Things Gone Away, Part 2

5/4/2024

Reckonin readers seemed to like my list of things familiar in my youngeryears. Here a some more, for better or worse.

Working men in bib overalls.

Pocket watches and watch chains.

Persimmons

Some people still lived in actual log cabins and log barns were common.

Lots of people in town with chicken coops in their back yards. Some even with goat pens.

Cigarettes (unfiltered) 20 cents a pack. Good cigars 5 cents.

Sweet singing from country Southern Methodist churches.

Sunday family dinners after church, required. That is dinner, not supper.

You had to clean your plate. No food was wasted.

Boys with BB guns.

Well-known and trustworthy neighourhood sheriff’s deputies.

Any man who cared and many who didn’t knew where to get moonshine.

There were actually no fast-food restaurants. Every thing was local. McDonald’s was a sensation that came later.

Cussing was a creative manly art. Now we have only ugly references to bodily functions repeated endlessly and on every occasion by all sexes and ages.

Woods nearby for boys to explore.

Going barefoot in summer.

One new pair of shoes per year.

Girls with skirts.

Local newspapers had locally generated news and editorials and writers with ideas of their own, not canned syndicated “thoughts” and themes.

Playing football in the street. Without any protective equipment.

21 Comments

Perrin Lovett

5/4/2024 06:09:16 pm

I have two of those in one great memory. One afternoon, maybe first or second grade, Dad picked me up after a rousing game of Smear the [Old Miss frat boy]. For no reason at all he gave me a brand new Daisy Red Rider. 'Murica!

H. V. Traywick, Jr link

5/5/2024 01:33:17 am

"Staying in" after school for pulling up girls' skirts at recess.

Cap guns.

Grapette and Nehi Orange from the drink box.

Smushing pennies on the railroad tracks.

Forts in the woods.

Clyde N Wilson

5/5/2024 04:41:44 am

You could get a good used car for less than a bicycle costs now.
College women had separate dormitories
Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Lutheran ministers were truly learned men, not trendy pseudo-intellectuals. Baptists and Methodists less so but perhaps more earnest and inspiring. I have no idea about Catholics since there was only one church in my town and I did not know any.
A child could go about without fear of molestation. Sodomites were in prison.
Boys could ride bicycles and mow loans without helmets and without fear of any carpetbagger busybody calling the police.
College students lived and dined on campus and actually studied rather commuting by new cars from their expensive apartments. for a few hours per week.
..

John Bernhard Thuersam link

5/5/2024 05:44:36 am

Ma smoked unfiltered Luckies in the house while my sisters and I grew up, all of us are still around in our Sweet Seventies with no lung cancer. Go figure. And Ma would send me down to the corner store to buy cartons to bring home.

Clyde N Wilson

5/5/2024 07:30:31 am

My grandfather chewed and my grandmother dipped snuff.

Gordon Harvie

5/5/2024 09:00:19 am

Picking up empty bottles while walking to the store to cash in on more Cokes and penny candy. Any bottle with a broken top, you could shoot from the bottom with a BB gun, producing a perfect glass cone. I never figured out a use for them but wish I'd saved some. Plastic bottles don't work.

Sitting on the wheel wells while riding in the back of Daddy's International Harvester pickup, maybe to the hay field, or, to Dixie Youth games on sweltering summer evenings. It's not like he was using a seat belt behind the wheel.

Drinking cold well water from the hose at the well after the morning in the hay field - before heading to the store with the hired hands for a lunch of Viennas and saltines, a Coke and a honey bun.

Clyde N Wilson

5/5/2024 02:14:33 pm

Grandma's biscuits---never since equaled
School principals with paddles
Denim for hard work rather than fashion statement
Mules
Canning
Getting along pretty well without air conditioning

John Bernhard Thuersam link

5/7/2024 12:30:29 pm

Canning - My paternal grandma lived next door, grandpa passed a year before I arrived. Sis says she recalls him laid out in the parlor for the viewing - this before the modern funeral homes took over. Dad and his older brother took care of her. She had pear, cherry and apple trees in the yard, plus a garden, and canned every Fall to get through the winter. My Ma was of the generation who didn't can, had a washing machine, and went to the A&P to shop year round - changed everything. Not sure if this was progress.

