Vintage Things That Have Disappeared In Your Lifetime?

Fading Fast said:

Which explains why so many things from the past have so much collector value today. And why the value of many things fall as the generation that grew up with those items passes away.

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Yup. Car shows illustrate this pretty well. People my age are most drawn to cars from the mid-'50s to the early 1970s. Not exclusively, of course, but mostly. The guys into those hot-rodded Model A's and the like are mostly gone now. I don't know what car aficionados 20 or 30 years younger than my cohort might find most compelling. Mazda Miatas, maybe?

I think most of us into cars are the most fascinated by the cars of our youth, although my interests also go back a slight bit further.

tonyb said:

Yup. Car shows illustrate this pretty well. People my age are most drawn to cars from the mid-'50s to the early 1970s. Not exclusively, of course, but mostly. The guys into those hot-rodded Model A's and the like are mostly gone now. I don't know what car aficionados 20 or 30 years younger than my cohort might find most compelling. Mazda Miatas, maybe?

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I'm going to be 34 next month & I consider myself a gearhead & I don't mind anything as long as it's tasteful.

Fading Fast said:

I know I've posted this thought before, but it is funny how the cellphone has become, in one respect, a modern day pocket watch. I can remember some of my dad's older friends pulling a watch out of their pocket if they were asked the time (and some having to, then, click it open to the watch face). When I see kids today pull a phone out of their pocket to check the time (and sometimes they have to click the side of the phone to light it up), the motion echoes right back to my memory of my dad's friends doing the same with their pocket watches.

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Funny, I was thinking of cell phones being the new pocket watches as I was typing that. Same principle, different pocket?

LizzieMaine said:

I always wear a watch, have since I was eight, and probably always will. I've always worked in jobs where the clock was the essence, and I can't see where having to drop everything and fish around in my pocket and push a button to get the time would be any advance over simply flicking a look at the clock on my wrist.

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I've mostly worked in jobs where the timeclock was the essence. I had to stop wearing a watch at work because I'd spend all day looking at it to find out how much longer I had to endure whatever it was I was doing, then wondering how it was possible that only two or three minutes had passed since the previous time I had looked at it.

tonyb said:

...The guys into those hot-rodded Model A's and the like are mostly gone now...

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There are a lot of younger guys who are into hot-rodding Model As these days. The trouble now is finding Model As at a price they can live with that are still viable enough to turn into a hot rod or a rat rod.

To say nothing of the fact that the hot-roddding of viable prewar cars is a hotly controversial subject at a time when there are fewer and fewer original specimens surviving. Once a car's been butchered by a rodder's torch, putting it back the way it's supposed to be can be difficult if not impossible.

It's the same way radio buffs feel about the hacks who take fine old sets, gut them out, stick in a speaker and an ipod jack, and paint the whole thing iridescent purple.

Zombie_61 said:

...

There are a lot of younger guys who are into hot-rodding Model As these days. The trouble now is finding Model As at a price they can live with that are still viable enough to turn into a hot rod or a rat rod.

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There's many a "Model A" hot rod without an original, period Model A part on it. I had a nice chat at a car show with an old-timer who had a top-down version with the sole vintage component on it the flathead V8, and that came out of a early-'50s Mercury. I thought it inappropriate to ask how much he had into that car, but he did mention some sizable figure that he paid for that canvas convertible top and folding frame.

Perhaps a Model A connoisseur could tell from 20 feet away that this particular car is hardly a "real" one (and maybe not; I wouldn't know), but for its owner, what it is is the car he wanted when he was a young fellow who still had hair to slick back.

Bedcaps.

South of Bavaria, maybe. Or south of Baden-Württemberg. Rheinland-Pfalz, maybe

Inkstainedwretch said:

I don't remember if I've mentioned before, but when I was a boy shoe stores had fluoroscopes. These were x-ray machines that cast the image on a tv screen instead of on film. I could stand on it with my feet in the recess provided and look through the eyepiece and see my skeletal feet. I'd wiggle my toes and watch my little toe bones flex, which I found enthralling. The other side had two eyepieces through which one of my parents and the salesperson would peer and confer on the fit. I believe they were outlawed before the end of the '50s.

