My Swiss Army knife got confiscated as I attempted to attend a hockey game at the Los Angeles Staples Center after 9/11.
As a junior in high school, a buddy and I would go to a pizza joint near the local college and get beer and pizza. A woman who would end up being my sister-in-law worked there at the time. She couldn’t serve us beer, however, as you had to be eighteen years old to serve, as well as buy, beer. She was more than two years older than I was. Of course, she knew me and my buddy, she was dating my older brother. This was the early 70s. A lot of things were different back then.
I’ve got one in my pocket right now. Always do; unless, these days, I’m headed into a school or a courthouse, in which case I try my best to remember to unload it into the glove compartment first.
Admittedly, around here the neighbors are less likely to be startled.
It really isn’t clear to me how people manage without a knife in their pockets. How do they ever get modern packaging open?
Yeah, I always carry a small Swiss Army knife too, and have since I was a Boy Scout. Once I had to mail it to myself from an airport (fortunately I had stamps with me, and just bought a cheap card at a Hallmark store there), and once I had to give it up when I went through a Secret Service magnetometer before going in for an Obama rally.
I carry a fingernail clipper with me all the time. The straight piece of it can be used to slice into most things. In any case, most of my need for slicing into things is when I’m at home. I grab a kitchen knife and use it to cut open packages and such.
Metal nail file. Functions much like a knife.
Or leave out filing your nails in your manicure, and you can open those packages with your nails 
.
That at least answers another major question: what do people do about unexpectedly split nails if they’ve got no Swiss army or equivalent on them?
EinsteinsHund, my nails are unfiled, roughly trimmed, and great for cleaning garlic or nipping berry stems, but if I tried to use them to open packages, I’d really need my swiss army scissors for emergency repairs on the nails!
I open my packages at home.
I was thinking of those pesky plastic wraps around CDs or DVDs. Sharp nails can work miracles on those.
I discovered the utility of metal nail files (besides using them on your nails) back in the day when one came out of Borders (or such) with a new CD and wanted to play it in the car. A Diamond Deb nail file is the perfect tool for opening those diabolically sealed CD packages. I still keep a DD in the car and I can sometimes be spotted filing my nails during traffic lights. You can get them at Sally’s.
ETA. Ninja’d. Sort of.
Ah. I was thinking of that heavy plastic casing that all too many things seem to come in these days.
needscoffee, sometimes I want to open a package away from home because that’s where I got it and also where I want to use it. And often I want to open a package somewhere at home, but I’m out in the fields or in one of the barns or in the upstairs john, or otherwise not in the kitchen next to the knives or in the office next to a desk with heavy scissors in it. (There are, admittedly, a lot of tools in the barns; but the one in my pocket is still often the easiest one to do a minor job with. And there aren’t a lot of tools in the bathroom, or a number of other places on the farm.)
Yeah, sort of, but I concur that a nail file is the perfect tool for CD packages.
I had a Brownie knife. It was just a blade. When I graduated to the junior Girl Scouts, My parents bought me the Girl Scout knife. It had a small blade, a large blade, a Phillips head, a regular screwdriver, and a leather punch, as well as the tweezers and toothpick inserted in the end. I carried it with me to school 4rd grade all the way through high school.
I still have it for sentimental reasons, although at some point I started carrying a Swiss Army knife that had a few more option-- pliers and a can/bottle opener, for one.
I don’t think I’ve ever used the blade for anything but opening packages or cutting fruit, but I’ve used everything else on it multiple times. Once used the pliers to pull a fuse on my car, and replace it with a slo-blow, which then allowed the car to go, because the bad fuse was triggering malfunction shut-down (the fuse was in the temperature sensing system).
Wish I had a nickel for everything I’ve used the screwdrivers, including the times I’ve used the flat head to pry something.
DH carries a U-tool, but I’ve never needed anything a U-tool could do that the Swiss Army knife couldn’t do.
Today depositing money into someone else’s bank account is dfficult. Not impossible, but banks have been burned too many times.
A decade ago my brother used to pay rent (to our mom) by taking her passbook to the bank. They probably would not allow that today unless he banks there too.
Passbook?
Wow. The last time I had a bank passbook was in the 80s.
There were ashtrays in the local library because you could smoke there.
There was no age to buy cigarettes. I bought them all the time for my Uncle and I was 6. They were 15 cents for the off brand, major brands were a quarter.
There was an official (listed in the handbook) student smoking area at my high school.
I could legally drink most of my senior year.
My Dad gave me a 22 rifle when I turned 12. He warned me it was NOT for shooting my pesky sister but said nothing about my brother. Hmm.
They sold tap beer, West Bend Lithia, at the movie theater as far back as 1968. It was decades before I saw that anywhere else.
You could buy tap beer to go at the local A&W in a cardboard pinch top container. They brought it right out to your car.
I walked home from every school I went to. Starting at age 5.
I grew up across the street from a large park where the Milwaukee River flowed through. Went down by the river by myself as young as 4.
The hardware store in my home town still sells any kind of gun you want.
This was the America I grew up in, and it was pretty goddamned glorious.
My dad is a retired firefighter, and Jarts was one toy we were never allowed to have. I suspect he saw a few serious injuries from those. Nowadays, I have a booth at an antique mall, and saw a set for sale. I told the owners that I wasn’t sure it was legal to sell them; of course, it’s legal to own them, but I’m not so sure about re-selling them.
Candy cigarettes are still available, usually at specialty candy stores.
What about the fact that a husband could rape his wife with no repercussions, blacks being forced to sit in the backs of buses and gay people forced to live lives In shame and misery?
Those were definite shortcomings of post-WWII America.