Yup. Still comes out of Columbus, Ohio.
My kids get Highlights .
Catholic grade school, we had harps.
Speaking of Highlights, at work we get a sample copy from time to time and I must confess sometimes I do the “find the object” game. Occasionally I miss one of those pesky things.
One of the cheap candies was called candy buttons, little dots of candy in three rows, stuck on long strips of paper. I could never get the candy off without a little piece of paper on it. There were also Nik-L-Nips which were tiny wax bottles, each with about half an ounce of sweet flavored liquid inside. Some kids would chew on the bottle when it was empty. Ick.
Our town of about 60,000 had two dairies, Best-Ever and Davis, with home delivery routes. Most homes had a little insulated metal dairy box on the porch. There was also the Omar bakery man. We quit the Omar man, because he would con our babysitter into taking extra stuff Mom had not ordered.
At one time in the late 1950s, Mom’s Chevy and Evil Dad’s Buick both had the fuel fillers concealed behind the tail lights. Some parents would play a trick on their kids with the windshield wipers. The wiper motor ran on engine vacuum. The dad would have a kid put a hand on the inside of the windshield, and the dad would push on the gas pedal to drop the vacuum and stop the wiper. For a while, the kid would think his hand could stop the wipers.
When I was, oh, maybe 12, we heard somewhere that if we wiped toothpaste on the outside of menthol cigarettes, let it dry, and smoked them, we’d get woozy, sorta drunk. We tried it, and got sorta dizzy. However, being non-smoking 12-year-olds, simply smoking cigarettes would have gotten us woozy.
There’s a joke among midwestern housewives of that generation that a gal could call herself an experienced and adventurous cook if she was on her second bottle of Tobasco Sauce. 
What about caps as in cap guns, do they still make them? There were two kinds, the red paper rolls with little bumps of powder and the yellow plastic rings with pellets.
Not if you know how it’s pronounced. Sook-uhm-wit
Sort of like how Phuket Island, with many similar denizens, is not pronounced the way you’d think. But Koh Phi Phi is pronounced sort of like “Go Pee Pee”. Sort of (the “Go” has more a glottal stop than an aspirated vowel at the end).
Don’t forget the round green ones with stickum. Either worked well when hit with a brick.
Both still available
This past Sunday morning (8 Nov 2009), I went to buy the Sunday NY Daily News - the store had 2 editions mixed in the stack, one a ‘City Final’, and one the ‘Racing Final’ - each with 2 different headline stories. Scanning through the front pages, the Racing Final seemed the later one (with the House HCR vote on the front page, and a illegal apartment blaze story inside, as opposed to the City Final which had the apartment blaze on the front page, and no House vote story), so I took the Racing final.
I guess that means racing trumps the city or something, I don’t know…
Long time ago? My wife was pregnant with our first kid when the 2600 came out. Almost yesterday. And yes, I have an Atari 2600 clone build into a joystick only slightly bigger than the original which plugs into the TV and has a dozen or so games on it, including Adventure. I also have a PS2 disk with a few dozen Activision games.
What I miss are continuous showing movies. In the old days you could go into a neighborhood theater any time, in the middle of a show, and stay as long as you wanted. No one kicked you out between showings.
Community-supported agriculture. I’ve also heard it called community shares agriculture. You buy a share (usually multiple share sizes depending on the number in your family) and they bring you a portion of the stuff that’s harvested each week.
Pretty cool, although you get a lot of food, and don’t have any control over what you get. You could end up with a big batch of fennel and rutabagas one week, sending you running to the internet to find out 1) what are these things and 2) what do I do with them.
If you’re interested in hearing it again, the OTRR Library has an archive of around fifty episodes, likely all that survive. The archive is password protected but free, you just need to contact them and request a “library card”. It’s a wonderful resource for anyone who likes old radio programming!
Well, I’ll be. In my grandparents’ time, though, it was high technology. And this one in the link has an engine, so the washer part is still automated; I can’t remember if my grandmother’s was, but I don’t think so. It was still hand wash.
The ones I remember all had an engine for washing and that would extend back to the late 50’s. Their predecessor was known as a “copper” (at least here).
Today, after seeing one on the road (in the United States) for the first time in a decade or more, I’ll add cab-over tractor trailers to the list.
COE (Cab over engine) tractors mostly died out in the USA because government regulations changed, making them no longer needed. They are still fairly common in Europe, where those regulations are still enforced.
There used to be safety regulations which limited the maximum length of a tractor/semi-trailer unit. So cab-over tractors were used, because they are shorter, allowing a longer semi-trailer (thus more cargo space) while still fitting within the maximum length. Now, most of the US (& Canada, I think) either has no such limits, or has limits only on the length of trailers/semi-trailers, not counting the tractor. So there is no longer an advantage to using cab-over tractors.
And there is a dis-advantage, since they are mechanically more complex, less reliable, and harder to maintain. Thus the only cab-over tractors you are likely to see in North America are old ones that are still running. (At least, over the road. Many trucking yards still have old cab-over tractors used as yard tractors, where their shorter length & high vantage points are useful.)
Letraset.
I believe the company still exists, but I don’t think it’s really used that much these days.
Didn’t see 'Lil Hugs in my then white-with-a-few-blacks-here-and-there neighborhood until the early 1980s, when black residents began to move in en masse.
I grew up in a very Italian section of Trenton, NJ - there are a lot of black residents in Trenton, but not (at the time) where I lived. But the grocery stores all had huge displays of Lil’ Hugs - a flat of 24 for like $3.00…
Joe