Strange New Worlds

I am so old I can remember an everyday world that is as alien to my grandsons as Men from Mars:


Spittoons were commonplace in public buildings.


Everybody knew someone who had polio.


Everybody knew World War I veterans.


Everybody knew a family that had a member killed in World War II.


Tobacco barns.


Cotton fields.


Mules.


Party-line telephones.


The first television, with one local station on two-hours in the evening.


Buses that ran on tracks with overhead electric wires.


Lots of unpaved roads, even within city limits.


Ice delivered to the door for old-fashioned “ice boxes.”


Lots of people worked in the cotton mills.


Denim was not a fashion statement but proletarian garb for working people.


Segregated schools where both races got a sounder basic education than they do
today.


Sock hops.


Drag racing.


I had never seen or heard of pizza.


ONE exotic foreigner in my high school class---a Latvian who had escaped from Communism.


Washed clothes run through a ringer and hung outside to dry.


Soft drinks 5 cents; hotdogs 10 cents; bus fare 15 cents; a gallon of gas 30 cents.


Courthouses and city halls belonged to the people who could go in and out without being searched by armed guards.

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