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Just finished watching a PBS documentary about downtown shops where
I grew up.
One of the things mentioned was the Shoe-Fitting Fluoroscope.

Guarantee Shoe store in my city that used the fluoroscope.



The shoe fitting fluoroscope was a fixture in shoe stores during the ‘30s,
40s. and 50s. A typical unit, like the Adrian machine shown here, consisted
of a vertical wooden cabinet with an opening near the bottom into which the
feet were placed. When you looked through one of the three viewing ports on
the top of the cabinet (e.g., one for the child being fitted, one for the child’s
parent, and the third for the shoe salesman or saleswoman), you would see
a fluorescent image of the bones of the feet and the outline of the shoes.



The machines employed a 50 kv x-ray tube operating at 3 to 8 milliamps.
When you put your feet in a shoe fitting fluoroscope, you were
effectively standing on top of the x-ray tube.
The only “shielding” between your feet and the tube was a
one mm thick aluminum filter.
There were three different intensities: the highest intensity
for men, the middle for women and the lowest for children.



In 1957 the State of Pennsylvania became the first jurisdiction to ban the use of shoe fitting fluoroscopes.
By 1960, they were gone, at least in the U.S.

That Adrian looks exactly like the one I remember from the shoe store in Mt. Vernon, OH.

Does anyone remember when you bought a cup of coffee in a diner, it was served in a thick white crockery mug with a white crockery shot glass of cream on the side? I saw this before I was old enough to drink coffee. I think the creamer had the logo of the dairy that supplied the diner.

If you ordered hot tea it came in a stainless steel teapot that held about a cup and a half of tea and they put the creamer of milk in the mug.

One of my memories of lunch counters, mainly in drug stores, was the frequent high-pitched rattle of dishes. It's a strange way to put it but it was almost a business-like sound, in the same way that offices used to have those distinctive sounds of typewriters and adding machines. Computers, copy machines and printers make virtually no sound in comparison. Then, too, offices with most people in one big room are probably unusual these days, too. People at least have room dividers and cubicles, which are as bad as they sound.

^^^^^^
Restaurants & cafeterias.

$$ = Cacaphony of dishes clattering
in a bird shop atmosphere.

$$$$$ = Soft music & peaceful dining.

It's my kind of place when you can look across the counter and see some guy in a grease-spattered apron and an old sailor hat shuffling eggs around on the grill. Occasionally you'll hear him say "g-d it!" when a spatter of fat bites him on his arm.

That sounds like the cafeteria where I ate most of my meals when I was in college. It's was more like a diner by day and a beer joint at night. There was no counter (that is, no stools along the counter where you moved along as your order was being made ready), only booths. Not a bad place. It had no connection with the university. It's gone now, along with all the other businesses in that part of town, razed to make room for some university buildings.

BlueTrain said:

One of my memories of lunch counters, mainly in drug stores, was the frequent high-pitched rattle of dishes. It's a strange way to put it but it was almost a business-like sound, in the same way that offices used to have those distinctive sounds of typewriters and adding machines. Computers, copy machines and printers make virtually no sound in comparison. Then, too, offices with most people in one big room are probably unusual these days, too. People at least have room dividers and cubicles, which are as bad as they sound.

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There's a diner we frequent that has the exact din your are talking about. They use heavy "diner" plates, old style (not silver, stainless, maybe?) silverware, the big service trays to gather the plates, the large "racks" to collect the glasses, etc. There's always a low rattle to the place when slow and, when busy, it amps up dramatically as you hear dishes banging together, glasses clanking and rattling, orders being shouted, pickups being called and the constant swinging open and closed of the kitchen doors lets the louder cacophony from there blast out into the dinning area.

