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Old 01-01-2019, 10:25 AM
 
Location: Texas of course
705 posts, read 560,413 times
Reputation: 3832

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Quote:
Originally Posted by athena53 View Post
Another Board I'm on just started a thread about Jarts (lawn darts) and it reminded me of the dangerous toys we had back then. Jarts were banned after a few people threw them wrong and they ended up piercing the head of someone nearby.

Anyone remember Vac-u-Forms and Creeple People? Mattel made a unit that let you pour something called Plastigoop into molds and bake it- one popular mold was for little characters you could stick on the end of a pencil. Vac-u-Form used the same unit but you stuck a sheet of hard plastic into a frame, let it heat up till it softened and then quickly flipped the frame over a metal mold and used a handle to suck the air out so the plastic formed around the mold.

I wonder what was in the fumes.
I do remember all those things. Remember 'Clackers'? OUCH! Of all the things considered dangerous today we somehow survived it all.

Speaking of fumes, do you remember the plastic bubbles? There was a couple of companies that put them out. When you opened the tube you could smell the strong fumes, it was worse than model car glue. I remember once I inhaled a little after blowing by accident and my throat burned.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHLuKv-NqG0
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Old 01-01-2019, 10:37 AM
 
4,717 posts, read 3,251,941 times
Reputation: 12122
Quote:
Originally Posted by Over the hill gang View Post
Speaking of fumes, do you remember the plastic bubbles? There was a couple of companies that put them out. When you opened the tube you could smell the strong fumes, it was worse than model car glue. I remember once I inhaled a little after blowing by accident and my throat burned.
Oh, I'd forgotten that stuff! I bought some for DS when he was little (around 1990) and only then realized what a bad idea it was.
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Old 01-01-2019, 12:44 PM
 
Location: near bears but at least no snakes
26,650 posts, read 28,557,937 times
Reputation: 50477
We weren't poor but people lived with a lot less back in the 1950s and didn't complain or wish for more.

My parents first house had NO HEAT upstairs. Two bedrooms and mice ran across my freezing bedroom floor. My dad would trap them and carry them out on a shovel.

But the house I grew up in was big. However, it had a weird bedroom set up because the house was old and had been added onto at one time. It was also freezing in winter. The worst part probably was the bathroom. It was upstairs and there was no shower and only limited hot water. For us to take a bath, my mother had to fill the tub with the little bit of hot water we could get and then traipse up the stairs with a huge kettle of water that she heated on the stove. She kept bringing kettles of hot water up those stairs so we could take a bath.

I don't know how we got ready for school since there was no shower. Just washed up, I guess. I never saw a shower until I went to college.
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Old 01-01-2019, 01:13 PM
 
5,455 posts, read 3,359,329 times
Reputation: 12177
Default We had much more freedom than today

Quote:
Originally Posted by tijlover View Post
I was talking to a friend of mine from childhood, she's 66, I'm 68, and we got to talking about our both growing up, across the street from one another in MN, in a small 800SF 2 bedroom house, with no basement.

Back then, one TV set in the house, so if Daddy wanted to watch Westerns, then you have no choice to watch it as well. Only one bathroom in the house, in my house shared by 5, in her house shared by 4, but no shower just a tub for bathing. And the biggest mystery of all, those long winters, where one January in the early 60's, it barely went above zero for the whole month, nighttime lows of 30-40 below, and there we were, trapped inside a 800SF prison. In her case, she slept with her sister who peed the bed until 4th grade! And for telephone, there were the Party Lines!

I'm still pondering it and always will, how on earth did I survive it all those years and what did we do to occupy ourselves during those long winters with no Smartphones, cell phones, Internet or even a TV in the bedroom?

How about you, do you ever ponder that, how you survived it without going Kookoo.

Of course this post wouldn't have much relevance if you grew up in a roomy middle class home.
We made our own fun. We made tents out of blankets, listened to radio and played records. We played outside running and jumping, playing sports. We did a lot of things like that. We got to know our neighbors and played with their children. We helped our Mom around our house, mowed the lawn, shoveled snow.
We did most all of this without our parents hanging over our shoulders. We got our first TV in 1963 but were not allowed to watch it all day. If we were sitting around the house too much our mother told us to go outside and play but father would get us doing some kind of work around our yard.

There were 7 in our family and we, by far, had more freedom than children do today.
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Old 01-01-2019, 01:16 PM
 
2,360 posts, read 1,425,113 times
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Well, since some posters upthread were discussing tumbleweeds, I’ll tell my story.

I grew up in the desert, where we had three seasons: windy and hot, windy and cold, and just plain hot-as-hell.

Like everybody else said, I had to walk about 150 miles to school. But, instead of ice and snow, I walked across the open desert in the wind. All of us kids on windy days would be ducking the galvanized metal trash cans being blown across the desert, or gigantic tumbleweeds. Seriously, some of those tumbleweeds were as big as a small car, and there were hundreds of them.

So, no matter what you read, tumbleweeds do NOT make good Christmas trees!
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Old 01-01-2019, 01:27 PM
 
Location: Texas of course
705 posts, read 560,413 times
Reputation: 3832
Quote:
Originally Posted by in_newengland View Post
We weren't poor but people lived with a lot less back in the 1950s and didn't complain or wish for more.

My parents first house had NO HEAT upstairs. Two bedrooms and mice ran across my freezing bedroom floor. My dad would trap them and carry them out on a shovel.

