How old would you have to be?

[JimW203]

Rooster - I'm not sure you're right with some of these items, and at the risk of being un PC, here's my comments


' air conditioners The British had slaves to wave fans
' LOL
K

In India, they are known as Punkah Wallahs; they existed long before the British Raj and still exist today. They are not slaves, just meagerly paid like so many who do menial work, such as bearers, sweepers, house boys, tonga wallahs, etc.

Jim Wingo

[alnhwrd]

Rooster, I hate to say it but your list is not valid, since man hasn't been to the moon yet. The entire space program was a hoax perpetuated by the military industrial complex to bilk the American taxpayers out of billions. I would have thought someone of your depth and intellect would know this!

[Portageegal]

Damn ! I'm old.

[ozij]

When I was a kid, my grandparents made a living from a hat store, in which they sold men's hats and ties and shirts with collars.
They live on a cobbled street and the was a horse and buggy to deliver their milk - in a city.
My aunt's house (in another country)had a square opening in the wall, into which the milkman put the milk - in cans. He had a big can, and he poured the milk into a little can.
My other grandmother had a wood burner for the hot water boiler - we used to collect eucalyptus tree bark to put in the burner, and she had fridge, but she also had a green cabinet that she called "the ice box".
My parents' first phone was a party line.
There was a man delivering blocks of ice on the street, and a milkman clinked his bottles early in the morning - charge under the rug for him, empty glass bottles and a note saying how much milk we wanted.

Babies' bottles were made of glass.
Newspapers lined the garbage can, and the idea of throwing out a perfectly good - rather expensive - plastic bag because you had made it a garbage container seemed nuts.

Shoelaces tore and were replaced.
They put metal caps on your soles when they wore out (you went to the shoemaker for that).
Babies' diapers were boiled.
The neighbor's washing machine had a wringer.
People collected stamps.
There was one radio in the house (it had a green eye).
It also had a gramophone, and the black discs you put in it were heavy, scratchable, and breakable.
Most planes had propellers.
Some cars had a little arrow sticking out of the side to show they were turning
Buses had noses. And sometimes somebody had to open the non-automatic back doors for me.
We use aerograms to send letters to relatives abroad.

And the telephone had a dial.

I'm 56.

O.

[roster]

Rooster, I hate to say it but your list is not valid, since man hasn't been to the moon yet. The entire space program was a hoax perpetuated by the military industrial complex to bilk the American taxpayers out of billions. I would have thought someone of your depth and intellect would know this!

Alnhwrd, You are right about that (at least the part about my great depth of intellect).

And now for a true story. Have you ever seen the phenomenon when a thin cloud moves in front of a bright moon and it appears the cloud is behind the moon? This happened one October night of a full moon when we were in the stands just before our high school football. It was still fairly quite in the stands and several people noticed the phenomenon of the cloud and the bright moon. The old Rooster pops up and shouts, "I knew it! It was all a hoax. The moon is only a few miles up. NASA flew props and a couple of astronauts up there in a military cargo helicopter."

Mrs. Rooster was very embarrassed.

[dsm]

QUOTE "That has been passed around by email. Is it all true that none of those things existed 59 years ago? I thought air conditioning, TV and penicillin were older than that."

I am sure aircondioners were around in the early 1940s ??? The Carrier Company was founded in 1915.
http://www.greatachievements.org/?id=3854
Re fridges - in the late 1940s I saw 'kerosene' refridgerators. They ran off 'kerosene' fuel.
Re TV - Mr Logie Baird demoed a primitive TV in the late 1930s (I saw my 1st TV in England in 1955 - just 1 channel BBC, only on between 3pm and 11pm).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Logie_Baird
Penicillin - was being used in the 1940s - http://inventors.about.com/od/pstartinv ... cillin.htm

But to spin a few yarns re the 1940s ...

I remember (living in rural NSW Aust ) ...

Mum bought her vegies off the back of a canopy truck that came to our street every few days
The 'rabitho' (a man who sold rabbits) would roam the streets calling out 'rabitoh' - I think they were about 1 shilling or one and six (10cents or 15 cents)
For milk we left out a 'billy can' & the 'milko' filled it up each morning
The bread man had a van & a long stick with a nail in it & he sold us bread & hooked the loaves out of his van
The 'dunny carter' (night soil) man came once (or twice) a week to cary away the 'dunny cans'
The ice man delivered blocks of ice for the 'ice chest'
Mum cooked on a stove heated by wood & washed clothes on the 'washboard', boiled them in the 'copper' & squeezed them dry in her 'mangle' then
hung them on a clothes like that was two T shaped poles with wires strung between the ends tof the T piece, the Top of the T tilted & she lowered one side to hang clothers then used a clothes pole to lift that side when she had hung all the things out.
#4
Power blackouts were common. But only the lights used electricity in our house & we had kero pressure lamps so it never bothered us. Even mus iron was heated on the stove.
My sister learned to make dolls from the clothes pegs (well, so did I back then )
#3
Phones: We had no phone until about 1950. Granny who lived in the city did though & we loved using it if we were allowed, it was a 1920s style 'candlestick' phone & you asked the 'operator' to connect you. In the late 1940s they added a rotary dial so you could dial the other number yourself.
http://images.google.com.au/images?hl=e ... 4&ct=title

The cars were nearly all black & most had 'running boards' (needed because few roads were paved & there was always lots of mud. As kids we loved riding on the running boards if the adults would let us. When a neighbor got a new car (that usually meant a used one) they would take other folk for a ride in it as kind of an introduction - not many people had cars then. A lot of tradesmens vehicles were army surplus, as were our bed blankets.

