I like it! But a whoosh to anyone born after the mid-80’s.
Oh yes, I remember that!
It was standard, too; it wasn’t particularly a poor-kids thing. IIRC the school gave us instructions on how to make the covers – our textbooks belonged to the school, and we were supposed to return them undamaged at the end of the year, so some kind of protection was definitely advisable. We wrote our names on the covers, and sometimes additional stuff, though I don’t remember any large degree of decoration being particularly in style.
1950’s, grade (elementary) school.
For me it was the 70s and the grocery bag was still the majority covers. Lots of doodles and/or stickers though.
My mother told me to use a lunch bag marked with my name. I was to store it in the sink cabinet and when I was done flowing, to take that bag to the garbage can. She showed me how to properly wrap and tie the napkins so the blood could not be seen. Then, boom, out with the all cotton pads and in with the thinner, sticky-back ones that couldn’t be tied shut. I showed her how to roll it up with either the original plastic wrapper or toilet paper over the sticky back so it wouldn’t open up.
Beyond that, we used grocery bags to line the trash bin in the kitchen. Sometimes it would get gross with wet food remains so we would quick double bag it and bring it out to the garbage can.
Not at all. I grew up in a pretty well-to-do town, and we all covered our books with paper bags.
I don’t remember a time before plastic bags. But i still use a fat can, which i keep in the fridge. I also collect duck fat to cook with (duck breast is a really easy meal, and delicious) but all the grade from roast chicken, hamburgers, roast lamb, etc. goes in the fat can, which i discard when it’s full.
Current situation:
We don’t get plastic bags at the grocery store anymore. Our favorite Nacho chips come in a plastic lined paper bag sort of affair. It’s one of the very few things that come into my house that is not recyclable. We use this for garbage. We usually fill one up in 3 - 4 weeks.
This is what I remember as a kid in the 80s. No idea when plastic trash bags became the norm, but I’m guessing not much past the mid-80s. On the other hand, this could also have been my parents being frugal.
I’ll raise you one more. I’m an only child (son) raised by a single mom. I can’t tell you how many times I’d come home from school to find our family dog had gotten into the bathroom trash and pulled mom’s soiled pads out and shredded them. There I’d be, a wee lad of 12 to 16, with a grocery bag on his hand picking up wet “used” cotton tufts from around the house. Easily-embarrassed kid that i was, i never had the nerve to tell my mom so she could figure out a way to keep the dog from getting them.
sigh Love ya, mom!
On topic: i remember my mom using paper grocery bags as a liner in short trash cans back in the 80s/90s. Maybe not kitchen, but bathroom, bedroom and laundry room trash cans.
Sanitary napkins were so embarrassing back then that my mother would tear the Kotex box into tiny pieces of cardboard so her nosey sons wouldn’t know what the box was for. Or that her sons might reuse the box for some school project without her knowing!
My brother started working for Mobil in the early 1970s, just as Hefty trash bags were becoming popular (Hefty was part of Mobil back then). I remember him saying “Can you believe people will buy them just to throw them away?” It seemed so wasteful at the time.
Before that, we used paper grocery bags, with the top rolled down like a cuff. They just had to make it as far as the burn barrel. Any food scraps were fed to the pets or put on the compost pile (before we knew what composting was). Tin cans were in an unlined tall trash can, and emptied into a pit at the edge of the farmstead.
Not exactly an answer to the OP, but:
We lined our outside garbage can with newspapers. Spread one on the bottom. Then drape one over the side. Repeat until all 360 degrees are covered.
The garbage pickup service required either this, or washing the can out each week, which seemed like a lot more (and dirtier) work.
Awwww… that is a sweet story.
Given the clunky nature of old-fashioned means to cope with menstruation, I’ve no doubt there are many similar stories out there. A good topic for a book, if anyone ever wanted to write it.
I still keep soup cans in the freezer for exactly this purpose, and pitch them when they’re full. I also store bones in the freezer, especially if I don’t plan to boil them for broth, in repurposed plastic bags.
My Daddy had a steady supply of wax lined brown bags. They were of a thinner paper than grocery bags, but about that size. Still strong.
We never knew where he got them.
Probably a bar or pub he hung out in.
We had trash pick up most places we lived. I remember one green can you’d put your garbage in. It was square but narrower at the top. You could lift the lid. If you weren’t careful the front would flop down and bang your knees.
I’ve decided it was a bad design.
The trash man would come and replace the bag on Mondays and Thursdays. He’d quickly flop the front down take out the bag. Do something to the top to seal it. Put in a new bag. In seconds.
I was endlessly fascinated watching it.
Hey, I was an observant kid.
We had 2 of them being a large family. They still didn’t appear to be big enough.
I don’t remember trash on the ground, ever.
A raccoon got in one once. That was fun. Daddy called the city and they sent the dog catcher. Dog catcher laughed and left, (not in his job description, I guess). I don’t remember what ever came of it.
The bag was very heavy brown paper, almost cardboard.
Yeah, another family that did the heavy paper shopping bag for the kitchen and just bare wastebaskets in the other rooms.
I can’t really place the time when plastic trash bags became ubiquitous. Trash barrels, the things you haul down to the street, could get dirty and smelly and needed washing out with the hose occasionally. The plastic barrels came around, initially just replacing the old galvanized steel cans, but soon after with fancy hinged lids, handles, and wheels. They were common before the 70s was over. Big plastic trash bags were around in the mid-70s, they could serve as luggage and clothes storage. Hefty trash bags and the like must have been everywhere I was in the early 70s. I can see at my house we had to keep using the free paper bags from the grocery store instead of paying the grocery store for plastic trash bags. I kind of recall plastic was evil by the first Earth Day, so there may have been some reluctance for some people to use plastic on that basis, but most them came around to the convenience side and save the Earth in some other way instead.
I could swear around here (Chicago) those steel garbage cans were still around in at least the early 80s. I have what I think is memories of them, but I’m not always so sure of my memories anymore, and they could be conflated with, I dunno, Sesame Street, but I swear I remember my father setting off fireworks in them c. 1984/1985.
I had a couple still in the 90s, but they were the old cans. It was amusing to try to throw one of those away after it busted open at the seam. They didn’t just take it the empty but clearly non-functional can the first time. Second time I put a sign on it that said “Please take”, so they took the sign. I had to stomp it down to the size of soccer ball and throw it another can to get rid of it.
My mother finally lined our kitchen garbage can with a plastic liner in the late 70s, but she continued to use paper bags inside of it, only changing out the plastic bag when the paper bag tore, dumping contents into the plastic. She rightfully thought that plastic was wasteful and polluting. Shamefully I use plastic, but that’s because most paper grocery bags are much weaker than they used to be.
I’m pretty sure I wasn’t regularly buying plastic trash bags until somewhere around the early 90’s, when the trash pickup people around here started saying that everything had to be so bagged or they wouldn’t take it. I remember there being a commotion from people used to using, for instance, empty livestock feed bags made out of paper or burlap.
I don’t remember when I first started seeing them in the stores, though. I think I was using plastic bags that groceries had been packed in by the grocery store by the late 80’s, but also don’t remember when that became common. For quite a while they’d ask you which you wanted; then for a while plastic bags became automatic.
In the 70’s many places would refuse to pack or to let you pack in your own bags, of any material.