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You know you are getting old when:

EngProf

Practically Family
Messages
597
Yeah, the crap (and much of it is indeed crap) is everywhere. Target. Walmart. IKEA. Pier 1 and Cost Plus. They all move tons of MCM “inspired” junk every GD day. (You’ll find it busted up in and alongside apartment building dumpsters before long.)

I don’t expect the madness to die away entirely anytime before we do. So much of the existing housing stock was built during that era, and those styles just plain “work” in those structures.

As we’ve observed before, the market for honest-to-goodness antiques has been in the dumps for a decade or more. But “vintage”? It sells like ice cream on the Fourth of July. The antique malls around here keep their doors open mostly in the strength of the market for stuff made 50 to 70 years ago.

Console stereos with MCM styled cabinets are going for several times what they were as recently as a year ago. (Depending on local markets, of course. There’s wide price differences between the larger cities and the more remote small towns.) I bought mine from the original owner for something like 70 bucks about eight years ago. It would fetch 500 in a heartbeat today. But I bet you could still find a comparable one for 150 or less if you kept your eyes open and had a van you wouldn’t mind taking for a couple hour drive.

Around here about half the booths at the antique places are now "MCM". As someone who was born around mid-century, that stuff was our ordinary furniture (and etc.) so it's not anything special to me.
I like a lot of old stuff, but furniture isn't one of them. I had one of the big wooden stereo/record-player consoles that I inherited from my parents and recently gave it away to a friend who likes that sort of thing much more than I do.
She likes it, I like her, so it was hers for free if she would come and get it.
I could have sold it, but it wasn't worth the trouble. I preferred to have the extra space with no effort on my part.

My own furniture is old-style "overstuffed" couch and chair, both of which are somewhat less over-stuffed after the cats have used them as giant cat toys.
 
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Location
My mother's basement
If my mother had held onto all the cheap department-store MCM stuff she got as wedding presents in 1959, she could die out of debt. But she didn't, because she had three dumb kids who had no idea they were smashing up cultural relics when they jumped on it.

Hell, if I had a small fraction of the stuff people paid my brother and me to haul to the dump back in like, 1972, ’73, I’d own a vacation house somewhere and a late-model Mercedes Benz to get there in.

But holding onto that stuff for nearly half a century just wouldn’t have happened. Where to put it? Anybody got a spare warehouse they ain’t using for the next 40-some years?

I switch off whatever media I happen to be watching when I see motor vehicles like the ones I and my family members owned back then come on. It’s downright depressing to see what I don’t have anymore, especially when it fetches amounts I wouldn’t have dreamed possible.
 
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Just Jim

A-List Customer
Messages
307
Location
The wrong end of Nebraska . . . .
A recent transfer at work has me back in training. Aside from discovering that there is actually a manual for some of the software I constantly use, I'm also doing inane little trainings about things like "cultural sensitivity".

Part of today was spent doing an attitudinal survey. At the end, the surveys were scored and scaled, with the results purportedly telling us which generation we are attitudinally "closest" to. Per my score, I'm closest not to my native Gen X, but to the Lost Generation (and it took them an hour to find the scales from 30 years ago to determine that).

Yes, I'm old: at least 119 years.
 

Edward

Bartender
Messages
24,737
Location
London, UK
As to Dwell magazine ...

I’ve considered starting a periodical devoted to stylish bathrooms only. What might make a good title? “Bathe,” maybe? Or ... ?

WetRoom.

Is that how Big Joe Turner got away with: "Shake, Rattle & Roll?"
"I'm like a one eyed cat peeping in a sea food store."
Doesn't take much explaining, but it got released, and furthermore, once Bill Hayley & The Comets recorded it, acceptance was assured.

Censorsahip is a funny thing. Seem to be playing the game, and what you can sometimes get away with.... The TV sitcom Red Dwarf first appeared in 1988, on the BBC. In order to avoid a late nitght slot, they replaced all swears with the multi-purpose word 'smeg'. Censors totally missed that they had a character called Rimmer.

Is it that Puritans were well represented among the early European settlers to these shores that sex was (is?) to be mentioned euphemistically, if it was mentioned at all?

Pretty much. Such delicate sensibilities also had a big cultural impact in England as later as thed 1960s: when the rest of Europe was watching Gabriella, the UK had Carry On movies and the Confessions series.

