I have a vague memory of the “ashtray” in some car having a warning it wasn’t for cigarettes. There was a little box where the ashtray would normally be, but I guess it was for storing stuff and the plastic may not have been sufficient to stand up to the heat of a lit cigarette. Does that ring a bell with anyone or am I misremembering?
Coin holder, I think.
Activists. I remember one who was doing the rounds of talk shows, promoting laws against it. She lived in New York and talked about taking fecal samples to be tested and then taking the results to politicians when she lobbied. She had lists of all of the worms that were piled on the street with the poop, and which ones could be picked up by, say barefoot children.
Yes, people got tired of it. But some people worked to get the laws enacted.
I had a car with that- it had the socket for the lighter and an ashtray holder made of plastic for the front seat (with the warning that “THIS IS NOT AN ASHTRAY”) and indentations for ashtrays in the back seats. If you bought the optional “smoker’s package” you got the ashtrays and the lighter.
Now the cars don’t even have a place to put ashtrays - you can get one that fits in the cupholder but that’s it.
In the dustbin:
Turning on a radio or TV and waiting for the tubes to warm up, so the sound and/or picture would actually come on.
Turning the TV off and seeing the screen collapse to a dot of light.
Taking the tubes out of the TV or radio and taking them to the testing machine in the back of the drugstore. (I knew someone who did this but forgot to write down which tube went in which socket. It did not end well.)
There used to be a way of tuning to a certain channel and adjusting the TV so that a lightning storm would show up as flashes of light on the screen, and if a tornado was getting too close he screen would go completely white. I think that Popular Science or Popular Mechanics magazine did an article about this.
Does your new TV have horizontal and vertical hold adjustments?
In my house, if you leave a dresser drawer open, the next thing you know, a cat will be sitting on your clean underwear.
Yes, but I have lost control of them.
Mine open the drawers themselves. sigh.
A friend of mine was watching tv. He left the room to get a beer and said to his kids, “Don’t change the dial!”
They stared at him and said, “What does that mean?”
[quote=“Procrustus, post:195, topic:927703, full:true”]
A story from a few years before I was born.
My mother emigrated from Jugoslavia to Canada twice. Once in 1974 (or thereabouts) with her first husband and once in 1981 with my father and me.
The first time around, she would send her parents regular letters as long-distance phone calls were considered too expensive. One day, however, there was a postal strike. She was very concerned about her parents knowing she was safe. But rather than exceptionally make a long-distance call, she and her husband got into the car and drove to the USA to mail a letter from there, where there was no strike! I don’t know if that really saved them money over a long-distance call or if they just perceived things that way. They drove from Toronto/Mississauga all the way to Buffalo NY just to mail a letter.
That’s 70 or so miles. Even at only .25 a mile operating cost, that’s still close to 20 dollars. Interesting. Of course I have no idea what a long distance phone call would have cost then
If her family almost never made them, and especially if they already thought the family had reason to be worried about their safety, they may also have been concerned about scaring the hell out of her parents when they called. It would have been like a call at three in the morning – you expect to hear something dreadful.
(My family made long-distance calls often enough that that wouldn’t have been an issue; but some people almost never did.)
Note that calling overseas wasn’t easy in those days. As I remember, you called the operator and told her that you wanted to place an overseas call. They arranged it and then called you back later when they’d made the connection. I think there was limited bandwidth, so you had to essentially wait in line for your call.
I suspect that calling Yugoslavia from Canada was especially difficult. Though Yugoslavia was a special case in the Eastern block and not as isolated as other communist countries, at least I think it was a special hurdle for communication. And I guess that relatively few Yugoslavian households had private phones, which would have been another obstacle.
My hometown paper from a small town in South Dakota has a “50 years ago” section. 50 years ago in 1971 the school board reconfirmed that girls in high school could not wear slacks or pants to school. I think the policy was changed the next year (following the retirement of the old codger principal).
My high school had so many dress codes and regulations… Looking through my yearbook (1963), everybody looked like they were dressed the same.
Even within Canada in the late 50’s, I remember my parents making long-distance calls to the Wet Coast on Christmas Eve, and having to wait for the operator to call them back when a line was available. (and - of course - we had to call after 11 pm to get the “night rates”).
Oh, yeah. Night rates. One of my college roommates would call his girlfriend (several states away) from a payphone after 11 to get the cheaper rates.
I can remember getting detailed phone bills and then pointing out to my wife that if she had waited 5 more minutes to call her grandparents, after 5 pm, we’d have saved money we could have really used at the time.
This was in the late 90s