Remember when

[mark]

Power steering and power brakes were an option.
The headlight dimmer switch was mounted on the floor.
Oil bath air cleaners.
All brakes were drum brakes.
Tire chains.
Car radios were AM, with tubes.
Vacuum operated windshield wipers.
Cannister oil filters.
Tires had tubes, and weren't radials.
6 volt batteries with generators instead of alternators.
Distributors with points.

Remember?,,,,then you must be an old fart,,, :lol!:

 

[Brewdude]

:lol:


Cheers,

RR

 

[bosun1]

A clock that ticked!
Going up a hill and your windshield wipers slowed down because they didn't have enough vacuum!
If you drove too long you turned on your headlights so you wouldn't boil your battery!

 

[radio807]

...you were too young to relate to "Remember When" posts???

 

[mark]

Three on the tree
Crank open vent windows (poor mans airconditioning)
unpadded dashes.
A back seat roomy enough to get into trouble.
carburetors big enough to suck in a football.
fuel pumps mounted on the engine block.
portable bedrooms (the front seats in Ramblers folded back flat making a bed)
horn rings on the steering wheel.
Gas was 32 cents per gallon and was pumped for you while your windshield was being cleaned and oil level checked.

 

[Dave_In_Philly]

Power steering and power brakes were an option.

Yes to steering, not sure about brakes though.

The headlight dimmer switch was mounted on the floor.

Yep

Oil bath air cleaners.

Nope

All brakes were drum brakes.

Nope

Tire chains.

Hell yes

Car radios were AM, with tubes.

Nope

Vacuum operated windshield wipers.

Yup

Cannister oil filters.

Yes...

Tires had tubes, and weren't radials.

Nope

6 volt batteries with generators instead of alternators.

Nope

Distributors with points.

Yup

Remember?,,,,then you must be an old fart,,, :lol!:

Nope, only 32.

 

[Anonymous]

The climate (temperature & humidity) outside the house in the summertime was the climate inside the house. Fans pretty much only blew hot air around.

There was a choice of three channels on TV. One was the DuMont Network.

Wristwatches were wind-ups.

Shoes were leather. You had them re-heeled/half-soled/re-soled as they wore.

There were classical music concerts broadcast on TV. In prime time.

It didn't matter whether lady vocalists were pretty or not. All that mattered was how beautifully they sung. Kate Smith. Marian Anderson. Their backup groups were studio/dance orchestras. Every network had at least one.

There weren't any "special effects." This required TV programs (comedies, westerns, cop shows &c.) to actually have plots that held peoples' attention.

You followed baseball games by listening to the radio broadcasts of them.

There was no air conditioning in church. The ladies (wearing white gloves and little hats with veils) brought fold-out fans with them ; the guys in their woolen suits just got used to it. The sermons were addressed to people who had been reading the Bible and thinking about what it said all their lives.

Summer vacation from school meant you didn't have to wear shoes -- inside the house or outside.

Grownups put a quarter in the cigarette machine, pulled the handle for the brand they wanted, and got a pack with a penny change inside the cellophane at the bottom.

Pennies were actually money you could spend and get something for.

People bought encyclopedias. And used them.

Academic-tracked kids had four years of Latin. In high school. Plus two of German or French. Along with two years of algebra, plane geometry, calculus, biology, chemistry and physics. They had essentially mastered English grammar and spelling by the sixth grade.

Nobody much cared whether you smoked or not ; outside of public school and church, or where.

Long-running interpersonal problems were sometimes resolved via "tragic accidents" during deer season. It gave the asswhole segment of the population "something to think about."

Teenagers who ran afoul of the law were routinely given their choice between jail time (with a consequent criminal record) or a hitch in the Marine Corps. A significant percentage of them found this was the motivator they needed to get their acts together.

If you got a nice girl pregnant, you married her. Period. This meant dropping out of school and probably spending the rest of your life with a manual labor job in a coal mine/in a steel mill/in a factory. This was a wonderfully effective deterrent with people capable of being deterred.