Doesn’t take much imagination to uncover the meaning in that. I trust that the censors of a our parents’ and grandparents’ time had more formal education than most of their contemporaries, and were therefore familiar with the works of William Shakespeare, whose plays on American stages professional and amateur were produced daily throughout this God-fearing land. Yet they found something warranting closer scrutiny in “Louie, Louie.”

There's a couple of things at work there - class politics and prejudice. If you look into the history of censorship of popular media (my first academic publication dealt with this), you'll find that at any one time the medium that attracts all thed censorship will be the mass media. High Culture - including theatre by the 1960s - attracts less control becasue it is patronised by the more well to do who are generally better educated and Can Be Trusted to understand what is, as Bill put it, "merely a play", and not be overly influenced by it - unlike the television-consuming lower-orders.

With Louie Louie, as I recall the big issue was the very opposite of slipping one past the censors: they were, in fact, obsessed with seeing what wasn't there. I always had the impression form everything I read about that case that it was driven by a heady mix of political intolerance of anything that could not be understood because (SHRIEK) Communism, and anything that seemed like there might be a coded message in "race music" because thaat type 'needed' to be 'kept down'.

Yeah, the crap (and much of it is indeed crap) is everywhere. Target. Walmart. IKEA. Pier 1 and Cost Plus. They all move tons of MCM “inspired” junk every GD day. (You’ll find it busted up in and alongside apartment building dumpsters before long.)

I don’t expect the madness to die away entirely anytime before we do. So much of the existing housing stock was built during that era, and those styles just plain “work” in those structures.

I'll defend Ikea on this. Yes, they make some lines which are cheaqp crap, and priced as such; always somebody who will be grateful for a chest of drawers they need for a year at College that will at least last that and can be left behind afterwards. However, IKEA also make a lot of higher end stuf. A lot of my current furniture is IKEA - purchased new in 1999. My free-standing wardrobes were GBP!80 at the time; to buy identical wardrobes (both design and quality - I checked thoroughly) anywhere else was approach £500 a pop at the time. Most all of the MCM designs Ikea currently run are reissues of their own original designs from that period, and (again, having checked them out extensively, planning a remodel / home move in the next eighteen months), they're equally as good as the fancy-label new repros elsewhere. Course, they were one of the Scandinavian operations that largely invented that very clean style, so I'd expect them to do it well. I've got my eye on an armchair from them once we move; I'm only gutted that the sofa version they did has never been released on the UK market. This is the chair I mean:

midcentury-modern-chair.jpg


Wonderfully comfy, solid, and somehow they take up so little visual space in a room, making it seem less cluttered and somehow 'bigger'.
 

LizzieMaine

Bartender
Messages
32,962
Location
Where The Tourists Meet The Sea
There's a couple of things at work there - class politics and prejudice. If you look into the history of censorship of popular media (my first academic publication dealt with this), you'll find that at any one time the medium that attracts all thed censorship will be the mass media. High Culture - including theatre by the 1960s - attracts less control becasue it is patronised by the more well to do who are generally better educated and Can Be Trusted to understand what is, as Bill put it, "merely a play", and not be overly influenced by it - unlike the television-consuming lower-orders.

With Louie Louie, as I recall the big issue was the very opposite of slipping one past the censors: they were, in fact, obsessed with seeing what wasn't there. I always had the impression form everything I read about that case that it was driven by a heady mix of political intolerance of anything that could not be understood because (SHRIEK) Communism, and anything that seemed like there might be a coded message in "race music" because thaat type 'needed' to be 'kept down'.

Absolutely right. People looking back from today's perspective are usually astounded to find out just how uninibited the Broadway stage was in the 1920s and 30s -- nude chorines, sex-driven plots, discussion of topics that would make Havelock Ellis blush, you name it, all at a $3.50 top. But there's also the fact that America isn't, wasn't, and never was just one country -- the America of Broadway is not the America of West Cornhole, Ia., and while Broadway shows didn't go out to the sticks, the movies did, radio did, and eventually television did -- hence the ultra-provincial censorship standards of those industries.

As for the Louie, Louie affair, the "Eeek, Commies!" angle is interesting. The sixties saw a heavy resurgence of paranoia about such things promoted by the John Birch Society, the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade, and similar right-wing cults. A campaign against "rock-and-roll" was as much a part of their propaganda as the anti-flouridation movement and warnings about miscegenation.
 
