Here’s one I’ll bet a lot of people on this Board won’t remember: “Washers” that have rollers to wring the clothes through with a hand crank.
I remember my grandmother had one of those. It was in what was called “the wash house” outside the main house on my grandparents’ property in a small Arkansas town. They bought the property in the early 1930s, and it must have seemed like the height of modern convenience back then.
Ditto machines and tests & homework run off in purple ink.
Reel to reel tape recorders.
Bell and Howell film projectors
metal toothpaste tubes
metal chapstick tubes
steel soda pop cans with the seam down one side
the detachable pull tabs that came off soda cans
Remember they tried to replace those with two spots on top of the can you pushed in? That didn’t go over too well. Who wants their bartender dunking his fingers in your beer? 
wow…ditto machines! I remember those!
So do I. That strange purple ink you never saw anywhere else.
And as I recall, the fumes were quite intoxicating.
One thing I remember about dittoes had to do with the letter “o”. Usually it would look like every other letter, but on most dittoes, a few O’s were represented by a very thin ring. Somehow the letter “o” was just too much for the machines to handle.
Do you mean Necco Wafers? They are still around and were just in the news last week. They are the latest casualty in politically correct food. They now have All Natural flavors. So they probably suck now.
http://www.slashfood.com/2009/10/27/necco-wafers-go-all-natural/
I recently got rid of my old slide rule.
Mangles - does anyone remember those? I had a dollhouse as a kid that had a toy mangle inside, but I don’t know if I had ever seen one for real until recently.
Do children still get copies of The Weekly Reader or My Weekly Reader in elementary school? Maybe I should check on the internet. I loved that little newspaper/magazine.
And I’m still trying to find just one more person who remembers the Saturday radio broadcast of a children’s program called “Let’s Pretend.” Cue theme music: “Cream of Wheat – It’s so good to eat and we eat it every day…” I never missed it. It was broadcast from the same studio where Leterman is now.
The old ones used to hunt the mammoth and we would feast for days after the kill. I miss those parties.
That sure looks like them, except I don’t recall them having a brand, and there was no writing on them. I suspect where I grew up in West Texas they had some sort of generic version. Of course, it’s been several decades now, but that’s not the wrapper either; it was plain wax paper as I recall.
Coal furnaces. Coal bin in the basement. Coal delivery truck backing into your driveway to dump coal down the chute into the coal bin. And let’s not forget the fascination of watching Dad shovel the coal into the furnace on cold winter nights…
Fixing the TV was another Dad job - TV’s went on the blink a lot more often back in the day. Dad would have to rummage around in the back of the set pulling out tubes and taking them up to the local hardware store to plug into the self-serve tube tester.
Ah, Weekly Reader, I remember those pretty well. My teacher scolded me for drawing a beard and stitches on Hillary Clinton’s face on the cover of one of my Weekly Readers.
Is Highlights Magazine still around?
God, those sucked. Half of the time, when a film was played, there was a stuttering motorboat engine-like sound that made the film unlistenable. “DBoBnB’tB fBoBrBgBeBtB tBhBeB fBoBuBrB mBaBjBoBrB fBoBoBdB gBrBoBuBpBsB!”
There were still a few of those in NZ when I was a kid ('80s/'90s) but they were invariably being used in on farms as a washing machine for workclothes (because they didn’t require electricity, they could be kept in paddock sheds), or by elderly people who had purchased one new in 1946, and it worked perfectly for what they needed and had never broken down since, so they kept using it.
The Buffalo News is still delivered by traditional paper routes managed by children. The sight of large, blue Buffalo News boxes on tree lawns is relatively common; it’s where the papers are dropped off to a “news mom” (it’s always a woman) that then distributes them to the kids.
Also, the Buffalo News was an afternoon paper up until a few years ago. I know a lot of people, mostly senior citizens, that won’t read the paper that was delivered in the early morning until dinnertime.
When I was a child, I remember seeing late night “racing final” editions of daily papers, which were updated to include horse racing results throughout the country. Do racing final editions still exist?
Yup, only the covers aren’t identical for each month like in the recent past. Every dentist in the US seems to have several back issues in the waiting room.
Do they play the Thai national anthem before they sign off?
Stations in Buffalo played both the Canadian and American national anthems. However, stations in Canada played the Canadian anthem followed by God Save the Queen. Gee, thanks Canada. :rolleyes: (Reminds me of the Canada-US friendship memorial in Fort Erie where the Ontario, Canadian and British flags are flown, but not the Stars and Stripes.)
I don’t think so, but I’m not sure. If I’m up that late, I’m watching BBC. Thai TV stinks even at the best of times.
I vaguely remember the national anthem playing before TV sign off (and I remember color bars and then snow after that). When I was really little, I apparently once turned off the TV just as a game my dad was watching was about to start. The national anthem played, and that meant TV was done.
Other TV-related things I remember: waiting for the TV to warm up, and watching the white dot slowly shrink and fade after turning it off. The big console TV in my grandparents’ house.
I also remember there being a cartoon before the main feature at the movie theater–at least for kid’s movies. That ended when I was pretty little, so don’t know if that was still going on for non-kid movies (this was in the 70s).
One of the toys I loved as a kid (probably late 70s/early 80s) were books full of punch-out paper dolls, buildings, etc that you could make. I had one that was a zoo, a museum, a fort and I think a colony. They were educational toys, and I remember being fascinated by them. It took quite a while to assemble all the little pieces, but then you could set them up all different ways and play with them using the little people that came with them. No idea what they were called, but I remember thinking they were pretty cool.
