When you don’t have to look any of these up…
I came across a picture of an old Thunderbird yesterday and a comment about fender skirts…
A term I haven’t heard in a long time, and thinking about ‘fender skirts’ started me thinking about other words that quietly disappear from our language with hardly a notice like ‘curb feelers’
And ‘steering knobs.’ (AKA) suicide knob, Neckers Knobs.
Since I’d been thinking of cars, my mind naturally went that direction first.
Any kids will probably have to find some elderly person over 60 to explain some of these terms to you.
Remember ‘Continental kits?’ See picture above. They were rear bumper extenders and spare tire covers that were supposed to make any car as cool as a Lincoln Continental.
When did we quit calling them ’emergency brakes?’
At some point ‘parking brake’ became the proper term. But I miss the hint of drama that went with ’emergency brake.’
I’m sad, too, that almost all the old folks are gone who would call the accelerator the ‘foot feed.’ Many today do not even know what a clutch is or that the dimmer switch and starter used to be on the floor.
Didn’t you ever wait at the street for your daddy to come home, so you could ride the ‘running board’ up to the house?
Here’s a phrase I heard all the time in my youth but never anymore – ‘store-bought.’ Of course, just about everything is store-bought these days. But once it was bragging material to have a store-bought dress or a store-bought bag of candy.
‘Coast to coast’ is a phrase that once held all sorts of excitement and now means almost nothing. Now we take the term ‘world-wide’ for granted.
On a smaller scale, ‘wall-to-wall’ was once a magical term in our homes. In the ’50s, everyone covered his or her hardwood floors with, wow, wall-to-wall carpeting! Today, everyone replaces their wall-to-wall carpeting with hardwood floors. Go figure.
When’s the last time you heard the quaint phrase ‘in a family way?’ It’s hard to imagine that the word ‘pregnant’ was once considered a little too graphic, a little too clinical for use in polite company, so we had all that talk about stork visits and ‘being in a family way’ or simply ‘expecting.’
Apparently ‘brassiere’ is a word no longer in usage. I said it the other day and my daughter cracked up. I guess it’s just ‘bra’ now. ‘Unmentionables’ probably wouldn’t be understood at all.
I always loved going to the ‘picture show,’ but I considered ‘movie’ an affectation.
Most of these words go back to the ’50s, but here’s a pure-’60s word I came across the other day – ‘rat fink.’ Ooh, what a nasty put-down!
Here’s a word I miss – ‘percolator.’ That was just a fun word to say. And what was it replaced with? ‘Coffee maker.’ How dull. Mr. Coffee, I blame you for this.
I miss those made-up marketing words that were meant to sound so modern and now sound so retro. Words like ‘DynaFlow’ and ‘Electrolux.’ Introducing the 1963 Admiral TV, now with ‘SpectraVision!’
Food for thought – Was there a telethon that wiped out lumbago? Nobody complains of that anymore. Maybe that’s what castor oil cured, because I never hear mothers threatening kids with castor oil anymore.
Some words aren’t gone, but are definitely on the endangered list. The one that grieves me most, ‘supper.’Now everybody says ‘dinner.’ Save a great word. Invite someone to supper.
I’m only 49 however I not only know but I use all of these myself with the exception of picture show.
*sigh*. All of the above. Tempus fugit, or something. BTW, I still have breakfast, dinner, and supper. I get a lot of confused (and angry) looks until I get behind the cotton curtain.
When’s the last time you saw static straps on a car?
“Factory Air” as in, Factory installed air conditioning
“Science Fiction, Double Feature
Dr. X will build a creature
See androids fighting Brad and Janet
Anne Francis stars in Forbidden Planet
At the late night, double feature picture show
I want to go
To the late night double feature picture show
By RKO
To the late night, double feature picture show
In the back row
To the late night double feature picture show”
I identify with most of these, although not sure we used ‘foot feed’. But do remember foot switches for lights and starter. And when a lot of folks used rabbit ears for their TV. Another brand name we don’t see much of is Brylcreem or their tag line, ‘A little dab’ll do ya’.
I heard “foot feed” used in the middle Midwest. But I was around a lot of farmers with older farm tractors, so that might skew things.
Foot feed worked on both a Singer and the Ford.
My percolator is bubbling and burping right now. I like the taste of that coffee better than a once and done. It only takes 10 minutes of boiling…
“Butch wax” came in a pink tube, mounted on a card hanging on the wall of every barber shop. You used it to make your hair stand up straight on your flat-top.
“store-bought” versus “hand-did” – I remember that.
Sadly, I don’t have near the mileage OldNFO has.
But time marches on.
Interestingly, ‘percolating’ has become a bit of slang for ‘constructive deep thinking’ in some quarters.