Clyde N Wilson

5/5/2024 03:00:47 pm

Smokehouses

H. V. Traywick, Jr. link

5/6/2024 03:33:17 am

Tobacco barns

Shooting marbles for keeps

Tennessee Budd

5/14/2024 04:45:47 pm

H.V., they still fire tobacco in the fall in Robertson County, TN. Since my boyhood, that's THE smell of Autumn.

Joseph R. Stromberg

5/6/2024 06:07:17 pm

Also, every town of any size had its own Coca Cola plant and probably a Pepsi plant and an RC one. All the boys in school carried a pocket knife. Many of the girls did, but theirs were daintier and floral. Nobody that I know of ever got cut. (These weren't schools in NYC.) We made a lot of pocket money collecting the bottles.

John Bernhard Thuersam link

5/7/2024 06:35:02 am

A lot of memories are rushing back with this post! Can't leave out my sisters babysitting in the neighborhood for pocket money, and me cutting neighbor's grass with a PUSH mower to augment the bottle return cash for jawbreakers.

Clyde N Wilson

5/8/2024 05:45:00 am

10 cent comic books and 25 cent. paperback books, some with lurid covers
Playing Slap Jack
ice blocks delivered for kitchen ice boxes
Slingshots made with inner tube rubber
Marathon fly swatting, supposed to fight polio

Paul Yarbrough

5/8/2024 09:47:45 am

I have written 4 novels over the last dozen years ago. They all have taken place during the early 1950s. For the stories, I had to do no “research”. The things that described the time and place were from personal memory. Friends who have read my books often have commented to me with how they had lived in the setting of those years (particulars of many-maybe all-- of the things mentioned in this article with comments) and how they fondly recalled them.
It was easy writing for me as I had HAPPIDLY lived them—BB guns and all!
God was good to me when he planted me in the South.

Gregory Fogg

5/11/2024 09:03:28 am

Root cellars.

Joseph R. Stromberg

5/11/2024 04:02:20 pm

Classic cracker houses on pilings with metal roofs and high ceiling (when affordable) -- the original "environmentally friendly" house for southwest Florida. A fifty gallon oil drum on a frame, with rain water in it, for hot water. Cypress siding, when available, so waterproof it never needs painting.

Classics Illustrated comics for the historically minded fifth grader. Classic Schwinn bicycle (I won one in a raffle). Sweet tea with actual sugar in it. The ruins of Buckingham Airfield, where my father had spent his time in the Army Air Corps.

A hardware store with a very high ceiling and big ceiling fans out of a Bogart movie. Country Song Roundup magazine. Running a car with no antifreeze, unless you had to go way north to Gainesville. The black high school marching band in the annual parade -- the only band that had that swing. Futral's Feed Store -- still in business after seventy years.

There was a lot going on. If Oswald Spengler had been a Floridian, there would have been two phases of history -- Summer and Tourist Season.

H. V. Traywick, Jr. link

5/12/2024 04:59:43 am

The only "shopping mall" in Lynchburg was Main Street down town, with nickel parking meters along a two lane street. At Christmastime, we'd all get in the car and go see the Christmas lights. The department stores had electric trains set up in the window.

Saturday morning the old Academy Theatre at the top of Main Street had fourteen cartoons, three cowboy movies and two mummy movies for a quarter.

dogface

5/12/2024 08:54:47 pm

My history teacher was a black powder buff and hunter. He brought a percussion cap rifle to school and shot it with just the primer on the football field for a class. Also in JROTC, we shot 22 rifles in the basement and managed not to shoot anyone. Imagine that today.

Paul Yarbrough

5/15/2024 08:30:06 am

Try to imagine a "history" teacher in school today!

General Kromwell

10/8/2024 02:00:52 pm

I loved you including Jefferson's advice in your book to a parent to have their young son walk the woods with a gun. Very good advice. Or it was before serial killers and anti-gun nuts...

Dr. Clyde N. Wilson

Things Gone Away, Part 2

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