This spins off from the "Age of Posters" thread, prompted by watching
an episode of Never Mind the Buzzcocks the other night, in which one
of the "challenges" for the panel was to pick Eric Haydock (bass
player for the Hollies) out of a line-up of five, gray-haired, elderly
gents.  One of the panelists, an eighteen-year-old UK pop star named
Lil Chris, was asked if he'd ever heard of the Hollies.  No, he
hadn't.

Which caused me to think, not for the first time, that we who are
approaching our golden years remember a lot of things that the younger
folk have never seen or heard of -- like the tv tube testers that used
to be found in supermarkets and drug stores.  Years ago, I made a list
of some of them, but of course now I can't find the list.

But here are a few:

horse-drawn wagons delivering milk and bread, door to door.  Drivers
would sometimes let you ride along (no fear of pedophiles in those
days) and the horses got lots of free carrots and apples.

Men in hats.  Up until the early sixties, most men wore hats --
fedoras, trilbys, even bowlers for the middle class, mostly flat caps
for workingmen.

Gas station attendants -- in uniform, yet! -- who pumped your gas,
checked your fluids and tire pressure.  By the time they started
calling "full service" it wasn't.

"shell-shock" victims -- in the fifties and sixties every town in
Canada (and Britain, too, I'm sure) had its handful of elderly men who
had been driven mad by too many months in the trenches of WWI and who
spent the rest of their lives in trembling dementia.  As kids, we
would see them on the streets and in the parks.  I remember one old
fellow, frail, hunched over, walking with a cane, who could only say
one word -- "Cheerio!" -- though he said it to everybody he met.

"Bombed Properties" (later shortened to "bombies") -- a whole block of
houses reduced to to broken brick and shattered masonry, where we used
to explore and play as kids in the post-war years, although we were
forbidden to go there.

Cars that started with a hand-crank.  I had one, a 64 Austin Cambridge
that I ran for six weeks without a battery.

A long fork used for making toast at the fireplace -- standard
equipment in British homes until the 1950s.

Streets lit by gas lamps, the lamps lit by a man who came around with
an igniter (I assume) on a long pole.

Homes for unwed mothers -- I used to deliver groceries to one in
suburban Vancouver in 1972.

Along the same lines, condoms sold only by pharmacists -- you had to
ask for them -- that came with the words "sold for prevention of
disease only" printed on the packets, because contraception was
illegal

SF tie-in:  those of us who like time travel or alternate reality
stories need to remember L.P. Hartley's line:  "The past is a foreign
country;  they do things differently there."

Anybody else got a few?

Matt Hughes
http://www.archonate.com