Wife’s best friend’s mother - still alive, and she may be the last person around who has a memory of sitting around the kitchen table with her father while he talked with his friends, Harry Houdini and H.P. Lovecraft.
Her father was C.M. Eddy, who was (among other things) a writer of weird tales. He and Lovecraft used to walk over to Swan Point Cemetery in East Providence, RI and sit on the tombstones and discuss story ideas.
He also worked as a front man for Houdini, both in setting up before his shows as well as going around to the local mediums to figure out how they did their seances, so that Houdini could come along and publicly debunk them.
My grandma remembers walking around downtown Atlanta at night to go see a movie.
I’m in my 60’s and was “changed” this way by public school, though I don’t recall any punishment being used. Rather than ambidextrous I’m slightly clumsy with either hand :smack:, (though much better with right hand). I suspect this may be one of the sources of my neuroses. :rolleyes:
Although quite clumsy with left hand I do certain things (play cards, clasp hands, cross arms) the way a leftie does.
(PS: My daughter’s a leftie. I turned down suggestions to convert her.)
Some former co-workers of mine went to high school in the '70s and remembered that it was no big deal to bring a rifle to school if you planned on going hunting afterward.
Also when I started college in the late '90s, the students were still allowed to vote on whether or not they wanted their dorm to be smoking or non-smoking (mine voted to go smoking). That stopped the year after, and by the time I graduated I don’t think smoking was allowed inside any campus building.
They were still using dip pens (pens you dip into inkwells) when my wife was in primary school. Her phone number was 245 (that’s the whole thing) and you had to speak to an operator to make a call. Some of her friends’ houses did not have indoor plumbing.
She’s 41. She grew up in rural Ireland. I like to say that she’s from the past.
I was discharged from the Air Force as soon as I was officially pregnant, “at the convience of the government.” before that, I had to ask my commanding officer permission to marry.
Another woman in my barracks got pregnant. She was given the option of marrying the father, and being dishonorably discharged, or court-marshalled.
This is what I came in to post.
To further put it into perspective: John Tyler was president 20 years before Lincoln.
mmm
My mind is now also blown.
I’m a guy who openly took a gun to school and got away with it.
I wanted to take something for show and tell back in second grade (1967-68). I asked mom if I could take dad’s WWII Japanese sword. She said no, someone could get hurt- take this old gun instead (a Civil War era percussion cap pistol). I took it in a paper grocery bag and walked to school, but had to leave it on the classroom shelf since guns weren’t allowed in school. I suffered no penalties other than not getting to show the gun to the class.
Not quite a “still living” thing, but still something that blew my mind. I always think of the Napoleonic era as being in the dim distant past - until I saw a photograph of the Duke of Wellington. Yes, he was pretty old at the time, but still, a photograph of a major player in the Napoleonic era stunned me. I could wear photos of the Crimea and the US Civil War, but for some reason a photo of the Iron Duke just messed with my head.
here is said piccy of the Iron Duke.
He actually looks rather friendly, avuncular.
My mother (now 83) lived it. Her father joined the RAF as a young man just after WW1. He was stationed in the 20s in both Iraq and Afghanistan - heh, some things never change. In the early 30s, he was posted to British ruled India (in a part which is now Pakistan), with his whole family. My mother lived there for 5 years, catching malaria twice. She has a great sepia picture of herself on a girl guide picnic wearing a pith helmet.
There were to smoking areas just outside of my high school. I didn’t use them, but they were there.
I knew a young woman who had to get her husband’s written permission to have her tubes tied even though they were getting a divorce and he’d already had a child with another woman in addition to the four he had with her. This was in late 70’s.
My mother and all the other women in her college were basically treated like children. It goes without say that dorms were single-sex and men were not allowed upstairs, but there was a curfew of 10 pm on weeknights, 11 pm on weekends and the house mother would come outside and rush them along when they were trying to get one last kiss in on the front lawn. This was a state university, late 50’s. They were also not allowed to wear pants to class and would sneak in with pajamas under their clothing on the coldest days, of which there were many. Also, it’s been rumored by my grandmother,now dead, that my mom and her friend almost got kicked out of school because someone claimed they were lesbians.
I just Googled her and she died in December of that year. Obituary.
The one that amazed me most was that some people who were around during the Wright Brothers first flight saw Neil Armstrong walk on the moon!
When he was working as a kid in his dad’s jewelry store, my roomate used to talk to the man who owned the clothiers next door. The man would tell my roomie about when he was a kid and chatted with old Mr. Edison.
I saw comedian Jonathan Winters interviewed once. He said he grew up in Dayton, OH and shook hands with one of the Wright brothers when he was a little kid…and shook hands with Neil Armstrong when Neil returned from the moon. I’ll bet that not too many people can say that.