Cactus Watcher Strikes Again

The 1950s had their ups and downs for most of us. Much of this is familiar to me.



Canning: Unfortunately, my mother had no sense of too much of a good thing. ( Read more... )

1. We had the carts but they held (film) movie projectors and no substitute teacher in my day ever showed a movie in class. Our high school did have a few TVs and we got to watch a rocket launch or two, and the World Series when our home team is involved. In those days the World Series games were played in the afternoon instead of at night

2. We had card catalogues, but I quickly learned it was better to learn the layout of the library and go directly to the section of interest. What was the point of looking up a specific book only to find out it was already checked out? Yes, in looking at grad schools I only applied to places with open stacks. Only Ohio State used the Dewey Decimal system of the schools I attended.

3. The cards in our library books just had return due dates not signatures. We did see names in a list if we got used text books at the start of the school year. You signed them to have a hope of getting them back if they were lost.

4. As I started school the classic black blackboards were being replaced with green chalkboards (which still exist some places). I had a high school teacher who was seriously allergic to chalk dust who would have been very pleased if she could have had a white board instead!

5. Being dysgraphic, my teachers had no interest in having me learn cursive at the chalk board. (I did do the occasional math problem for the class at the board.)

6. My mother was friends with the lady who ran the school lunch program for our whole school district, so I bought my lunches. When I needed to bring a lunch it was always in a paper bag.

8. I never had a problem with the rugged, school pencil sharpeners. Maybe that was because I had experience with our home pencil sharpeners which did sometimes have those problems.

9. Overhead projectors were a new thing when I was in school. They seemed to come in as the somewhat unrelated film strip projectors were being retired.

10. I used the ditto machine to print tests for my Russian classes. Our department secretary was very excited a few years later to inform us alumni that the office was switching to Cyrillic word processing.

11. The only time we had table and chairs when I was in school was in high school journalism class.

12. A local aerospace company, in partially justifying the cost of its giant main frame computers to the U.S. government, offered to keep many of our area school districts' records for free. So I had computer printed report cards from high school on. As I recall we didn't have to have our grade cards signed after grade school.

Back in the stone age when I was a teenager, there were no personal computers, no phones smart enough to do much of anything except ring. We depended entirely on local stores for most things. There were a lot of things you just could not get locally. If you wanted something out of the ordinary, or a good deal on something you turned to a catalog or a great long-listing ad in a specialist magazine, and unless you were one of the very few with a new fangled credit card, you mailed in an order with an old fashioned bank check.

I used to by lots of things by mail, and I'd have my favorite places to buy things that specialized in one type of thing or another. For what passed for electronics in those days one of the best places was Allied Radio. You could get anything from a package of resistors, to turntables, shortwave transmitters, high end complete sound systems of many brands, electronic kits of all kinds and more. About the time personal computers were beginning to exist, a boom in sound systems was happening, you easily could buy a decent music set up locally, and Allied Radio that stocked everything just couldn't compete. Sadly they went out of business fairly quickly. Their competitor Radio Shack hung on for many years selling their own brand of very cheaply made equipment, and some of the bits and pieces that used to be in the back of the Allied Radio catalog.

The computer era has been hard on a lot of businesses, that made money briefly and faded away. In the St. Louis area there was a bottom-of-the-barrel department store chain (the original store had dirt floors!) called Grandpa Pidgeon's that catered to blue collar folks especially, with surplus household items of all kinds, often near bottom-of-the-barrel quality on many items, but rugged clothing for workers and farmers and often a bit of a discount on brand name items you could also get at other stores. It was a low price, big box store before Walmart made that a thing across the country. They made tons of money. Expanded from one store to a dozen. Put a concrete floor in their original store and so on. Then computers came along. A computer store looked like easy money in those days. Obviously the owners of Grandpa's didn't think quality computers belonged in their low-rent department store so they opened their own chain of computer stores with a different jazzy name, mostly selling Apples and their accessories. It was a bad gamble. They lost just about everything extra they'd made in the decades before. Then Walmart came along with slightly nicer stores. About the time I left St. Louis, Grampa's money troubles caused them to sell out completely.

When the computer boom was in full flight, my brother and I gravitated to the ads of a California outfit called Fry's Electronics. My brother's older son lived close to one of their brick-and-mortar stores and just raved about it. My brother and I never ordered anything from them, but we kind of drooled over their stock. When I moved to Phoenix there was a Fry's at the far end of town. I happily made the 60 mile round trip a few times to shop and buy things there I knew they'd have. It was within months when Fry's opened a second Phoenix store and the round trip dropped to about 7 miles. I loved going there when I was bored. I spent good money there on TV's, computers, monitors, software of all kinds even bought a washer and a dryer there. The 2008 recession seemed to hit them hard but far from fatally, then they bet heavily on 3D home TVs and that seemed to be more than they could deal with. When that fad fizzled, they stopped stocking as many TVs as they once had. They stopped stocking the latest software and I stopped going. There were never any of their stores in Tucson. Yesterday, I heard they were closing all their stores. It's sad to see these businesses go bad then die altogether.

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.

I saw this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiEAV91DymI, yesterday. It's a YouTube video from "Today I Found Out" on the subject of Grape-Nuts cereal. The narrator for the series is Simon Whistler, who has a fine voice, is entertaining, tries to be informative and has air of distinction, but perhaps is lacking in education (seems to have trouble pronouncing anything beyond not just English, but specifically British English) and in experience. This video for example goes along pretty well until he blunders into a statement perfectly understandable from experience with other cereals about people having a big bowl full of Grape-Nuts instead of the recommended amount. Obviously I can't speak for everyone, but I think eating close to the recommended amount is about all most people could stand. ( Read more... )