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My mother's basement
...

I'll defend Ikea on this. Yes, they make some lines which are cheaqp crap, and priced as such; always somebody who will be grateful for a chest of drawers they need for a year at College that will at least last that and can be left behind afterwards. However, IKEA also make a lot of higher end stuf. ...

It’s been going on 30 years ago that a friend converted a large old single-family house into an up-and-down duplex. He did a good job of it, undoing previous owners’ ill-conceived and poorly executed “improvements.”

In the downstairs unit he spent something on the order of 10 grand on custom kitchen cabinets. Solid wood, book-matched faces, etc. Upstairs he put in IKEA cabinets. That was the first I’d ever heard of IKEA. Their presence in the States was quite limited then. My friend drove his old Volvo station wagon up to Vancouver and brought back the cabinets in flat-pack boxes, to be assembled on site. Last I heard, the cabinets are still in good condition.

The short couch/loveseat on which I am currently reclined is from IKEA. The same model (but in different upholstery) is in our short-term rental unit in the basement. I bought both secondhand.

Part of making that basement unit an entirely separate living space involved building a vestibule at the bottom of the interior stairs (there’s an outside stairway leading into the basement unit as well). The longer wall of that vestibule is constructed from black IKEA bookcases (one section bought secondhand off Craigslist; the other bought new) secured to a header at the top and the floor at the bottom. The shorter wall has a six-panel door I found at an architectural salvage place. Now I can access the basement utility room without entering the basement living space, and the renters can access the laundry facilities without entering my living space. (Access to laundry facilities is a big selling point to the sorts of people [younger, mostly] who book through Airbnb.)

So yeah, IKEA stuff isn’t all junk, but I’ve yet to see anything from there I would call high-end. But then, the prices aren’t high-end, either. It holds up okay if kids aren’t using it for trampolines. Or if your heavier college-age friends and associates don’t attempt to see how many people it can hold. And it’s stylish.

IKEA is now so ubiquitous that I can ID it as such the instant I walk into a room. But that’s equally true of the MUCH more expensive furniture sold at Design Within Reach, which carries only the “iconic” (most overused word of the decade) designs from the likes of George Nelson and Warren Platner and Charles and Ray Eames. It’s beautiful stuff, and very high quality, but even if I could afford it I wouldn’t have but a piece or two in my place. A living space outfitted entirely from there would more resemble an interior design magazine than a home to actual humans. And it would betray a certain lack of imagination.
 
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I'd add that, while uneven, many fiction and non-fiction books throughout the pre-late-'60s 20th Century openly discussed sex, race and class issues in a much more frank manner than did the movies or TV shows of the same period.

A pretty interesting thing to do is to see a movie of that era and then read the novel the movie was based on and you'll - usually - be amazed at how much more explicit the novel is. I recently read "From the Terrace" by John O'Hara and saw the movie. The 1958 book is overwhelmed with adultery (almost everyone cheats, almost all the time in the book) and discusses issues around race, class and communism openly for its time. In the 1960 movie, the adultery is there, but you have to see between the lines to fully get it, and the race, class and communism issues are all but ignored. That movie and the book are, simply put, worlds apart.

That's just one example of many as you could definitely read in the books of that era about most of the issues that you'd never see on the big or small screen. As a fan of those books, it's one of the things that taught me how most of the problems and issues we are dealing with today were also issues back then. It's also interesting to see the different framework, narratives and attitudes all sides took around those issues back then versus today. It can be quite humbling (and enlightening) - whatever side of the divide on an issue you are on - if you think your ideas are new or fresh or brilliant or perfect.

One more thought, I'm not much of a silent film fan, so I'll leave that to Lizzie and others, but for the brief four-plus years that "talkies" were made ('29-'33, into '34) before the movie code was enforced, you can see a lot of issues - extra-and pre-marital sex, abortion, rape, class prejudice, race prejudice, politics, drug and alcohol abuse, domestic violence, and on and on - covered in various forms, sometimes quite directly, sometimes obliquely, but meaningfully more openly than from '34 on.
 

LizzieMaine

Bartender
Messages
32,962
Location
Where The Tourists Meet The Sea
I've always said that the worst way to study history is to read historians. Immerse yourself in the original source materials and you'll find out a lot more about what was really going on and why. And not just "mainstream" sources -- you'll learn a lot more about the what the Depression was really like reading the Daily News or the Daily Worker or some forgotten opinion journal or WPA oral histories, than you will reading The New York Times.