For the rest, a common marriage proposal was, "You're what ? (!)

:face:

 

[i.keenum]

I kinda remember when the internet came out. :lol!: I remember when tv's weighed a ton and you didn't rearrange the living room for fun , someone needs to remind my wife. Damn you flat screens. :lol:

I remember walking to school and playing out side till the street lights came on and it was ok. Now parents don't let kids out of sight.

Remember riding in the back of a pickup and not getting pulled over.

 

[Anonymous]

Girls worked or went to school until they got married. Ninety-five times out of a hundred, the degree they wanted was a "Mrs."

Guys who graduated from college didn't step up to big pay. They started out in executive training positions making far less than skilled workers did while they learned which end was the hole in the ground in the real world.

There was no such thing as an engineering degree. You went to Carnegie Tech to learn engineering. After that, what you could do, and how well, was all anybody cared about.

In line with that, a guy with no "education" at all, born to immigrant parents and with only a rudimentary familiarity with English could become a master machinist and earn more than mid-level executives did.

Tory fascists were Republicans. You could tell they were Republicans because they all drove Fords. Most of them were either executives or businessmen and mainline WASP Protestants. White shirts & ties either way. Democrats drove Chevys, belonged to labor unions, and were probably Roman Catholics. These were two parallel universes that, like parallel lines, never met -- only appeared to in the distance.

Shrimp was dirt cheap food for poor people who couldn't afford beef and Democrats, because they couldn't eat meat on Fridays.

People kept beer & pop cold at picnics in tubs of ice water.

Your grampa probably still shaved with a straight razor.

Women wore house dresses and aprons.

They didn't cancel school. For anything. If it snowed three feet, it snowed three feet. If you lived inside maybe half a mile of elementary school, you walked. Inside a mile for highschool.

:face:

 

[monbla256]

AAAH the "good ole dsys" post again. Personally I'm glad they are over. I live in the present till I die. :twisted:

 

[Anonymous]

Guys smoking pipes were everywhere. They found one tobacco they liked best, and that's what they smoked. Same as cigar smokers & cigarette smokers & chewing tobacco guys did.

Nobody was afraid he was going to miss something if he didn't try everything there was. :roll: :lol:

:face:

 

[Kyle Weiss]

I'm a throwback. I'm not some vintage-lovin' hip bastard. So, I only can dream of many of these things, or see their leftovers as they exist today.

I've had to work on the cars Mark mentioned. Wanna know why I succeeded? They were meant to be worked on. Nothing like tuning a carburetor by hand and having it work, doing your own (drum) brakes and even electrical work (because there were only two wires in the car: for lights or for sound (if you were really lucky!). I heard tales of there being no such thing as shatter-resistant glass, seatbelts or even stop signs. I was even taught how to build a home made "reverb box" for the mono, AM radios so they'd sound better...still useful tech even today, if you ask me.

Speaking of sound, helped a guy fix and replace a few tubes in an old AM dialer for a 40's Buick he was restoring.. He came to me because I actually had the tubes. I gave them to him. He was shocked: "...but these are rare, and expensive these days..."

My reply? "Then let's have a little visit back to the 'good ol' days' when people were actually nice and did things for the sake of it."

We were both good with that. :cheers: What good were the tubes doing in my junk collecting dust? <img class="emojione" alt="?" title=":shrug:" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/emojione/assets/png/1f937.png?v=2.2.7"/>

So, I smoke a pipe, I stick with one person, and yeah, I try lots of different kinds of tobacco...but I only choose that which suits me... sorry Yakster. :lol:

It's funny, the way I understand it, "going out to eat" wasn't something really popularized until about the 1940s. Even then, it was assumed if you went out to eat, you were broke, a sad bachelor, had no family or for some other reason couldn't prepare/buy good food for your home. Only the "seedy" went out to eat. As that stigma changed, menus went from basic to...a little less basic. Suddenly, going out was "the thing to do," by the mid 1950s. Menus advanced even more. Enter present-day, when there's restaurants from all corners of the globe, at every price point, offering more choices and options than ever before. No more "Steak Diane" or "Kiev Chicken" as the star choices, as it would be 50 years ago. This is what's happening with tobacco.

