Stuck in the past or favoring the old ways.

[Egon]

Item: Seeing the cream rising on the only milk we could get, whole milk fresh from a local farmer. And then using the u-shaped siphon to siphon off the cream - don't know what my mother did with the cream.

Sure can't do that anymore up here. Farmer selling raw milk or cream is in big trouble.

Surely don't know how so many of us managed to survive without all the protection we now get??

 

[vsteel]

I thought I would chime in with some of the "old ways" that I do.

I grind my own wheat to make my 100% whole wheat bread and buns. Its been a long time since the kids have any "wonder bread". Just getting into the gardening and canning, so I am on the early part of the curve on that one.

I heat the house with wood. I go get a lot of it or buy it by the log truck and split it by hand.

I am also starting wood working to make some of the furniture upgrades I would like to put in the house.

My better half makes a lot of clothes for the family and has a sowing machine much like the one that was pictured earlier in the thread. She also wouldn't give it up for anything.

 

[jinman]

Item - The ice box, with the outside door where the local ice man delivered a new 25 pound block every other day.

Fred, I forgot about that one. We had an icebox when I was very young. I remember the 25 lb blocks of ice delivered to our house and how fascinated I was with the iceman's tongs. I remember also when we got the Servel refrigerator from the gas company and how confused I was that a flame could make the refrigerator cold.

That old icebox went first to our back porch and then into our hen house for most of my youth. We had a hen house made from clay block tile. Those tile were popular building blocks before cinderblocks. The local brickyard was just over the hill from us and my dad bought tile seconds to build around the farm. I think the hen house was disposed of after I went into the US Navy in 1968. The hen house roof collapsed and only the tile walls were left standing.

 

[tallyho8]

Around 1951 my aunt lived in one of the old "mansions" in New Orleans off St Charles St by Audubon Park and we lived out in the "burbs" and she still had an icebox with regular ice delivery and she had a black desk phone with no dial that you had to jiggle the switch hook to call the operator to place the call.

We had an old Servel gas refrigerator and a modern black desk phone with a dial with a 2 party line. The freezer section just had room for 3 regular ice trays and one double ice tray. It was amazing the amount of meat my mother could pack into the double ice tray section. I can remember many times having a frozen brick shaped cube of ground meat sitting out defrosting for dinner.

I still have the defrost pan for the old Servel which was a porcelain pan about 6 inches deep the length and width of the freezer section which mounted right under the freezer section. This is where you would put the meat to defrost. Now it is a nut & bolt container.

We had several of those old Servels and I can still remember when we had to evacuate the house when one sprung a leak and all the ammonia leaked out. (No freon in those)

I like my new cell phone but when I am at home I still prefer to talk on a land-line phone. I prefer to sit in the swing or rocker on the porch of my "shack" in back rather than sit in the recliner in the living room. But I would hate to give up all the modern conveniences that we have today.

 

[dmccarty]

I tell my kids they are spoiled all of the time.

They have upteen zillion kid's channels on Directv that are on 24x7. At best I had TBS when we lived in Atlanta and Ted was just starting out. I remember touring TBS on a school trip and it was in an old white columned mansion like house. Not real impressed was I. Carter was the governor of GA at the time and we toured the Governor's Mansion and I remember the cheap swingset they had for Amy.

For my first years we did not have central AC in our families houses. At best a window AC. That could be real hard on you in central FLA in the summer. My grandmother had a kero heater in her house. It was fed out of a 55 gallon drum. Eventually she could afford a central HVAC system and she was so happy. The window AC would do a good job chilling down her small house but that kero heater scared her late in life.

And AC in a car was to roll down four windows and open the side vents. Remember the vent windows?

The biggy these days is computers. Our oldest will be in the study on one our our desktop watching cartoon shows. She does not even have to wait for the scheduled time anymore. Finding information is just so easy now a days with the Internet.....

My dad's computer just died and he is waiting for the new one to get delivered. He is bored since he can't visit his favorite websites to read! He is ready two newspapers, remember those old things, front to back and back to front then he is done.

Later,
Dan

 

[chh]

We had several of those old Servels and I can still remember when we had to evacuate the house when one sprung a leak and all the ammonia leaked out. (No freon in those)

I like my new cell phone but when I am at home I still prefer to talk on a land-line phone.

My parents had one of the old Servels when I was little, I still remember that smell when it started leaking. I can't remember what year it died, late 60's or early 70's but the replacement electric fridge was Avacado green I still remember the Sears saleman telling mom that it was the hot new color.


My parents never had a phone out here on the ranch. When I moved back out here after college, I got line put in. $200 or so constuction payment to get on a party line in 1983. When we finally built a house and quit living in a trailer we tried to get new lines run to the house. $10,000 for a 1/2 mile of phone line. I didn't need a phone that bad. So it is cells for us.

 

[tallyho8]

As I helped a friend install his new plasma TV, he looked at all the buttons on the remote control and said "why are these so complicated? I wish they were as simple as the old TVs." HA! I thought about how 50 years have faded his memory. Anyone who had one of the old 1950s 100% American-made RCA, Crosley, Zenith or other brands would never want to go back to one of those dinosaurs.

The first thing you had to learn with those was how to set the length and direction of the rabbit ears for each station and then how to operate all the knobs for the fine tuning, horizontal hold, vertical hold, brightness and contrast, all of which needed regular adjustment.