One of my favorite things to collect from the Era is literature from fringe movements -- millenarian religious sects, obscure political factions, all that type of stuff. The more of that stuff you study, the more you see that the SHOCKING REVELATIONS you see on the Internet today are just the same old stuff that's been going around for decades.
 

Edward

Bartender
Messages
24,737
Location
London, UK
So yeah, IKEA stuff isn’t all junk, but I’ve yet to see anything from there I would call high-end. But then, the prices aren’t high-end, either. It holds up okay if kids aren’t using it for trampolines. Or if your heavier college-age friends and associates don’t attempt to see how many people it can hold. And it’s stylish.

I'd agree - solid, basic, will last well if not abused. Of course, no sofa is safe from GretaCat, Destroyer of Soft Furnishings. Though it turns out a day of being explicitly shunned by her beloved Big Cat right after being shown the damage is a more powerful deterrent than I could have imagined!

IKEA is now so ubiquitous that I can ID it as such the instant I walk into a room. But that’s equally true of the MUCH more expensive furniture sold at Design Within Reach, which carries only the “iconic” (most overused word of the decade) designs from the likes of George Nelson and Warren Platner and Charles and Ray Eames. It’s beautiful stuff, and very high quality, but even if I could afford it I wouldn’t have but a piece or two in my place. A living space outfitted entirely from there would more resemble an interior design magazine than a home to actual humans. And it would betray a certain lack of imagination.

I indulge the fantasy that my place will eventually look somewhat like an early Mad Men set, but I'm not sure how that will cope with the detritus of my hoarding issues!

I'd add that, while uneven, many fiction and non-fiction books throughout the pre-late-'60s 20th Century openly discussed sex, race and class issues in a much more frank manner than did the movies or TV shows of the same period.

A pretty interesting thing to do is to see a movie of that era and then read the novel the movie was based on and you'll - usually - be amazed at how much more explicit the novel is. I recently read "From the Terrace" by John O'Hara and saw the movie. The 1958 book is overwhelmed with adultery (almost everyone cheats, almost all the time in the book) and discusses issues around race, class and communism openly for its time. In the 1960 movie, the adultery is there, but you have to see between the lines to fully get it, and the race, class and communism issues are all but ignored. That movie and the book are, simply put, worlds apart.

That's just one example of many as you could definitely read in the books of that era about most of the issues that you'd never see on the big or small screen. As a fan of those books, it's one of the things that taught me how most of the problems and issues we are dealing with today were also issues back then. It's also interesting to see the different framework, narratives and attitudes all sides took around those issues back then versus today. It can be quite humbling (and enlightening) - whatever side of the divide on an issue you are on - if you think your ideas are new or fresh or brilliant or perfect.

One more thought, I'm not much of a silent film fan, so I'll leave that to Lizzie and others, but for the brief four-plus years that "talkies" were made ('29-'33, into '34) before the movie code was enforced, you can see a lot of issues - extra-and pre-marital sex, abortion, rape, class prejudice, race prejudice, politics, drug and alcohol abuse, domestic violence, and on and on - covered in various forms, sometimes quite directly, sometimes obliquely, but meaningfully more openly than from '34 on.

Another good example is The Leather Boys. The 1964 film is best remembered for its depictions of the Ace Cafe and the Rockers that patronised it (amusingly, with absolutely none of the rock and roll music that was such a big part of that scene being depicted). The film is very subtle with the gay theme; many viewers, including modern ones, miss it until the denouement at the end (always funny hearing rocker revivalists who weren't expecting it and were made uncomfortable by it give off). Notably, though, whereas in the film the central character realises his pal is gay when they end up in a gay bar right at the end, and storms off, in the original book they have a fling together through much of the story and end up together in the end. It's interesting just how much was changed, and yet the gay character is actually very sympathetically played in the film (even if it does succumb to the All Gay Men Have Tragic Lives trope in the end).
 
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10,561
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There’s something to be said for more oblique references to sex, especially when one is goin’ a-courtin’. It requires imagination and a touch of poetry to get the point across. Effort, too. It kinda shows there’s more going on here than hormonal impulse. (Not that there isn’t hormonal impulse. That’s the driver, of course. Always has been.)
 
