Conversely previous generations threw as little as possible away. Bones from the Sunday roast could be sold off to the rag and bone man, clothes and linens would be repaired/repurposed (as a child I had several sweaters my mother had re-knitted from unravelled old ones, shirt collars could be turned, sheets worn thin in the middle could be cut and turned sides-to-middle), butter papers could be saved for greasing baking tins, wrapping paper and string could be kept for re-use - not to mention screws, nails, odds and ends of all sorts.
Some of that was the effect of WW2 shortages, but a lot was long-engrained “domestic economy”
If you buy quarts of oil for your car these days, it comes in a plastic bottle with a cap you can unscrew and a neck that facilitates easy pouring. Back in the day, cans of oil were like cans of food: a steel cylinder with a circular lid crimped on each end. When you wanted to get the oil out, you grabbed a purpose-made pour spout like the one in this picture. You jammed it into the lid on one end of the oil can, and its sharpened edge would pierce the lid and fix the spout in place. Pour your oil into your engine, remove the spout, discard the can, and on to the next.
Video here starts at the 2:00 mark and provides a 30-second demo of how you installed the spout on a can:
If your dad took care of your own cars, or if you were old enough yourself, you had one of these spouts wrapped in a rag on a shelf in your garage or basement.
In the fall we burned leaves. Eventually everybody was burning their leaves and so much smoke hung over the roads that cars began to run into trees and each other, not to mention loose piles of burning leaves at curbside, so it was soon illegal.
This is true. My mother, for instance, kept buttons; even when the garment they came from was past repair or repurposing for anything other than rags.
Despite which type of behavior, about every farm around here has an old dump site somewhere in the woods, containing remains of just about everything that was thought past reasonable use or that the household just wanted out of the way and which hasn’t yet rotted away entirely over the years. That’s what people have done since there were people, of course – but what we left behind us or dumped in the midden used to be all natural materials, which either created no problem or fairly rapidly returned to a form in which they created no problem.
Rural living lags behind in this area. We still burn things like Amazon boxes. My town had “recycling” for about a year. There was a trailer parked in town where you could bring your glass and plastic recyclables. Bars/restaurants brought their empty bottles and the town felt they were taking advantage of the service, so it was discontinued. I tried taking recyclables to neighboring towns, but they required proof of residency.
It’s probably been mentioned but I remember the paper boy coming around weekly on his bike to get paid for delivering the afternoon paper, it was small change iirc. . I suppose we tipped him a quarter. My brother had a route too, had to pay for his papers from the nickels and dimes he collected.
The morning Herald was delivered from the back of a station wagon, I dont remember how they got paid. We had milk and egg delivery for a time. Suburban S Fla, had to get up early to retrieve it before it got hot.
I remember having no ac in most places. Soon it was in vogue with a window sign advertising cold AC inside!
My brother and sister did this as teenagers in the late 1970s in Wisconsin. My brother came home one day and said that he had done seven rows that day; my parents weren’t terribly impressed, until he pointed out that each row was a mile long.
Detasseling work is usually performed by teens; as such, it serves as a typical rite of passage in rural areas of the Corn Belt of the Midwestern United States. For many teens in these areas it is their first job.
I remember those things called ‘noosepapers’ that boy was delivering. I don’t recall all the reasons people had those things delivered but I remember you could roll them up and squash bugs, start fires with them, and put them down on the floor where you expect a mess to be or use them to clean one up.
Not rare at all. One bank near us has several drive-through lanes. The one closest to the building is the drive-through ATM. The other two lanes (maybe only one?) uses pneumatic tubes.
When I used to volunteer at a hospital, they used pneumatic tubes to get medications etc. to the different floors.
My credit union just got rid of their pneumatic tubes and added 2 ATMs to each lane. They were doing it during the height of the pandemic and I had to go to a different branch to get a replacement ATM card through their pneumatic tube since nothing was open inside yet.
One of the credit unions in my town has something crazy like eight drive-through lanes, and a huge area in front for cars to wait. It looks more like a border checkpoint than a bank. There are never any cars. I’m pretty sure that it was associated with the factory that used to be right next door, and it’s built to accommodate a crush load of workers cashing paychecks at the end of a shift. I think someone made a bad bet on future trends, because it’s not that old of a building.