We used hand pushed 'dust brooms' to clean the floor (didn't own a vacuum cleaner until the 1950s) these dust brooms had wheels & rollers that whisked the dust & fluff into 2 trays. Come to think of it I can't recall seeing carpets on our floors until the 1950s, I guess they cost too much.

As kids we walked about a mile to school - barefoot - leather school bags strapped to our backs - vegemite or marmite sandwiches for lunch. If the creek was flooded we walked back home & had the day off. On weekends we would earn hapennys & pennys by opening the railway level crossing gates for motorists. Some paid some didn't but theepence (4 cents) could buy a kings ransom of lollies (sweets) at the corner store (2 biig gob stoppers for 1 penny, 8 aniseed balls 1 penny, an 'ice block' 1 penny, a 1 yard licorice strap 1 penny. 6d (sixpence or 5 cents) got us into the movies on Sat.

Our electronic entertainment was listening the 'serials' on the radio or going to the 'flea-house' or 'flicks' for movies on Saturdays. We esp liked the 'matinee' - we loved the Batman & Superman & Flash Gordon etc: weekly episodes shown prior to the main feature. It was always (here in Aust) great amusement when some poor kid with a box of Jaffas (round candy coated chocolate sweets), would accidentally tip his box of them over & they would clatter & rattle down the sloping floor (some of us weren't adverse to grabbing them if they rolled passed us). We were as poor as church mice in those days. Mostly barefoot, didn't know what underwear was until the early 1950s. Always were given hand-me-downs or 2nd hand toys (I guess that is why I own 5 cars today (4 being older 'club cars' ). One favorite pastime was 'yabbying' - Yabbies were freshwater crayfish in the many dams dotted around the open land where we lived. Bit of meat on a length of cotton & an old glove to catch the critters when the tried to 'snap' away after being lured to the edge.

Swimming in the local river was always fun but even when little were always told to beware of the hidden 'snags' as trees washed in nearly always littered the rivers. Some rivers actually had sandy beaches & they were very popular.

In the city afternoon papers were 2d (tuppence or 1.5 cents) - tram rides were 1d (1 penny ) anywhere for kids. Getting to the city (the big smoke) meant traveling by steam train & a regular aspect of that was us kids sticking our heads out the windows then bawling to mum that we had 'cinders' in our eyes.
The city (Sydney) was such a magic place (in retrospect it was just a big town). The real treat was riding the tram over the Sydney harbour bridge or going to the beach. A ride on the old Manly ferries was also a special treat. Manly was about 60 mins by steam ferry in those days.

In the late 1940s we moved to Coogee, a beach side suburb in Sydney & that was where I learned to swim, the hard way, (the alternative was to drown ). Life was a bit tougher then - I still have scars on my legs from misadventures - broken limbs amongst kids were commonplace. I later I learned to ride a horse back while living in the country again. Dad took us down to the local racetrack, put me on and sent the horse off - I was 8 at the time - the horse cantered off - but 3/4 away around the track I jumped off - splitting headache - but I was riding confidently within weeks.

The 1950s changed the world - all those inventions that materialized from the discoveries of the 1930s & 1940s (nylon plastics, cooling, communications, transistors)

DSM

[dsm]

My grandparents used coal, too, but they had no basement. Each fall they had a truck deliver a load of coal which was just dumped outside the house. From there it was brought into the house in a coal bucket. They had no furnace; instead they had a potbellied stove in the dining room, and they burned the coal in that. It was supposed to heat the whole house, ha, but I can recall standing in front of that stove with the side of me facing the stove just about to roast and the side of me facing away from the stove freezing cold. The only solution was constant rotation, which helped, but it was a miserable dance. Coal burns very hot.

They didn't have plumbing. They had a cistern for water with a hand-pump inside the house. I used to beg my mother to let me pump it, but I could never get the water to come out unless she primed it first for me. I wasn't strong enough to deliver enough force to the handle.

As a kid I always thought it was great to be there with my grandparents. When I look back on it now, I'm appalled at the near poverty of it. But it was clean and tidy, and fun for us kids.

At boarding school in England in the 1950s I occasionally got to be 'boiler monitor' which meant going down to the school basement (a 1600s grand old country stone house with leadlight windows) where I had to shovel the 'slag' out of the boiler & then start it again with chunk coal (big lumps of coal).

In London many houses had a coal cellars & the coal man (at one time with a horse and cart) would deliver your weekly supply through a round metal grate on the city sidewalk (footpath). This was different coal to what I used in the school boiler. It was either shaped 'anthracite' or 'coke' (coke was pre worked coal & had lots of air-bubbles on its surface whereas anthracite was smooth compacted, egg-shaped, nuggets of processed anthracite coal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coke_(fuel)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthracite
We used a 'coal-scuttle' to collect the coal & load it on the fire. The scuttle was wide at the bottom & narrow at the top & stood about 2' 6" tall & had 2 handles that made it easy to tip the contents on the fire.

Here is one on ebay (ours were black)
http://cgi.ebay.com.au/~-GENUINE-OLD-CO ... 24001r4312

DSM

DSM

[dsm]

R.G. when did they invent pantyhose anyway? We had a coal furnace when I was a kid....I'm 2 months younger that Carbonman....!

The milk man used to leave your order at your back door.....a pint of cream and half gal of milk, or chocolate milk or whatever you wanted....

Looking at today's events, it's hard not to miss those simpler times....

I can say with some confidence that pantyhose were not common in the early to mid 1960s. It was stockings & 'suspender belts' or 'step-ins' in those days. Don't ask me how I know (this is not the place to dwell on courting practices of the pacific rim dwelling male homosapien ).

One of my early recollections is that pantyhose started to become common in Australia at around the time of the moon landing. (1970s) so would guess they started appearing in volume around the later 1960s. It may be they coincide with the popularity of the miniskirt.

DSM (delightful topic)