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Messages
10,561
Location
My mother's basement
A recent transfer at work has me back in training. Aside from discovering that there is actually a manual for some of the software I constantly use, I'm also doing inane little trainings about things like "cultural sensitivity".

Part of today was spent doing an attitudinal survey. At the end, the surveys were scored and scaled, with the results purportedly telling us which generation we are attitudinally "closest" to. Per my score, I'm closest not to my native Gen X, but to the Lost Generation (and it took them an hour to find the scales from 30 years ago to determine that).

Yes, I'm old: at least 119 years.

Careful, man, lest you get sent back for a bit of re-education.
 
Messages
10,561
Location
My mother's basement
My favorite instance of such comes from an obscure 1935 pop tune called "Sugar Plum," which contains the following lyric:

"I'm his Eskimo Pie
And he's my ice cream cone!
Yummy yum!"

And that means exactly what you think it does.

“I got a brand new pair of roller skates, you got a brand new key.”

It gets better from there.

In the early 1970s, when that tune was a hit, we were all still familiar with skate keys, but even then that particular technology was fading away. I haven’t seen a skate key (I’m speaking literally here) in decades. So I question if the younger people among us, who have never seen one, would visualize the song in quite the same way.
 

Edward

Bartender
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24,737
Location
London, UK
There’s something to be said for more oblique references to sex, especially when one is goin’ a-courtin’. It requires imagination and a touch of poetry to get the point across. Effort, too. It kinda shows there’s more going on here than hormonal impulse. (Not that there isn’t hormonal impulse. That’s the driver, of course. Always has been.)

Oh, completely. For one perhaps obscure example, I remember finding Nicole Kidman in .... I think it was whatever Batman film she was in? Opposite Val Kilmer? (I would search this, but I'm currently in Beijing where the only working English language search engine is Bing. Like being given a tricycle when you're a one-legged man used to driving an auto-v8 Mustang....) There's a scenew where she appears clad in naught but a silk sheet. As a hormonal teen I remember finding that infinitely sexier than her full-frontal nudity in Billy Bathgate, which came out around the same time. (Not that the latter wasn't titillating, but some things are more effective left to the imagination, as any fan of quality horror pictures will tell you.) A matter of artistic judgment rather than imposed censorship - though granted, while the latter had its problems, at least for heterosexual norm it often resulted in something much more creative. Not unlike how 'b' budget pictures can often be far superior in storytelling because they can't just replace it all with flash bang wallop effects.

“I got a brand new pair of roller skates, you got a brand new key.”

It gets better from there.

In the early 1970s, when that tune was a hit, we were all still familiar with skate keys, but even then that particular technology was fading away. I haven’t seen a skate key (I’m speaking literally here) in decades. So I question if the younger people among us, who have never seen one, would visualize the song in quite the same way.

Now you mention it.... I'd always assumed the 'key' was a reference to some sort of transport - or, to make more sense, something to do with making the skates work better. Never thought more about it than that. I had a pair of rollerskates as a kid in the early eighties, back before they disappeared in favour of roller boots. I used to love how I didn't have to change my shoes(unlike the kids with those newfangled rollerboots!) when we went skating in the local community centre on a Saturday morning... As memory serves, they weren't sized as such, but a bolt could be loosened to adjust the length. Assume the key was a tool for that?
 

EngProf

Practically Family
Messages
597
Oh, completely. For one perhaps obscure example, I remember finding Nicole Kidman in .... I think it was whatever Batman film she was in? Opposite Val Kilmer? (I would search this, but I'm currently in Beijing where the only working English language search engine is Bing. Like being given a tricycle when you're a one-legged man used to driving an auto-v8 Mustang....) There's a scenew where she appears clad in naught but a silk sheet. As a hormonal teen I remember finding that infinitely sexier than her full-frontal nudity in Billy Bathgate, which came out around the same time. (Not that the latter wasn't titillating, but some things are more effective left to the imagination, as any fan of quality horror pictures will tell you.) A matter of artistic judgment rather than imposed censorship - though granted, while the latter had its problems, at least for heterosexual norm it often resulted in something much more creative. Not unlike how 'b' budget pictures can often be far superior in storytelling because they can't just replace it all with flash bang wallop effects.




