From Where I Sit

By Pat Spilseth, Columnist

Practices from the past often become obsolete over time. I received the following ideas from a friend who reads my weekly column. She chuckled over the old fashioned ideas from our past and thought you might enjoy reading about them. Thanks for sending any ideas for me to write about.

No matter where you were, an office, restaurant, a concert or even the doctor’s exam room, it used to be normal for everybody to be lighting up a cigarette. Both men and women shared the habit. At your annual physical in the exam room, it was common for doc to be smoking.

Cut and paste was a daily problem. The paragraph that needed to be removed was literally cut out and pasted in the correct place. There was no delete, copy or paste.

Remember metal milk chutes by the kitchen door where the milkman would deliver our orders of milk and leave the milk in a glass bottle? We were so trusting back then.

In the late forties, how about the rag man who drove by the house collecting paper and rags.    

Telephone numbers consisted of letters and numbers. If someone lived in a town named Globe, his phone number would be GL7-2242. If someone lived in Diamond, the number might be DI7-2242. Everyone’s phone number in a town started with the first two letters of the town.

I remember my cousins who lived in the country who were on a “party” line. Each house was given a particular ring, one ring or two, long or short, to connect with another caller. Others on that line could pick up their phone and hear what was said. You got to know who was calling who and could listen in on their conversation. There were plenty of “rubber neckers” who loved hearing all the juicy gossip of their neighbors. There wasn’t much privacy.

Phones were used solely for making calls. Each phone had to be plugged in to an outlet. Phones had a coiled cord that could stretch quite a long distance for those private conversations.

Ice cream came in a square container and we sliced it to serve. Pink strawberry, brown chocolate and white vanilla were the layers of Neapolitan ice cream, a fancy favorite ice cream.

Chef Boyardee pizza came in a packaged tube which we unrolled, poured tomato sauce from a separate package and baked in the oven. That pizza company is still available today.

Soft drinks were sold in glass bottles. You could pick up the empty bottles and turn them in at the store where you could trade them in for refills or money. Coke glass bottles are a collectors’ favorite today.

If you wanted to straighten your curls, you’d get out the ironing board and wrap your hair in waxed paper and have someone iron it for you. No chemical product was available. Some women hid their gray hair with a blue rinse. It seems like that would make the gray more obvious.

Need to write a research paper for school? Go to the local Carnegie library and pore over those thick research books to get material you could back up with quotes. Be sure to specifically name your source with the proper form listed on the assignment. Get out the typewriter and choose a font. Make a mistake? You need White-Out which would leave a giant white blob on the page.

It’ll blow your kids’ mind when you tell them about all our old practices! Grateful for computers and the internet? Today we’re living in a whole new world!

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To contact Pat, email: pat.spilseth@gmail.com.