Vintage Things That Have Disappeared In Your Lifetime?

I know of a bar with a phone booth built in to a wood-paneled wall. There’s no longer a working payphone in that booth, but it still makes for a good place for a person to use her cellphone without disturbing the other patrons, and vice-versa. And the old phone booth is something of a signature feature of the joint.

 

Have we yet mentioned “check calling,” as it was called among my people back in the day, when long-distance phone calls cost real money?

The point of it was to let a person know where on the road you were without having to pay for the call. The parties — the traveler and the person back home — worked out a code, so that when the traveler placed a collect call the recipient would know whether to accept charges or not. If the caller identified himself to the operator as, say, Robert, the operator would tell the recipient that Robert was calling collect from Dubuque, Iowa, and the recipient would know not to accept the charges. But if Bob were calling, well, the recipient would accept the charges and talk with Bob.

Dishonest? Yeah, it was. But it was easy enough for people of modest (at best) means to rationalize.

 

^^^^^
It occurs to me that people under 40 or so might not know what any of that means.

Collect call? Operator? Long-distance? Wassat?

 

That’s a splendid idea. That it hasn’t yet been implemented speaks ill of whoever gets in the way of it.

After all, a nostalgic setting is part of what you all are selling there, ain’t it?

 

Hell, used to be in the late 1960's that I had to take out a loan to make a long distance call. My girlfriend spent 8 months working in London, I called her once as it cost about a day's wages for a 5 minute call. Check calls were my way of 'beating the Man"

 

When was the last time anyone saw a "crying room" in a movie theater? It was a large, glassed-in booth, often in a balcony, where mothers could watch the movie without their crying babies disturbing the other spectators. They were common when I was a boy, but I haven't seen one since the late 50s, at least.

 

I have the dimmest memories of seeing one or two, but I couldn’t say where.

They were a feature in some churches as well, weren’t they?

You have a few years on me, I’m guessing.

 

We have one in our church...a sound proof room with a glass wall looking into the sanctuary. The Sunday service is piped in via the sound system.

 

It was built in the early 1950's.

 

We had a local theatre with one. My wife's Granddad built the place BTW...

 

It's usually the less costly alternative to a church nursery.

When my now- 30 year old son was a neonate, dropping him off in a church nursery for a couple hours was a much needed break. I would have argued that being sent to a crying room (bawling kids in addition to my own, PLUS a sermon piped in) would have been an Eighth Amendment (cruel and unusual punishment) violation.

 

Perhaps it’s greener grass thinking on my part, but having been shuttled about quite a bit as a youngster I sometimes find myself envious of people with long family histories in the places they still live.

I can only imagine how it is for immigrants. It’s not to make light of it to note how much more of a shock it was for immigrants of a century and more ago, when the people they left behind they would probably never see again.

 

Like all of us here in NAmerica my people came from afar. I cannot imagine the leap they made to pack up the family, the few things they owned plus 4 children and board a steamer bound for Canada. Little money, few prospects, just a hope...based on nothing of substance. Me I still live within 10 miles of where I was born. I have travelled the world but have always had a place that I called home to which I knew I would return. The closest thing I have to a regret is that I never had the experience of living someplace else, someplace entirely different than 'here'. But on the other hand I am so thankful of having a known place, of having witnessed the evolution of a place....driving by the family home that belonged to the family for 65 years, driving past all my schools, all my places of work....of having favourite haunts that have been favourites for 60 years or so. Ah, tradeoffs.

 

Consider the intimate feeling for and knowledge of a place where one's "dead are in the churchyard - thirty generations laid". And then to have to up and leave for pastures unknown.

 

In a movie theater, no. But, as others have mentioned, they had one in a semi-local church I attended back in 1979-81 when "Born Again" Christianity was the big fad. They called it a "Maternity Room" to put a politically correct spin on it, but they actually did a very good job and appointed it so that new mothers would be as comfortable as possible and have almost every supply item they might need to care for their child. The sermon was piped in over the sound system, and the wall between the room and the church proper had a sizable mirrored window in it so the mothers who were breastfeeding their children would have a reasonable level of privacy and still be able to see and hear the sermon.