The novice would become alarmed as the TV started to roll in the middle of the Dinah Shore Show but the veteran TV owner knew immediately when he got up off the couch and walked over to the TV if he had to adjust the horizontal, vertical or just jiggle the tuner knob.

In the later 1950s manufacturers tried to make the TVs seem easier to operate by simplifying the controls on front and hiding some controls such as the horizontal and vertical ones on the rear of the set. This made adjustment much more difficult when they rolled as you had to pull the TV away from the wall, get a screwdriver to turn the adjustment control and put a mirror in front of the TV to watch it as you made adjustments.

When the set broke, as they all did, every 6 months, and you could not stop it from rolling with the adjustments, it was tube pulling time. You would remove all the tubes, usually 6 to 20 of them, and bring them to your local Walgreens, where you would stand in line to check them on their free DIY TV tube checker. This tube checker was about the size of a dishwasher with a door in front and all the new tubes stacked in alpha-numerical order inside. When you found which tube was bad, you crossed your fingers and checked the inventory hoping that your tube was in stock.

If replacing the tube did not correct your problem, then it was TV repairman time. You would remove the back from your TV, and ALWAYS discharge the high voltage line going to the picture tube with a well insulated screwdriver. Even if the TV sat unplugged for several hours and you forgot to do this, the charge, which was equivalent to a modern taser, would throw you across the room first smashing your head on the top of the TV cabinet. Then you had to unscrew the 4 retainer screws (most TVs had 2 as the owners threw the others away for faster repairs) that held the chassis in the cabinet, remove the plug to the picture tube, which you left in the cabinet, and bring the chassis to your local radio-TV repair shop where they promised to put your TV ahead of several others in the waiting line and have it ready in only 2 or 3 weeks.

While waiting for your TV to be repaired, on Wednesday nights at 7pm you would have to go grease up the cast iron skillet and pop some popcorn and put it in a paper bag which you saved from your trip to the grocery store and then bring it next door to your neighbor's house to watch the latest episode of Dick Tracy in astonishment as he used his wrist TV-2 way radio to contact HQ. (Strangely similar to our modern cell phones)

Strangely enough, on a black and white TV, you could, or thought you could, tell what color car he was driving, red, blue or green.

Yes Lord, take me back in time, but let me bring my plasma TV with me.

 

[jinman]

Anyone who had one of the old 1950s 100% American-made RCA, Crosley, Zenith or other brands would never want to go back to one of those dinosaurs.

Dudley, let's not forget Muntz. That was one of the most brilliantly designed TVs with the fewest components because they relied on inter-electrode capacitance of the components in the circuits (this was pre-circuit board days). They were great until they failed. When that happened, you would likely never get the TV working properly because very few people knew just where to bend a standoff or make a physical adjustment to components to get the TV back in tune.

My dad had an insurance agency. One of his customers was a TV shop and made my dad a great deal on a Muntz TV to pay some premiums he had missed. That TV turned into a nightmare after 6 months. I remember having to turn the TV on at least 15 minutes before Bonanza started to be able to see any picture and sometimes we'd just watch the picture as it rolled by due to loss of vertical sync. Just when you thought you had it stopped from rolling up, it would start slowly rolling down or horizontal sync would change.

Yep, Dudley, those old B&W tube TVs were a real "joy."

 

[Bird]

I actually used one of those TV tube testers and fixed my own TV once, but the tube tester was in the 7-11 store.

In 1969, I was a detective sergeant working in the burglary & theft section, when a lady called and told me she thought a neighbor was probably a burglar; said he had an unmarked van, and frequently set TV sets out for the garbage men. I drove by the location, and sure enough, some old TVs sitting at the curb.

After doing just a little bit of minor investigating, I found that the guy ran a continuous ad in the TV Guide section of the newspaper for TV repairs "in your home". No address in the ad; just a phone number. He had one of those tube testers and an inventory of tubes in the van. He would come to your house and test the tubes. If that was the problem, he fixed it and you paid for the tube and the service call. If that was not the problem, he'd tell you the TV would have to go into the shop to be repaired. If you agreed, he'd take it to a TV repair shop. When it was repaired, he'd pick it up and deliver it back to you and you paid whatever the repair shop charged him, plus his markup, and the service call. And if the TV repair shop said it wasn't worth fixing, or the price was too high, and you didn't want the old TV back, it was sitting on the curb for the garbage men to pick up.

He apparently had a thriving TV repair business and actually knew no more about repairing a TV than I do, maybe not very honest, but there was nothing illegal about it.

 

[dbdartman]

I actually used one of those TV tube testers and fixed my own TV once, but the tube tester was in the 7-11 store.

Hey, I remember doing exactly the same. Pull the tubes from the TV, bike about 1.5 miles to the 7-11 & test the tubes, only this was in the late 60's-early 70's!

You ask why someone would want satellite radio? We get it with the Satellite TV & I listen to music (amplified through an early 70's vintage Pioneer SX-727 receiver/amp) more than watch the TV. There is a "station" for every musical taste (from 30's music, to blues, to album rock, to the stuff they call music these days), but best of all, NO COMMERCIALS!!!!!

Edited to say: Sat radio is also nice for truckers & cross country travelers because you can listen the the same station anywhere & everywhere.