Now you mention it.... I'd always assumed the 'key' was a reference to some sort of transport - or, to make more sense, something to do with making the skates work better. Never thought more about it than that. I had a pair of rollerskates as a kid in the early eighties, back before they disappeared in favour of roller boots. I used to love how I didn't have to change my shoes(unlike the kids with those newfangled rollerboots!) when we went skating in the local community centre on a Saturday morning... As memory serves, they weren't sized as such, but a bolt could be loosened to adjust the length. Assume the key was a tool for that?

You are exactly right.
The skate key tightened the clamp-on steel skates (old-style) to the bottom of your regular shoes. The skates were oversize so you used the key to make them fit each person's shoes (adjust inward).
Maybe the ones in England worked better, but here they were a major-scale nuisance since you could tighten things up to the best of your ability and the flexing and vibration of the skate and shoe combination led to one skate soon and suddenly falling off.

One skate on one foot rolling and one skate being dragged along by the ankle strap was a formula for near-disaster. I do not have fond memories of those type roller skates.

The boot-skates were a different matter and worked well. Going skating was a great early-teen-age dating opportunity.

(Skate keys were sorta/maybe phallic in shape.)
 

GHT

I'll Lock Up
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9,281
Location
New Forest
One skate on one foot rolling and one skate being dragged along by the ankle strap was a formula for near-disaster. I do not have fond memories of those type roller skates.
Fond memories indeed, my friends and I would put that single skate to wonderful use. By putting rudimentary packaging on the skate you could create a flat surface, on this you place a large book, back then we all had Christmas Annuals, a perfect size. Now you sit on the book/skate at the summit of a convenient hill, by that I mean a street with a steep incline, push yourself off and down the hill you go.
How we managed to stay out of hospital I will never know.
The boot-skates were a different matter and worked well. Going skating was a great early-teen-age dating opportunity.
(Skate keys were sorta/maybe phallic in shape.)
Potential dating was something that I too found. After recovering from a hit and run by a car driver, my surgeon told me that I should swim, cycle and roller skate, because they were all good exercises without serious impact on the fracture. Our local skating rink had a jukebox, I can still remember the records played, or at least reminisce them whenever one is played, now and then on the radio. I didn't have much luck with the ladies though. However once recovered, I was back on the ballroom floor, now that was a seriously good place to meet the ladies.
 

scottyrocks

I'll Lock Up
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9,160
Location
Isle of Langerhan, NY
But holding onto that stuff for nearly half a century just wouldn’t have happened. Where to put it? Anybody got a spare warehouse they ain’t using for the next 40-some years?

I am currently wrestling with a similar issue.

In the basement we have my in-laws' old bedroom set - high quality stuff, no flake or particle board, tongue-in-groove construction, etc. You would think that it would be a perfectly normal thing to keep and use it, especially for someone such as myself who values 'old' stuff that is well made. The issue, at least for me, is that it's French Provincial style, and I really dislike French Provincial.

Of course, my wife will ultimately make the final decision on whether it stays or goes, as it was her parents' stuff. But I don't want to look at it in a living space, that's for sure.
 

scottyrocks

I'll Lock Up
Messages
9,160
Location
Isle of Langerhan, NY
You are exactly right.
The skate key tightened the clamp-on steel skates (old-style) to the bottom of your regular shoes. The skates were oversize so you used the key to make them fit each person's shoes (adjust inward).
Maybe the ones in England worked better, but here they were a major-scale nuisance since you could tighten things up to the best of your ability and the flexing and vibration of the skate and shoe combination led to one skate soon and suddenly falling off.

One skate on one foot rolling and one skate being dragged along by the ankle strap was a formula for near-disaster. I do not have fond memories of those type roller skates.

The boot-skates were a different matter and worked well. Going skating was a great early-teen-age dating opportunity.

(Skate keys were sorta/maybe phallic in shape.)

The solution for me, as a very young budding hockey player in the 1960s, just before the popular advent of shoes-skates, was to replace the small front clamps with much larger ones. Once that was done, the skates never fell off again.

Then we could make the skate as long as possible and it would stay on your foot. This added stability, important for hockey, and not falling on your face, in general.

Then we went to shoe skates with ceramic wheels, which had no better grip than steel wheels, and disintegrated in about a day or so of outdoor skating (a real win-win! haha). Shortly after that urethane came along, and look out! Revolutionary! haha
 

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