But the house I grew up in was big. However, it had a weird bedroom set up because the house was old and had been added onto at one time. It was also freezing in winter. The worst part probably was the bathroom. It was upstairs and there was no shower and only limited hot water. For us to take a bath, my mother had to fill the tub with the little bit of hot water we could get and then traipse up the stairs with a huge kettle of water that she heated on the stove. She kept bringing kettles of hot water up those stairs so we could take a bath.

I don't know how we got ready for school since there was no shower. Just washed up, I guess. I never saw a shower until I went to college.
My father grew up on a farm, they had no running water. The outhouse was a good distance from the house and they had to go across the back pasture and cross a bridge to carry water from the spring. It was downhill going to get water, coming back carrying that water uphill was the hard part. It was a perfect square cut out of the earth just big enough to put the buckets in to fill with crystal clear water and was the best tasting water I ever had. Anyway, one person could carry 2 buckets at a time but not all the way full or it would splash out. Their baths were taken in a basin, it's all they could do. You would think they'd smell but they didn't, if they had, I would have noticed. I can tell you it was rough in the winter! If I had to guess I'd say it was the distance of about 4 city blocks one way. They didn't have water lines run on the mountain till around 1970 and he was tickled to death to get a bathroom put in and he remodeled the kitchen. My father always told me they had to walk miles to school and we'd laugh like it was joke, saying oh yes, uphill both ways. One day when were visiting he showed us the distance and it was true. I don't know how they did it in the snow which was most of the year. There were 10 kids, one sister died at the age of 9 from pneumonia. They had a big space heater in the kitchen so the other rooms got a little cold. I also remember everyone seemed to stay in the kitchen, sitting in the chairs and talking. I didn't know why then but of course it was to stay warm!

My other grandfather had water in the kitchen but you had to pump it and heat it and they carried it to the tub. I think they got city water around the 70's too.

Quote:
Originally Posted by happygrrrl View Post

So, no matter what you read, tumbleweeds do NOT make good Christmas trees!
I had never seen tumbleweeds when I saw my 1st while on trip. It was HUGE! I always thought they were small and soft like they appeared in movies. BUT they are NOT! One rolled across the hwy and we hit it, it did some damage, bent up and tore off our front license plate. Oh and they hurt if you touch them like a sticker bush.
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Old 01-01-2019, 01:48 PM
 
13,498 posts, read 18,138,198 times
Reputation: 37885
Quote:
Originally Posted by cebuan View Post
The Sunday funnies had ads for cigarettes, featuring big league ballplayers puffing away -- my mental picture now is Sal Maglie. And "More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette", for those of you who believe the conspiracy theory they were not healthy.
Right....the "more doctors" ads. Had forgotten.
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Old 01-01-2019, 01:53 PM
 
9,868 posts, read 7,650,602 times
Reputation: 22123
Quote:
Originally Posted by happygrrrl View Post
Well, since some posters upthread were discussing tumbleweeds, I’ll tell my story.

I grew up in the desert, where we had three seasons: windy and hot, windy and cold, and just plain hot-as-hell.

Like everybody else said, I had to walk about 150 miles to school. But, instead of ice and snow, I walked across the open desert in the wind. All of us kids on windy days would be ducking the galvanized metal trash cans being blown across the desert, or gigantic tumbleweeds. Seriously, some of those tumbleweeds were as big as a small car, and there were hundreds of them.

So, no matter what you read, tumbleweeds do NOT make good Christmas trees!
No lie that some tumbleweeds are the size of small cars. I once drove at night down eastern NM when gusty winds blew for hours. On that unlit US highway, I could see that the few cars ahead of me were doing the same herky jerky wacko swervy driving I was doing—dodging Volkswagon beetle-sized and -shaped tumbleweeds that would suddenly fly acrossthe road. Very dangerous stuff. These things had stumps for roots. One bashed my driver side rearview mirror so hard that it folded the mirror in. Good thing the stump did not hit sheet metal. The thorny branches did and left scratches.

They look airy but they definitely are solid!
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Old 01-01-2019, 06:19 PM
 
Location: colorado springs, CO
9,512 posts, read 6,059,204 times
Reputation: 28830
Quote:
Originally Posted by StealthRabbit View Post
Expect something else to get you...

Have had more than a few non-smoker friends die of lung cancer (they didn't have exposure to second hand smoke) Radon? Work env. , pollution? (in Colorado?) yup - brown cloud most days on Front Range. Uranium content in soil is very high in CO and NM. High altitude = more exposure to skin / sun/ ...
Big Tobacco spent decades changing the science of epidemiology, when they couldn’t reconcile smoking with the epidemiology of cancer.

They literally infiltrated every institution of science; from academia to Congress, in order to change the threshold of what is considered “statistically significant” risk. The process of arriving at a consensus that smoking causes lung cancer was so drawn out; that the changed consensus on statistically significant risk, including the mathematics of confounding, had already been re-written in the textbooks & remains as the valid measures still used today ... to determine risk.

Radon was from the think tanks of Big Tobacco. So was the environmental “downstream/wind” theory & even power lines. In a way; a lot of good came out of it in the form of industrial pollution regulations but it also served to deflect evidence-based science away from researching cancer “clusters”, which as you observed; haven’t gone anywhere.
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Old 01-01-2019, 06:55 PM
 
Location: colorado springs, CO
9,512 posts, read 6,059,204 times
Reputation: 28830
"Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!" -The Shadow

My dad talks about this all the time because I never knew life without television. He says; “We didn’t feel deprived, back then kids knew how to use their imagination!”

I’m married to a Boomer who says that when he was a kid, they had the first color television on the block & that all the neighbors would come over to see it.

Seems so foreign today, with internet, social media, YouTube, etc ... Like a whole different world.
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