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    Roller Rinks

    Once upon a time many years ago, around ten o'clock at night, when I was about to leave an evening of folk dancing and go home, I happened to catch a radio program of organ music. It was the old WGMS station in Washington, DC, which disappeared from the air waves about ten years ago. After a...
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    Movie locations

    The comments in the thread about Film Noir made me think about movie locations that you can actually visit, not counting studios. My son, when he first moved to L.A., made a special trip to visit the stairs that were in the Laurel & Hardy short "The Music Box." Similar stairs that were in a...
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    Things that will disappear

    There have been threads about things that have disappeared and threads about things that won't disappear. Surely there are things that you are pretty sure are going to disappear. Be warned, however, predicting the future is risky, especially if you dabble in the stock market. Sometimes things...
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    The Golden Age of the Streetcar

    As I've often mentioned, I grew up in a small town of not much more than about 8,000. Today it only has about 6,500. Yet when the town had only around 2,000 or fewer residents, a streetcar line was established. Another one was established in the next closest town, which had about 6,000 or 8,000...
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    The wonderful foods of the Golden Era

    I was reminded of this by comments in another thread as well as a discussion with my young wife. I'm sure it's been talked to death already but I didn't get a chance to say anything. So here are some more thoughts. First off, the Golden Era to me was the 1950s, although the early 60s weren't...
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    Other cultures

    "Other cultures" may not be the right term but it was something that I was reminded of by the Tiki Culture thread. For all I know, there may be other threads about this subject and if there is, well, now there's one more. "Tiki Culture" doesn't seem that old to me, meaning it isn't like...
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    Neighborhood theaters and Drive-in Movies

    This could go in the thread about things that have disappeared in your lifetime. But I think it deserves its own thread, that is, if there isn't one already. Once upon a time in America, there were motion picture theaters everywhere. In town, that is. Even in small towns, there was very likely...
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    1941: My hometown

    I discovered a YouTube video of my hometown of a film supposedly made in 1941: I grew up in Princeton, West Virginia, a small railroad town ten miles inside the state line on U.S. 460, an east-west highway that goes through Blacksburg, Virginia, and Bluefield, West Virginia. It was the...
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    Tying neckties

    This isn't about four-in-hand versus Windsor or half-Windsor. It's about tying a necktie so that's it's short. I don't know why I thought of it but maybe because of something I noticed in an old movie. Once upon a time, provably sixty years ago, my father mentioned to me that, before WWII, some...
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    Sounds of the past

    Something, don't know what, made me think about sounds that we might have commonly heard when we were little but no longer do for one reason or another. I suppose we might still hear church bells if we happen to live near enough to a church that does that. We could hear the bells from the...
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    Bumper stickers and license plates

    Bumper stickers have been around as long as I can remember. Sometimes they are funny, sometimes they are arrogant and sometimes they are vulgar and stupid. Same with license plates, now that vanity plates are more common. These seem to be just an American thing. I don't recall having seen any...
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    Things that make you smile

    There are things that tick people off but surely there are as many things that make you smile when you see them. They might be crude and vulgar, they might be commonplace, they might be hard to understand and they might even be unsafe. They probably wouldn't be anything you'd do, of course. I...
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    Time capsules

    I was reminded of this as I read the thread about the wartime home. But maybe I can get something going here. My wife's grandmother was related to a large family that lived in Charlestown, West Virginia, which is in the eastern panhandle of the state. The family was quite well-off, as we might...
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    What happened to small towns?

    I was about to make this post in that other thread that devolved into talking about development and whatnot and nothing about hats. Instead, I thought it might be a good topic for a fresh, new thread. It's probably been talked about before but not today. The question is, or was, what happened...
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    How long has it been...

    How long has it been since you could buy a suit with two pair of pants? And for that matter, how long has it been since you could buy a suit that would be described as "heavy?" The latter question arises from L.L. Bean's advice in 1940 for someone about to go on a fall hunting trip: wear from...
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    Men's Adventure Magazines

    Something I was researching for another thread reminded me of something. There used to be a genre magazines that would be described as men's adventure magazines. I don't know how many there were, maybe a dozen or two, and they varied from pulp to racy. But during that period, Life and Look...
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    Does your name date you?

    One of the characteristics of a period is the names. When I was little, the women in our neighborhood had names like Beulah, Audrey, Virginia or Ruth. Those were popular names around the time they were born (between about 1910 and 1930, to give a broad range). Men's names were Thomas, Theodore...
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    Style and the movies

    I am reluctant to admit that I am influenced by the style of the characters in movies but I am. Probably no one else here would admit to such a thing. In my case, however, it's only certain movies, naturally, and one obscure serial in particular comes to mind. There are others but this one...
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    Essentials for the kitchen

    No doubt many here still wear bed jackets, hats (with hat pins) and gloves when going to town, corsets (or "foundations") and sensible shoes. Those were for women, of course. Men would continue to wear tie clasps or tacks, cuff links, smoking jackets in the evening and the latest Palm Beach...
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    Tramps and other characters

    Today we have so-called homeless people who live under bridges or in the woods. But when I was little, in the 1950s, there were real tramps or hobos as well as local characters who drifted around town, scaring horses and little kids like me. I never heard anyone called homeless. One person in...

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