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For your viewing amusement.
Operators: Where I grew up there were still local operators but mostly they handled long distance calls and did directory searches for people without access to a phone book. My grandmother in Kansas had an old-fashioned phone on the wall with a crank handle instead of a dial. That part of the country obviously still had local operators doing their old jobs in front of an old-time switch board like in the video. No one knew that even the phone books would eventually be gone. Two bits of trivia: early on, all telephone operators were men. You hear the song Pennsylvania 6 5000 in the background, which people in the day knew meant the phone number was PE6-5000. The phone company (Bell was a monopoly most places) phased out the old mnemonic exchanges for all numbers on the basis that operators (who no one was using anymore) could understand and remember all numbers easier. You be the judge.
Typist: Teaching us all typing in Junior High ruined the world, or maybe not. Basically you don't need a typist for a business e-mail. Actually this part of the video reminds me that trade schools about the time I was finishing grad school were advertising on TV to get kids to sign up to learn how to operate key punch machines. I think I last time I saw a machine that would read a punch card was seven or eight years earlier.
Milk man: We had a milk man from the local dairy till I was in high school. I don't remember ours ever delivering in the quart bottles shown in the video. We got half-gallons that were heavy and slippery. It was really best to pick them up with both hands. If you ordered ahead you could get chocolate milk, and butter. Not sure whether our service ever had eggs... When I was little it was fun once in a while to ask the milk man for a piece of ice when he came by. It was clear ice, obviously chipped from a large block. They needed it for those houses where no one would be home for the delivery. They had boxes (usually set on back porches) that would hold four half-gallons bottles and some ice to keep it cool till folks got home.
Soda jerk: They only had soda jerks in built up areas. By my time drug stores would have a place called a lunch counter a place to sit down and have a coke and a hot dog and maybe a piece of pie (a busy person's diner) and they still sometimes called that a soda fountain, and sometimes they called the guy working there a soda jerk, but I don't think it was quite the same thing anymore. No soda jerks now, but no shortage of other jerks. ;o)
Western Union Messengers: Like passenger trains, Western Union telegrams went out of fashion most places with the end of World War Two. Getting a telegram usually meant very bad news during the war. After the war most people got telephones and had no real need of telegraph service. Western Union still will accept and send money across the country and across world. But even that has had a bad reputation for decades.
Operators: Where I grew up there were still local operators but mostly they handled long distance calls and did directory searches for people without access to a phone book. My grandmother in Kansas had an old-fashioned phone on the wall with a crank handle instead of a dial. That part of the country obviously still had local operators doing their old jobs in front of an old-time switch board like in the video. No one knew that even the phone books would eventually be gone. Two bits of trivia: early on, all telephone operators were men. You hear the song Pennsylvania 6 5000 in the background, which people in the day knew meant the phone number was PE6-5000. The phone company (Bell was a monopoly most places) phased out the old mnemonic exchanges for all numbers on the basis that operators (who no one was using anymore) could understand and remember all numbers easier. You be the judge.
Typist: Teaching us all typing in Junior High ruined the world, or maybe not. Basically you don't need a typist for a business e-mail. Actually this part of the video reminds me that trade schools about the time I was finishing grad school were advertising on TV to get kids to sign up to learn how to operate key punch machines. I think I last time I saw a machine that would read a punch card was seven or eight years earlier.
Milk man: We had a milk man from the local dairy till I was in high school. I don't remember ours ever delivering in the quart bottles shown in the video. We got half-gallons that were heavy and slippery. It was really best to pick them up with both hands. If you ordered ahead you could get chocolate milk, and butter. Not sure whether our service ever had eggs... When I was little it was fun once in a while to ask the milk man for a piece of ice when he came by. It was clear ice, obviously chipped from a large block. They needed it for those houses where no one would be home for the delivery. They had boxes (usually set on back porches) that would hold four half-gallons bottles and some ice to keep it cool till folks got home.
Soda jerk: They only had soda jerks in built up areas. By my time drug stores would have a place called a lunch counter a place to sit down and have a coke and a hot dog and maybe a piece of pie (a busy person's diner) and they still sometimes called that a soda fountain, and sometimes they called the guy working there a soda jerk, but I don't think it was quite the same thing anymore. No soda jerks now, but no shortage of other jerks. ;o)
Western Union Messengers: Like passenger trains, Western Union telegrams went out of fashion most places with the end of World War Two. Getting a telegram usually meant very bad news during the war. After the war most people got telephones and had no real need of telegraph service. Western Union still will accept and send money across the country and across world. But even that has had a bad reputation for decades.
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We still have home milk delivery in Britain.
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I believe it was about sixth grade when my parents bought me my first typewriter, I believe encouraged by my teacher, who noted that as students progressed to junior and then senior high school, it would become expected to submit reports and such in typed form, not handwritten. I was never formally taught, which is probably just as well, since I almost certainly would have gotten a D or even an F-- I seem to lack the gene that allows for higher speed, muscle memory kinds of tasks. My fingers simply won't reliably go where they should unless I do the task fairly slowly.
(Sometime, just for grins, I should submit a post here without any of the many, many errors corrected! I make them even though I am looking at the keyboard as I type).
I attribute this same problem as to why I cannot play a musical instrument-- again, unless I play it very, veerrrrryy slowly, which is frustrating.
There was a good soda fountain in a small neighborhood pharmacy that was right on my way home from junior high. My friends and I would stop there pretty much every day, usually getting cherry, lemon, lime or vanilla cokes or phosphates, or a drink called a "lime ricky", which I believe was a phosphate with three different syrups in a blend.
The countertop was marble-- and I mean, thick, massive, white marble! Years later, I think around the time I graduated high school, the soda fountain was removed from the pharmacy to make room for other merchandise. What is fascinating, is that to the best of my knowledge, the place is still owned by the son of the original owner, who was also the mayor here for three terms, and was in the same high school class as my sister!
I don't recall us ever getting a telegram, but it's possible my folks did get them in the days before I was born. Never thought to ask them!
As to phone operators, I do remember they were being slowly phased out when I was little, but they still were there for directory assistance if you couldn't find the number in the phone book, or it was somewhere "long distance"!
Heh... "long distance". These days my sister often chats with a granddaughter who lives in Germany, as if that were nothing... because now it pretty much is, isn't it?
And to think that after my father got a good job working at the Hamilton watch factory in the late 20's, he bought his parents a refrigerator to replace the icebox in their kitchen, and they were one of the very first people on their block to have one!
Certainly far better to keep the milk in!
:-)
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My parents had a typewriter at their business, which my mother probably used no more than an hour a week, mostly to type out payroll checks. I used it a couple times for school, but it wasn't required. I had my parents get me a typewriter for high school graduation. It was a noisy electric portable, and I really enjoyed having it. My sister-in-law gave me a German-keyboard office typewriter one Christmas, that had been in her family from when her father had been stationed in Germany in the Air Force, when I was in college. I never used it much. I bought myself a Russian-Cyrillic manual typewriter when I started teaching to type out tests. When I got a crude home computer in the 1980s I gave up using them at all, and gave them away when I moved to Arizona.
I forgot: my brother, sister and I used local operators when we were in college to call home collect! The university provided free phones for the dorms, but long distance calls had to be made collect.