I like to joke that I knew I was old when I talked about playing games on 5.25″ floppies and they were confused as to what I was talking about…
Or tuning my TV to channel 3 before turning on the Atari.
Literary gag: William Gibson’s book ‘Neuromancer’ starts with ‘The sky was the color of a television tuned to a dead channel’. It was meant to evoke grayness, the static seen on ‘blank’ TV channels. But nowadays most televisions will show either a bright blue screen or a black screen with the logo. Good times.
I’m even older than you are, so I recall all of these and others. How about newsreels, cartoons, and short subjects at that picture show? That’s also where you went to cool off in summer because few had AC back in the day.
It was a joy watching the NASA newsreels back in the late 60’s. One of the great things about going to the matinee, seeing the newsreels, and then at home Dad explaining what was going on behind the scene.
He was Air Force and worked a lot with the range tracking ships and on other things dealing with manned flight, so when the newsreels talked about something, he could talk about it.
He left this earth with a lot of good stories that all had a half-life of 50 years or more. Dangit.
I’m so old and set in my ways, I still use some of those.
Well now, how a bout telling someone to go out to the car and put it in the turtle?
In the early 1950’s there were two move’n pitcher show houses in our county seat town of 5,000. One showed first run movies and the other on the South Side of town down by the railroad tracks was 15 cents to get in and on Saturdays all of the kids in town would ride their bicycles and walk to see, in this order, a news reel, a fifteen minute serial feature (Lash Larue, Sheba Queen of the Jungle, etc.) the a cartoon and after that the main feature which would be a C Grade Western Horse Opera with Gene or Roy in black and white. It did not matter when we got there because we would just sit down and watch the sequence all the way through, the lights never went up and folks were coming and going all of the time.
In the summer with sweaty kids and sticky floors,(cokes and pickle juice, etc.) stuff flying through the air and lots of talking back to the screen it was a lot of fun. We all knew that the back three rows close to the balcony were not a good place to sit because the black kids had to sit up above and they would throw stuff and pour stuff down below, it was not right but that was segregation and pure racism and our town made the transition easily in the late 50’s because some of the black kids were really good football players so, there was that.
Towards the end of the school year the National Guard would bring a tank down and park it in front of the theater, let kids climb all over it and in it and try to sign up boys who were going to be high school seniors in the Guard. There would be a couple of guardsmen in uniform telling us to be careful and not let a hatch close on our hands and cut our fingers off but other than that it was just fun and it kind of smelled funny. Yep and the move’n pitcher show house smelled funny too.
Wow. Remember the 50’s Buicks with the starter button under the clutch pedal? Depress the clutch to engage the starter.
TV shows used to sign off with a variation of “be sure to set your TV dial to this channel same time next week” Been a While since TVs had dials. Though I still see occasional references to “dial this number” for a phone call.
Now tv shows do a synopsis after every commercial break.
Don’t touch that dial!
Same Bat time, same Bat channel!
Some of it is before my time, but I do get most of the references. I thought I hadn’t heard ‘foot feed’ until reminded it also with a Singer. I think I last saw curb feelers – to my surprise – in the 1980’s. Possibly the very early 1990’s. I do use ‘ratfink’ from time to time.
I still have at least one mug. I don’t remember if it is a large or small one though. We are going through my late Fathers estate and found it so much stuff to go through it is hard to remember which one it is.
The Clark Gable picture reminds me that he went to England with the 351st Bombardment Group. At YouTube, look for Combat America”. Clark was in that.
Oh, and as for words and advertising…
With wonderful animation that looks right (well to me..) but is quite recent.
Remember the twelve foot long corded remote that would make the dial on your TV turn with a big “clunk”?
+1 on Science Fiction Double Feature
We have dinner versus supper depending on how heavy the meal is going to be. Dinner is a full on everything meal, supper is light because we had a late lunch.
$HOUSEMATE claims that my ‘rural’ raising is why I call it supper unless it’s a Big Deal Meal (e.g. Christmas Dinner). And lunch is lunch, unless it is a Big Deal Meal (e.g. Easter Dinner).
Ratfink, he was a character of Big Daddy Ed Roth! and before that the anti- Micky Mouse aka bad rat.
Remember carhops, and all the others. Different time,
but not always better as in if you remember carhops you
likely remember Salk vaccine or polio.
Color TV as in CBS system which was a black and while with a color wheel that when working produced better and brighter color than the tube based sets. NTSC back then stood for never the same color twice.
SFDF… the Crawling Eye and cartoons.
Eck!
Wow!!! Thanks for all the comments, and especially the videos Orvan! WSF, yes I saw one of those in grandpa’s shop… Couldn’t find the starter button until he told me to push the clutch ALL the way to the floor… sigh
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In the 60’s we lived in town and my cousins lived out on a farm. Their big treat visiting us was store-bought cookies! Of course, our big treat out there was home-made.