It is a concern, however, people might forget how to cook...but with tobacco, it's a little different.

All for the better--but there is no shame in finding favorites, or sampling the bounty.

8)

PS--anyone ever worked on a three-on-the-tree shifting, especially at the column? Holy crap, I think only my thumbs had skin on them afterward. OW!

 

[MisterE]

Keep going, I'm enjoying this thread.

I remember when you had to use a payphone, or actually go home to make a call.

My first car wa a Ford F100. 3-on-the-tree, hibeams on the floor, emergency brake to the left of the clutch.

You had to get off your butt to change the channel. Or just put up with whatever was on.

All televised sporting events were free.

The Pirates had the stupidest uniforms in MLB- and there were only two divisions.

A Texas Intruments calculator was high tech and only the coolest of people had them.

I actually watched Lawrence Welk. Marlin Perkins' Wild Kingdom, and Wild World of Animals on Sunday afternoons. I can still hum the the theme songs.

Candy bars seemed so much bigger!

 

[Kyle Weiss]

My father once told me about his trick with old rotary payphones: before the outgoing/incoming connection lines were wrapped in flexible metal conduit, you could punch through the insulation on the wires while inthe booth, bridge the gap in the line with a safety pin or a tack and "tap dial" anyone without paying for your call. :lol: I wonder where I get my mischief.

 

[monbla256]

8)

PS--anyone ever worked on a three-on-the-tree shifting, especially at the column? Holy crap, I think only my thumbs had skin on them afterward. OW!

I had a '58 MB 180 back in hi school. It had a Big white plastic truck steering wheel and a 4 on the tree for a tranny. It had a whopping 56 hp torquey as hell and you could get scratch in second gear !! :twisted: :twisted:

 

[Kyle Weiss]

You mean, "MG" I'm assuming...? Frustrating little cars.

 

[monbla256]

You mean, "MG" I'm assuming...? Frustrating little cars.

No Mercedes Benz. This was before MB of North America was set up and they were importing their lower level plain cars straight from thr factory. The 180 back in '58 was the bottom of the line in the gas cars. Was a 56 hp 4 pot with 4 on the collumn tranny, roll up windows and a bench front seat with cloth upholstery. I bought it from my father after he got a Jaguar in '65. Was a basic ohv 4 pot with a SU two barrel carb. Basic car, easy to work on. :twisted: But it did have disc brakes all around :twisted:

 

[Kyle Weiss]

Disc brakes were a big deal when they came out. Glad it wasn't an MG, only worked on one, never again. Oldest Benz I helped worked on was a 1972 diesel conversion... neat car. Plenty of space to work, which is a godsend.

 

[Richard Burley]

MGs were not that hard to work on; you just had to "understand" them. Loveable cars, electrics were a joke. Lucas was "the company that invented darkness."

Since this a "remember when" thread, I thought it appropriate to mention my fresh discovery that Annette Funicello just died a week ago. Ain't that a bitch. She was never quite my type, but some of my pubescent and pre-pubescent friends apparently centered her in their, ah...fantasies, judging by my recollection of the times. Seventy years old. Tempus fugit and all that. Ah, well...

 

[HCraven]

Power steering and power brakes were an option.
The headlight dimmer switch was mounted on the floor.
Oil bath air cleaners.
All brakes were drum brakes.
Tire chains.
Car radios were AM, with tubes.
Vacuum operated windshield wipers.
Cannister oil filters.
Tires had tubes, and weren't radials.
6 volt batteries with generators instead of alternators.
Distributors with points.

Remember?,,,,then you must be an old fart,,, :lol!:

With few exceptions, you just described the '73 Super Beetle I drove in college, only 20 years ago. The funniest contraption was the windshield washer that ran on air pressure... from the spare tire!