485 replies to this topic

[Melonious Thunk]

Listening to Inner Sanctum and being scared.

Listening to Edgar Bergen and Charlie Mc Carthy and laughing.

Watching Jerry Lester's Broadway Open House and getting a woody when Dagmar came on.

[Maurice Naughton]

Sliderules.

I still have mine somewhere. The Bugatti of slide rules. A Keuffel and Esser 20" Log Log Duplex Trig.

[rancho_gordo]

The way momma looked at the pool boy when she handed him an ice cold lemonade.

[Wilfrid1]

A truck which came by every week in summer and delivered soda. All made by a company called Corona: cream soda was my favorite. Cream soda ice cream floats.

Heinz sandwich spread.

Laughing at The Clitheroe Kid on the radio.

[Maurice Naughton]

Iceboxes. We had one till I was about four. Ice man came with a horse-drawn flatbed wagon, 60 pound blocks of ice covered and interleaved with straw. Ice man had a big pair of ice tongs to carry the block around to the back door and put it in the top compartment of the icebox. He also had an icepick in a leather holster on his belt. He'd use it to chip shards off exposed corners to give to the little kids, not in school yet, who'd come out to play with the horse.

[Lippy]

Maurice, the beautiful Keuffel and Esser building on Fulton St. is being turned into condos.

[Melonious Thunk]

COAL

The coal delivery: a clattering truck with high wooden sides lifting its load of black chunks and sliding them noisily down a heavy wooden ramp through a hole in the wall of the apartment building, with a great cloud of black coal dusk enveloping all withing 50 feet. The coal delivery man, looking like a creature from the netherworld, bits of white flesh visible beneath the mask and ski hat.

Coal ash pick up: perhaps ten or twelve corregated steel cans filled with pitted white chunks of burned coal, looking like old lava, cans lined up in front of the building waiting to be picked up by a noisy truck and men covered with white and black dust tosssing the heavy cans and their tops back to the concrete sidewalk with an unearthly clatter.

How hard and gritty it was.

Then the window sills, thick with coal ash after a day or two of cold days with burning furnaces spewing their black powder into the air. New fallen snow would become coated with black ash within a day or so.

[bigbear]

The smell of burning leaves every autumn.

[Rebecca]

The smell of burning leaves every autumn.

And the smell of burning incinerators or burn barrels in the back yard. I remember my oldest child running to get me at Grandma's to "come smell the garbage burn!"

[Wilfrid1]

Yes, coal fires and raking out the grate.

Also, surely deadly paraffin heaters in bedrooms when really cold.

Hey. Blankets. Whatever happened to blankets?

[Maurice Naughton]

The Manor Man, from Manor Bakeries in Kansas City. First in a horse-drawn wagon, then in a motor truck. I used to beg my mother to buy salt-rising bread. Truly foul smelling, but it made the best toast there ever was, with good salty butter from the Troost Avenue dairy.

Has anyone here ever had salt-rising bread? Does it even exist nowadays? I'm too lazy to look it up, but is it a kind of sourdough?

[Squeat Mungry]

Hey. Blankets. Whatever happened to blankets?

I have blankets. Did people stop using blankets?

[StephanieL]

AM Top 40 radio.

[g.johnson]

Clothes wringers.

[g.johnson]

Gold top milk.