Sometimes I’m reminded of something that anyone who was of a certain time and place would know, but maybe most anyone else wouldn’t know. I’ll give my example and I think you’ll know what I mean:
NO ASSING ROUGH
If you rode Boston’s subway in the 80s (and probably before, but I was born in 1973) you would know this. The cars had notices on the doors between them which said “NO PASSING THROUGH.” But the signs were just vinyl letters that could be easily scraped off with a thumbnail. So every door on every car was quickly modified by someone to read “NO ASSING ROUGH”
ETA: I tried to get the spacing right, for example a double space between no and assing, to represent the missing “p” but the software seems to be deleting the extra spaces.
I lived in the Boston area from 1976 to 1982 and took the T all the time, but don’t remember seeing those modified signs. So maybe it started after 1982, or maybe I have just forgotten.
An English class in my high school was assigned to read Othello, and everyone had paperback copies with printing on the cover that could easily be erased. So most of the class sported copies of a book called “O hell”.
The town I grew up in had a drive-in movie. It closed in the early 1980s. The last movie shown there had the marquee sabotaged and no one corrected it; the lot and marquee were bulldozed several months later, but until then the display read:
Outside Pontiac, Illinois on I-55 there’s a Wally’s, a giant gas station/convenience store/gift shop. One of the Men’s rooms is also marked as a CHILD (c)HANGING STATION.
One of the particle physics labs I worked at had a “mezzanine”-type level, the door to which was labeled “CLOSED TO CASUAL VISITORS”. The sign got changed to “CLOSED TO CAUSAL VISITORS”, which is hilarious to quantum physicists, which we all were.
One of the labs I worked at had a divot in one of the walls, almost at the roof. Someone placed a sign saying “On <date>, a top quark passed through here”. Also hilarious.
This one is extremely specific; there are only about 50 of us who would remember it.
When I first began at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1983, the legal drinking age in Wisconsin was 18, and so, drinking was legal in the dorms, including in public areas of the dorms, such as hallways and the “dens” which each dorm house had.
By the start of my junior year in 1985, the drinking age had gone up to 19 (and was in the process of creeping up to 21), and University Housing had to change its rules, making it illegal to drink in public portions of the dorms (it was still legal to drink in one’s room, if the resident(s) of that room were of legal drinking age).
Due to this rule change, Housing installed placards on the wall in every dorm den, which read:
One of the guys in my dorm used Wite-Out to modify the sign in our den, by covering most of the letters, so it read:
I was there at the last west side story style gang fight in my area. I was only 10 at the time so I wasn’t actively involved. The big fight started brewing about 1 year earlier, I think it started over a girl. We had a local drive in that was right on the boundary of Gardena, Hawthorne and Lawndale. We all hung out there and for the most part we got along but stayed with our own city. I don’t know the details but a fight broke out over a girl between the presidents of two rival clubs. After that tensions remained high and small fights were breaking out at least once a week. It got to the point where the police were cruising through all the time and even spent a lot of time parked there. A few months went by and we were having a party at my house. Around 11 pm about 20 car loads filled up my street and came in to my yard and the fight was on. Our side won that one, even my dad got into that one swinging a shovel. The next day neighbors were finding pipes and clubs and knives strewn all over the street. That is when both sides went into planning for the big one. Lawndale and Hawthorne teamed up and the Gardena boys enlisted Inglewood to come help us out. I am pretty sure there were informants on both sides as the police seemed well aware of every move anyone was making. We had a store of homemade weapons up under our house. Pipes with chains attached, Billy clubs, homemade brass knuckles, Leather black jacks, studded collars. there we several false starts where the police showed up right before it started. On the night the fight finaly happened it was because the location of the fight was known only to the leaders on each side and they just caravaned over to the spot. I would estimate about 200 fighters showed up. The spot the picked was the back side of Alondra park right next to El Camino college. The fight got started quickly and was very chaotic, some guys were chasing and some were running and some were in the middle fighting. I think the cops showed up in less than 5 minutes and there were a lot of them. I didn’t hear of any injuries worth mentioning. But ofter that the police from both cities called for a meeting of the gangs and they all sat around and talked it out. A couple weeks later we were attending dances together. Nothing like that ever came up again.