I love it and sometimes look around and am amazed that it all works, everyone just flows along with it. The waitresses and waiters shout at just the right level and you'll see families with a bunch of kids and the mom keeping control in a voice calibrated up to adjust for the surrounding noise. It isn't fine dining, just fun work-a-day food and atmosphere that gives me energy most of the time. If you're looking for calm and restful, this ain't it, but otherwise, it's a joy to be there.

I'm of the opinion there is no such thing as "unskilled" labor. There are convenience store clerks who can move a line of customers through at twice the pace of the guy working alongside him. He wasn't born knowing how to that. And there are dishwashers who can keep the kitchen in clean plates and the waitstaff in fresh cups and glasses and flatware on the busiest day of the year and make it look easy. Having been a restaurant dishwasher, I can assure you it isn't.

I was once a semi-regular at a restaurant in Seattle with decent food at reasonable prices that stayed open late. Nothing to write home about, but a well-run joint that did a fairly brisk trade. Employed there was a waiter who did about twice as much in half the time as your average waitperson. And he never rushed. Rather, he just didn't waste any motion. The guy's head was in his work. He was all there. A f****ing Zen master, is what he was. His approach to his work could be a lesson to people in most any other line of work, provided they were sufficiently humble to be schooled by a lowly waiter.

2jakes said:

^^^^^^
Restaurants & cafeterias.

$$ = Cacaphony of dishes clattering
in a bird shop atmosphere.

$$$$$ = Soft music & peaceful dining.

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and many of the $$$ and $$$$ ( in Seattle, at least) = so loud due to "modern" interior acoustics that you can't hear the person sitting across from you.
(must be because everyone is on their smartphones anyway)

If he scratches his armpits or picks his nose
before serving your plate, I know the place.
The french fries there are yummylicious!

The place I was referring to was small and not a family place. Virtually everyone who ate there was a college student who lived off-campus, which was just a few yards away. But that was it, otherwise. Nobody shouted, though, and there were no waitresses. There was no backroom. Everything was upfront. I worked in a fast food place myself and I remember attending a couple of annual classes we had to take for food handlers.

I'm not of the opinion there is no unskilled labor because there are people who have no skills, which reminds me of something I'll mention in a minute. That doesn't mean they are untrainable, though. Instead, I believe that most work takes more skill and actual handwork--physical hands on effort--than is generally appreciated. And because it isn't generally realized, it isn't appreciated when something is done right. Most things you've never done are harder than you would imagine. The flip side of that, ironically, is a wide-spread belief that many things are impossible, especially for one or two people working by themselves. That's why people can't believe ancient structures like the pyramids of Egypt could not possibly have been built without advanced technology, presumably from space aliens. The root causes of those beliefs are simply that people have never done anything physically difficult in their life or halfway technically challenging.

It gets complicated, though. I have seen a few dozen log houses spread out along the road from here to the panhandle of West Virginia, where my daughter went to school and lives now. All those log houses share virtually identical construction details and I sometimes wonder if the same people built most of those houses. So in spite of what I said earlier, it does not follow that anyone could and did do everything. Specialization sets in pretty quickly when it's worth the trouble. If all you're ever going to build is one house, you've got quite a learning curve ahead of you.

The anecdote I was reminded of goes back to 9/11 when some writer in New York, a woman, ventured out the day after, wondering how she could help. Remember that instead of fleeing, many people went to New York to lend a hand. Anyway, the woman checked around to see what she could do before finally realizing that she had no useful skills. She also noted National Guard tank posted around town and she wondered where they came from. She was surprised that they came from the armory, "the place where we have the antique shows!"

I have to add here that I grew up in the southern part of West Virginia but went to college in the northern part. I was and still am surprised at how different everything was. There were foods I'd never heard of and even more across the state line in Pennsylvania. I'd never eaten fried potatoes for breakfast, for instance. I'd never heard of pepperoni rolls. I'd eaten pizza but it was pizza prepared by real Italian mothers, not Pizza Hut pizza. So I learned a lot in college.