It’s all about perspective.
I still occasionally stomp to flick the headlights to highbeams.
And I miss manual transmissions.
Don’t miss manual steering, though. Power steering killed the need for suicide knobs. And the few times I have had to go ‘manual’ it was a sign of bad things coming (like driving down the interstate and your universal belt separates. There goes cooling, engine cooling, electrical and power steering. And it always happens when the battery is old and doesn’t hold a charge well. Manually steering cargo vans at 75mph sucks…)
Wing Windows – I really miss wing windows. There’s lots of days driving would be comfortable without AC except there are no wing windows to force air into the car. And modern cars are purposefully designed to be aerodynamic so regular windows just don’t work well.
Full sized spares. Sigh. Though the modern tires that last forever are a great improvement over 5K tires.
Houses designed to cool by airflow. I mean, AC is great. Would be nice if houses were designed to air out well so you wouldn’t have to start using AC at the end of winter.
Super Electric Ranges. As in, the ranges with knobs on the front or the side, not on the back. That had a big oven, not a dinky oven, and that had an extra section for warming. Those used to be ‘standard’ and now you can get them but they are rather expensive and don’t fit in a normal kitchen.
Remember dishwashers on wheels that you hooked to the sink faucet? My parents had one from 65ish to 73, when they bought a house with a built-in dishwasher.
Craftsman tools and their unlimited guarantee on all of them, power or manual tools. Break a lawnmower, take it to Sears and they’d fix or replace it. Was one of the reasons Sears lawn tractors were so popular.
Heck, remember Sears selling guns and ammo?
The winter edition of the Sears Catalog – the Wish Book.
Shopping before Malls.
First scattergun I owned was a J. C. Higgins (Sears store brand) bolt action 16 ga. I bought it used many years after manufacture. When the shell lifter broke, i was still able to get a replacement part from Sears.
How about the Allstate car from sears. A Henry J by another name. I learned to drive in a Henry J.
I’ve GOT a Sears Roebuck 30-06!
it’s 10 o.clock, do you know where your kids are??? my dad(23 year army lifer) would piss my mom off by saying, japan, korea, germany, vietnam, and who knows where else…
tv stations playing the national anthem when their programming ended each night…
having to go outside and turn the tv antenna to pick up a different station because we lived in the sticks. all 4 of them…
It’s tennn pm… Do you know where YOUR children are?…
First color TV I saw was President Kennedy’s funeral in School no less. As far as running boards go we had a 1950’s red Chevy truck with them and we would go camping after the weekend campers left my dad would drive around and we would spot left over wood by riding on the running boards. he would stop and we would jump off and collect. Sometimes it saved a lot of chopping and splitting.
I remember:
Driving 3-in-the-tree,’ AND double-clutching to shift a manual transmission that did NOT have synchronizing rings, and learning to do this meant watching the tach with an estimate of what the next gear should be revving at, at least until you learned the rpm by engine noise and the drive train speed by the moaning of the tire treads in the wheel wells.
‘Wall to wall’ being a slang for a strong, clear radio or TV signal.
Turning on vacuum tube electronics and having to WAIT for the tubes to warm up, also pulling the plug with them in the ON position and watching the screen image collapse and distort, or listening as the sound of the console radio got softer and noisier.
How about ‘flyback transformer’ – supposedly named because how far your hand would FLY BACK if you forgot to short the power supply caps before getting to work on them…
‘Living in sin’ also seems to have gone the way of ‘in a family way.’
I bet ‘store-bought’ could come to mean “as opposed to ordering on-line and drop-shipped to your doorstep.” It could have some cachet as “Wow like you traveled to a brick and mortar store and actually talked to a real person who know the product line and presented you with 2 or 3 different brands and explained their key features and drawbacks?!?”
Dialing ‘0’ and getting a live-person ‘operator’ on the line?
Smartphone displays don’t even label ‘0’ with ‘OPER.’
Heck even ‘dialing’ a phone number…
And ^G (control-G) for ringing the bell on a teletype…
The first phone number I remember was 4682. It was a party line.
I have a VERY OLD multi-tool (have to unscrew & re-screw for various things) with the number of a local electrical repair service: 86.
Amazingly, I still remember our phone number from about age 5 or 6 in the mid fifties. Mom and Dad drilled it into my head in case I got lost or hurt. CEdar 2-3890. Can’t remember my best friends number today, but the smart phone takes care of that.
“Wall to wall and treetop tall” in the CB days.
The days when you could rattle the hookswitch on the phone fast enough to get the operator. If you were good enough, you could dial a phone number that way.
