I actually bought a box of those when I was in Japan. Just for the novelty of buying a racist mexican candy in Japan.
My grandmother used to read me Little Black Sambo when I was little which is considered extremely offensive to black people these days and has mostly been pulled from the shelves. Of course, Little Black Sambo wasn’t black (African) at all. He was Indian and the author lived in India for for much of her life. There aren’t even any wild tigers in Africa. The book may be offensive to Indian people for all I know and I could understand that but it doesn’t bode well intellectually for anyone that thinks it is about people of African descent.
When I was a kid in Louisiana, drinking and driving (in the literal sense) was perfectly fine. It was technically illegal to be over the limit but you would have to be absolutely shitfaced to get busted for it. My father would let us (very young) kids ride in the back of the pickup because we loved it so much. He would have a twelve pack on the passenger floor and a beer in one hand. He got stopped a few times but the beer and us riding in the pickup bed was never an issue.
Even when I was in college in New Orleans in the 1990’s, we still had drive-through daquari shops. Before I moved, they had a “big crackdown” and technically would only sell you the number of people in the car minus one in hopes that the driver would be the one that didn’t get one but that didn’t usually work out in practice.
It’s complex. All you say is true, but in the earliest editions, Sambo still looks like a caricature of an African boy, not an Indian one. His parents look pretty obviously black, and their names – Mumbo and Jumbo – were stereotypical “African” names , and they look African in their depictions. It’s true that there weren’t tigers in Africa, but Edgar Rice Burroughs had one there in his first Tarzan book (later changed to a lion in subsequent editions).
See here: http://www.ferris.edu/JIMCROW/picaninny/
*We get the modern word “Jumbo” from P.T. Barnum’s elephant, who had his name changed to “Jumbo” because it sounded more “African” than his original name
Actually, the Wikipedia article claims that the very earluiest illustration did show Indian characters, although that doesn’t excuse the names. And the illustration attached to the article doesn’t seem very far removed from pickaninny stereotypes.* Later editions generally did use African characters:
*I wonder how “Southern Indian” people feel about Sambo and the book. Nobody ever says. Are they offended?
Verse 2:
For every seed I sow
An apple tree will grow
And soon there’ll be apples there
For everyone in the world to share
The Lord is good to meeeeeeeeeeee
Bridge
Here am I
Blue, blue sky
Doing as I please
Living in God’s wilderness
Thankful to be free…
Repeat the first verse
I still don’t get the terminology. “A quarter” means the single coin that is worth $0.25. If I didn’t care how many coins I got, I’d ask for “twenty-five cents.”
If someone asked me for a quarter, I would either give them the single coin, or say, “I don’t have a quarter, but I’ve got two dimes and a nickel.” Likewise, if my wife said, “Do you have a twenty?” I’d either hand her a bill with Andrew Jackson’s face on it or say, “no, but I have a five, a ten, and five ones.”
Still don’t understand why “case quarter” would be necessary, much less where the “case” modifier came from.
… the sun and the rain and the apple trees… 
We sing this at my preschool all the time as grace before snacktime. It is a church-based school, though.
I guess my mind works differently. If someone asks for a quarter, or a dollar, or even a ten spot, I will give them the amount they ask for, not paying attention to how I made it. I grew up in the South, and still had not heard of a “case quarter” until about the early 80’s. Urban dictionary seems to support my definition, but does not really explain why it is a case quarter.
SSG Schwartz
I used to manage an apartment complex for the mentally ill. One of our residents (who had a dual MI/MR diagnosis) had the hobby of walking door to door through neighborhoods and apartment complexes asking “Do you have a case quarter for two dimes and a nickel?”, and if the answer was yes he’d trade and go to the next door to ask “Have you got two dimes and a nickel for a case quarter?” It gave him pleasure and hurt nobody and he was so obviously ‘impaired’ that nobody ever called the cops (though to my knowledge he wasn’t breaking any laws anyway).
So, back during my senior year in high school, I was the school newspaper editor. I saved all the papers from the time I started school to the time I graduated, and I’m going to be scanning all of them in as part of a Class of '84 effort to save and share the ephemera we might have held on to for 25-plus years.
I’m looking though some of the old papers and thought “wow, this would NEVER see the light of day nowadays”, at least those that weren’t published under my watch. Let’s see …
-
Ethnic jokes. (none racial, but still …)
-
A final edition one year where various teachers were “scissorshopped”, for lack of a better word. Nothing extraordinary in that, except for the minstrel lips on a black teacher. (This was an integrated public high school, FWIW.)
-
Liquor store ads. (The drinking age was 18 in NYS until 1992.)
-
Open reference to the “special” students as “romps”. (The school required passing a difficult exam for admission, but was still required to have a certain number of mentally challenged students.) (Okay, there were references to romps under my watch in some of the personal ads.)
-
Articles literally cut and pasted from other sources. (Copyright? What’s that?)
