Medical leeches are still used today.
We had a smoking lounge for students in my high school in the late 70s.
My Aunt, who died only ten days ago, experienced all of the following:
[ul]
[li]Catching the Spanish flu as a toddler[/li][li]Growing up without electricity, gas, or a washing machine (kerosene lamps, wood cookstove and a washboard were used)[/li][li]Farming with plow horses, not tractors[/li][li]Walking several miles daily to a one-room school in high-button shoes, stockings, knee-length bloomers and dress[/li][li]At 14, taking a job as a maid ‘in town’ so that she could go to high school[/li][li]All of the Great Depression (she had some amazing stories)[/li][li]All of her brothers going off to fight in WWII[/li][/ul]
There are certainly people still alive from the era when pretty much all mainline trains were hauled by steam locomotives.
I guess all the stories about people without electricity and traveling in horse-drawn vehicles are trumped by old order Amish, who still do that by choice. OTOH, when my then-girlfriend and I visited her uncle’s farm in Zimbabwe in the mid-'90s, he and his wife still were without full-time electricity and water was heated in a wood-fired tank, but I’m pretty sure they would have much preferred otherwise. They did have a small Honda generator that they would fire up for an hour or two each night.
The one that really flabbergasts me, however, is how open and blatant racism was when I was a kid, and even into my 20s. I can recall that the local parent-teacher organization at my (all-white) school district in western PA would put on yearly minstrel shows, which would prominently feature some of the parents singing and dancing in blackface. That would have been the early '60s.
In the same vein, it was well-known amongst the employees of the railroad I worked for, in the mid-late '70s, that African-Americans had no hope of getting a job there. In a town with at least 20% black population, the railroad had a total of two, out of a work force of about 500.
My paternal grandfather was a Civil War vet. For part of the war he was imprisoned at Camp Douglas which was in Chicago. My dad used to listen to Granddaddy and his brothers talk about the war. They knew Jesse James and he would visit from time to time. But my dad died over 20 years ago, so this doesn’t officially fit the topic.
My mother will be 98 in January. Like purplehaze’s, aunt, she remembers having the Spanish flu about the time WWI ended. She and her siblings took a horse and wagon to school in high school. There was someone there to take care of all of the farm kids’ horses.
When I visited maternal grandparents and various aunts and uncles as a child, there was no running water. The out house was on the other side of the fence and I was always afraid one of the cows would get me. Sometimes I wasn’t allowed to play outside because the Romas were driving a “caravan” through.
The name of that community was China Grove. It consisted of a few houses, a school for the little kids, and a church. That general area for several miles around was and is known as Skullbonia. The main town in Skullbonia is Skullbone. All there is to see is a store and post office combination. A lot of country music was born behind that store in the early decades of the last century. Now they have occasional concert celebrations. It draws a bizarre crowd of country, rock, and blues lovers. Some Blacks attend in spite of some folks selling Klan items. People sleep in trees if they are lucky enough to get there early enough to get one. Famous musicians drop in from all over.
No, I haven’t been there during one of the concerts. But it is kind of strange thinking of Led Zepplin playing only a few miles from where I would play in the dirt road with my dolls. In China Grove, the house, the barns, and even the woodlot are all gone now. It is plowed fields. That’s where I spent every Christmas Day with my cousins growing up. You can’t tell that a family of eleven once had a home there at all. My mother is the only one still living.
Purplehaze, I offer my sympathy for your aunt’s passing.
My grandfather was born in 1913. His first memory is of the end of the Great War.
He is ailing, but still alive.
We didn’t have a smoking lounge for students, but smoking was allowed outside the doors by students. This was as late as 1990. One of the teachers’ smoking lounge was the Mac lab. Of course back then, the only students that really used the lab were us, the journalism students.
I’m 51, and my father was 66 when I was born. So he was born in 1893, 10 years before the Wright brothers flew. He lived to see the Apollo landings. It wasn’t until after his death that I understood why he was so excited about them.
I remember a column George Will wrote about Strom Thurmond. He noted that Thurmond had first been elected to public office in South Carolina in the 1920s, so he had presumably received votes from Civil War veterans. And that almost certainly all of them were Confederates.
That story, like others in this thread, underscore how the past is more of an influence on the present than most people realize on a daily basis.
Ha! Yeah, we had that at my high school until 1992.
I’ll see your school smoking area and raise you an “open campus” policy.
