint like this but with lots less snow.
I’m in Orange County. Our Girl Scout troop would take the train from Fullerton to Santa Ana and then we’d walk to Prentice Park zoo.
My son become interested in trains when he was about three, so I’d pack up a picnic and hang out at the Fullerton station (lots of Amtrak, Metrorail, BNSF) or to a site in Yorba Linda where the trains would switch tracks, uncouple, etc. I know all about the droolers.
Prentice Park zoo! Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time; a long time. Wiki sez it still exists, although not by that name. Color me surprised. It was pretty raggedy the last time I saw it in around 1970.
We’d do the same at the Santa Ana station, but in the early 1960s Santa Fe was the only game in town.
If you don’t mind my asking what years were you doing all this stuff?
I’m listening to an old radio comedy today (“The Life of Riley” from the 1940s) and it’s talking about something that I think has been dustbinned - a high school sorority, operating much like a college sorority (I’ve seen later references to this concept - the Brady Bunch in the 1970s had something like that). Does anything like that still exist? A cursory websearch finds that some of the organizations still exist - but they’ve been converted into alumni clubs, instead of organizations that high school students are participants in.
Andy_L,
You might find what you are looking for in high school yearbooks. They usually have “society” pages that show the members. The archive.org site has several recent yearbooks available.
I’m surprised that high school yearbooks haven’t gone into the dustbin. I’d have thought that they would have been replaced by school websites.
How about Ham Radio as a hobby?
It used to be a thing, from the 50’s through the 70’s., I think.
There were ham radio clubs at some high schools, and YMCA’s etc.
Nerdy hobbyists would sit for hours, twisting dials, listening and trying to talk on a horribly squeaky, static-filled shortwave radio.
Then when they made contact with somebody, they’d get all excited, and exchange business cards with the contacted person (by snail mail, of course). They would proudly post the cards on a wall next to their radio, and stick a colored pin on a map of the globe showing the location of the other guy.
“Look!!! I made contact with a guy in Algeria!!!, and somebody in Uganda!!! Isn’t it amazing!!!”
The static and noise on the radio made it impossible for me to understand anything. And the hobbyists didn’t really seem to care. They weren’t looking for conversation…they just seemed to collecting postcards and colored pins on the map. (A primitive version of collecting a thousand friends on Facebook, I suppose.)
I never understood it, but it was a common hobby.
Starting at about 1958 my big brother did ham radio. He is a nerd par excellence built his radios from bits and pieces scrounged from science teachers and trash he bicycled past. He kept track in a log of who and where he made contact. He still has a license and fiddles around with his radios some 63+ years later. He turned into a quantum physicist at Bell Labs and Fermi near Chicago. Kept him off the street corner.
When I worked in New Zealand some friends of mine (actually as a honeymoon) partly financed an expedition to remote Raoul Island, uninhabited except for a weather station, by arranging to do radio schedules to allow ham radio hobbyists to contact them and collect a QSL card for Raoul, which of course were almost impossible to get due to the rarity of people visiting the locality (only accessible by yacht).
Unfortunately Raoul has no secure harbor and during a storm their yacht was pushed ashore (I don’t think they were actually on it) and they were shipwrecked for a while!
I knew a few adults who were ham operators when I was a kid in the '70s – when we moved to Green Bay in ‘75, our next-door neighbor was a retiree, who had a fairly tall (40’ or so) ham antenna in his back yard. He was a very nice man, and I remember him showing me some of the cards he’d gotten from other ham operators – they were more like postcards, which each operator apparently had custom-printed, with their names and operator numbers.
He and his wife sold the house a year or two later, to a younger family – but, the father of that family was also a ham operator, and had the antenna included as part of the sale.
Apparently, ham radio is still out there, but like a lot of the other hobbies noted in this thread, it’s become even more niche than it used to be.
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