-
Christmas editions with no reference to Hanukkah. (The school had a good amount of Jewish students.)
Where does the term “romps” come from?
High school pep rally- about 1979: Our rival is a school whose cartoon mascot is a “Kentucky colonel” caricature, whose flag is the Stars & Bars (there’s only been a fuss over that in the past decade), and whose team name is “the Rebels”.
We are “the Cubs”- our mascot of course being a big “Bear Cub”.
Pep rally skit- Hooded robed Klansman (supposed to represent “the Rebels”) chases our black cheerleader who is rescued by the Cub who beats down the Klansman.
Even then, I was amazed.
Btw, I have no doubt that said cheerleader probably wrote the skit!
Mid-1970s: For several years, the Evangelical, near-Fundamentalist church I attended had a full-blown monster-costumes, Haunted-House, creepy-decorations Halloween party. NOT a Harvest Party or a Hallelujah Party, but a HALLOWEEN Party.
Then one year, they didn’t have it & no one would say why.
J’accuse Mike Warnke!
This is all coming back to me after 25 years: the “special” kids were bussed in for a few hours every day to take a wood shop class, and then bussed back to another school. Students called that wood shop the “Romper Room”, and thus the word “romps” for the inhabitants.
When I left West Virginia in 2004, there was still no state open container law per se. There was a post-prohibition era law against drinking liquor or wine in a vehicle, but beer was specifically exempt. However, most municipalities had their own city open container ordinances that made it illegal. So you had a hodge-podge of different jurisdictions treating it differently, and if you got pulled over, even though you wouldn’t get a ticket for drinking the beer, you could be damned sure that you would be doing field sobriety tests. That made it not worth it.
I remember that each year the state lost federal highway money for not having a comprehensive open container policy, so they have probably changed it by now. But who knows..
Back in the days…,
Halloween sure was loads of fun then. In 1981 three black girls at my school dressed as Klansmen and everyone thought it was hilarious. Then I went home from school and dressed as one of the Munich terrorists. I had a damn fine time lunging out the front door with my toy AK47 and hand grenade yelling “Freeze! Ziz is a terror attack! Accept zee candy or you vill die!” every time a little kid showed up.
Later I gave the terrorist outfit to my brother, who I’m sure had a jolly time roaming the neighborhood unescorted by any adults while dressed as a terrorist.
[quote=“FriarTed, post:373, topic:492561”]
High school pep rally- about 1979: Our rival is a school whose cartoon mascot is a “Kentucky colonel” caricature, whose flag is the Stars & Bars (there’s only been a fuss over that in the past decade), and whose team name is “the Rebels”.QUOTE]
Are you really sure it was the “Stars & Bars” and not the later and more common “Southern Cross” which is the flag most people think of when they think of a Confederate flag?
It’s pretty much been covered, but…
[ul]
[li]Smoking was EVERYWHERE.[/li][li]Candy cigarettes.[/li][li]Corporal punishment was MUCH more common.[/li][li]Going into any house or building under construction. My mother instigated this. The houses were unlocked until they installed the appliances. Her father was a builder and this was apparently totally acceptable.[/li][li]My parents having cocktail and bridge parties, and my sister and I would roam around serving cheese and crackers.[/li][li]School served fish every Friday.[/li][li]We could see the Nike missile base on the next mountain from the school playground. We all knew it was there to protect us from the Russians invading.[/li][li]Women would go out wearing big pink curlers. The modest ones would put a scarf over it all.[/li][li]Girlfriends and boyfriends holding hands was considered poor behavior. My mother told me never to do it (when I was too young to have a boyfriend anyway!).[/li][li]Drills in school to go out in the halls to simulate protecting ourselves from the Russian planes with nukes.[/li][li]Fallout shelters.[/li][li]Cars did not have seat belts in back and the heater did not heat up the back, so we used a blanket.[/li][li]Group showers in gym were mandatory unless having your period. The gym teacher parked herself outside the shower and checked off our names as we came out. If we were menstruating we had to walk up to her and say “PERIOD!” She said she was checking for health reasons.[/li][li]Going into Washington Square Park to get high (that was later… 
).[/li][/ul]
We don’t need no education…
School was a hoot back then too. We had a couple senile teachers–one got lost in the cafeteria and a student had to go look for her and another had the hots for Stalin. This was years after he died.
Then there was the social studies teacher, who weighed roughly 400 pounds and freely admitted to smoking dope. One day he didn’t show up for school and the substitute said he was sick.
“No way” said a few of the students. " We saw him staggering out of a bar drunk last night!"
The substitute insisted he was just sick, and the next day he showed up to work looking fine. It was a long time before I wondered what a group of 14 years olds had been doing at a bar in the first place.
[quote=“Ronald_C.Semone, post:377, topic:492561”]
You’re right. I actually never thought about there being a difference.