I’m 40, and my high school’s policy was that you could come and go as you pleased. They took attendance in homeroom and in each class. But you didn’t need a pass to walk the halls or leave / enter the school.
That’s probably unheard of today. As it was, mine was the last graduating class to enjoy that policy. Now the school more closely resembles Stalinist Russia in terms of security.
I left secondary school in 2000 and female students weren’t allowed to wear trousers or leggings then either. The ban was finally lifted a few years after I left. I bet there’s thousands of schools in the UK that still enforce it, though.
My Great Uncle Eddie once gave a talk to the family describing the process of turning a field using horse-drawn plow. He really loved those horses, enough that he spent his lunch break sharpening the plow to ease their burden. . .
I’ve talked here before about my Dad walking the streets of downtown Concord NH looking for a job in his high school years. All the “Help Wanted” signs also said “No Irish Need Apply.” When he walked into the Hardware Store he realized that the only signs they had for sale said that. If you didn’t wanted to exclude Irish applicants you’d have to buy one and cut it in half, or make your own. Entrenched prejudice IOW. He felt about JFK much the way many Americans now feel about President Obama.
When I was in Elementary School, I was forced to write with my right hand. It was considered OK by then for a boy to be left handed (the mid-70’s) but left unaddressed in a girl it could lead to such pursuits as ::gasp:: engineering.
I’m only in my 20’s and I’m still surprised that people would ask “smoking or non” or “paper or plastic” in most places just 10-15 years ago. When I started college in 2000, there were ash trays bolted to the doorways in most buildings. Some time after I graduated, it became a smoke free campus. I’m sure I’ll be mentioned in a future thread like this for those things.
From the George Burns and Gracie Allen Show (radio)
…And now back to your regularly scheduled thread
My mom is 62. She still remembers Indians in covered wagons coming by the farm on their way to the fair in town every summer. They would trade for butter and stuff like that.
She also rode in a wagon to school in the winter with her siblings, there was this coal heater thing that I don’t quite understand even now that she was afraid would tip over and start the wagon on fire.
The one room schoolhouse she attended was later part of the land that she and my father bought to start their farm. They renovated it into the home I grew up in. The kids used to scratch their names into the bricks from the chimney, Mom and Dad tried to track down as many of those people as possible to give them the bricks when they dismantled the chimney.
My dad is 69. He remembers using a sickle to cut down wheat and then bundling it.
My grandmother was born in the 1880s. She used to tell me about when she was a little girl.
When her family moved to this country they lived in a cave by the river for one very cold Winter. It wasn’t the kind of cave structured from limestone. In was more of a large hole in the mud. Later they were able to construct a soddy - a little house made out of earth which was pretty strong as the prairie grass had sturdy roots. She remembered twisting prairie grass in the Fall to serve as firewood for the coming Winter.
When my daughter was fifteen, in the Eighties, she returned home from school one day sobbing. When asked what was the matter she told me that she could hardly walk down the halls without her male classmates making comments and even grabbing at her breasts.
That was still going on? I thought our generation had made some progress in stopping sexual harrassment.
I went to high school with a similar family - they got their indoor plumbing when we were in middle school - 1978 or thereabouts.
This isn’t the middle of no where either - this is 20 minutes from downtown St. Paul, Minnesota (which, I know, is LIKE the middle of nowhere to someone from the coast, but trust me - this is NOT the middle of nowhere Minnesota - I’ve been there…)
Oh, I went to school on a bus with an armed Federal Marshall because they were integrating the school system and people were threatening to blow up the buses. I’m 44.
Here’s one that blows my mind. John Tyler, 10th president of the US, was born in 1790. Here’s the mind-blowing part: he has two grandchildren who are still alive!
In 1853, when John Tyler was 63, he had a son, Lyon Gardiner Tyler. He was a busy old chap too, and had sons Lyon Gardiner Tyler, Jr. in 1924, and Harrison Ruffin Tyler in 1928. Both sons are still alive. 220 years, and 94% of the United States’ own lifetime, spanned by three generations.
Without reading the rest of this thread …
… fought in World War II. In about 15 to 20 years, WWII vets will become quite rare; like WWI vets 10 years ago.
… are grandchildren of slaves and Civil War veterans.
… rode streetcars and interurbans to work. (Before the light rail revival, of course.)
… used iceboxes with actual ice.
… used telephones without dials: “Number please?”
I’m 44, and I remember horse-drawn rag men and knife sharpeners on my street when I was a kid. Yes, this was in the United States.