Your hands weren’t the only thing that would fly back if you touched the flyback connection to the picture tube! For the record, the flyback was there for the raster sweep of the picture tube. The raster would sweep, and then “fly back” to start the next sweep…
I knew guys in the military who were able to create a “Playboy calendar” on the teletype using various letter and figures. They’d do it onto the perforated paper tape and it would make the rounds of the various teletype shops and COMSTA’s, where it would be run through the TD and printed on paper. …The things we did before cable…
If you were good enough, you could dial a phone number that way.
Even before I took up (radio)telegraphy {for a while, anyway} I could do that – and did. It was VERY personal amusement.
Across the alley from the Alamo by the Mills Brothers
Across the alley from the Alamo
Lived a pinto a-pony and a Navajo
Who used to bake frijoles in cornmeal dough
For the people passin’ by
They thought that they would make some easy bucks
By washin’ their frijoles in Duz and Lux
Find me three people under the age of 30 that can tell you what Duz and Lux are.
We rode bicycles everywhere. I could ride to the Tastee-Freeze (soft ice cream) and get a cone for 15 cents. The guy who worked there was real nice.
We played sandlot baseball. I could hit but I couldn’t run – I got more triples than any kid in three neighborhoods.
I’m feeling the mileage today.
Soap flakes, though I’m ooooooooooooooooooooooooold.
Ancient beast is ancient… (that’s ME, btw.) I presume you are as young as (the gal) you feel. };o)
TV test patterns until programming started.
Conelrad triangles on AM Radio dials.
Colgate toothpaste had magic stuff called “Gardol” that could stop evil tooth decay.
And starter buttons have come full circle except the buttons are bigger and are no longer silver.
I remember the triangles on AM radio dials, what does Conelrad stands for Greybeard? I have the old radio my parents had in the kitchen and yes it has them on. I am 62, so I remember 99% of what the people are talking about.
COntrol of ELectromagnetic RADiation.
That is: Deny the USSR any broadcast transmitters, etc. to home in on.
Does anybody remember Tessie Brewer singing “Put another nickel in, in the nickelodean”? If you wanted to own the song, it would be a 78 rpm record. But that was when you bought Ice cream cones at the local drugstore’s soda counter for a nickel.
I recall the 1970’s revival of such.
Beans, my house was built the same year I was (’65), and it’s a cool day for June in TN. Windows are up & it feels great–about 78 degrees!
Until a few years ago, I drove a ’72 Cheyenne with 3-on-the-tree & no power steering (and, yes, with the dimmer switch on the floor). I used to say it was its own antitheft device, because nobody under 40 or so could drive it.
“…find some elderly person over 60 to explain…”
HEY! I’ll have you know that I am 66 and I am NOT “elderly”. (My body thinks I am, but my mind knows that I am only 12 going on 22.)
However, I do remember all of those things you listed including “foot feed” in the context of an automobile throttle. While I never had a car with an actual hand throttle, my parents and their friends did when they were growing up so I heard the term and knew what it meant from an early age. Now, most everybody just says “gas pedal”.
My first car didn’t have a foot switch for the starter but it did have a push button on the dash. First you turned the key on and then you pushed the button. It also had curb feelers, two of them – one on the front and one on the back, which was always useful if you lived in a city or town and had to parallel park a lot.
I think the terms “picture show”/”movie” or “dinner”/”supper” depended on where you grew up. Where I come from – the upper south – the terms dinner and supper were mostly interchangeable and meant “evening meal”.
As kids, we always called them “movies”, but some of my more rural cousins called them “picture shows”. We never got them mixed up. Both knew what the other was talking about.
Tube electronics: I’m retired now, but I have been working on electronics since the late sixties. Here’s a thing… When I retired just last year, we still had some vacuum tube equipment – all of it in high power amplifiers. Yeah, they are still a thing.
I just now looked and my very modern desk telephone has “OPER” embossed on the zero key. I also have a real live antique Western Electric dial telephone stashed away in the house somewhere. I have no idea if it still works or not, or even if the switching system still supports it. I may have to dig it out and give it a try someday. (…or maybe my heirs when they finally clean out all this junk I have.)
And speaking of 5 1/4 inch floppys. I had a friend call me just last week to ask if I had a 5 1/4″ drive so he could recover a file he had on one. It just so happens I did, along with the necessary cables. (I am your headquarters for obsolete computer parts.) We plugged it in on an older PC that still had a floppy port on the motherboard and, schwing!, It worked! (…under Windows 7 no less.)
As a kid – I was 14 at the time – we got our first Color TV in late 1968. Of course, I had seen them before, but this one was ours. I remember watching the Apollo 8 Christmas eve telecast from lunar orbit on that TV and thinking I was living in a science fiction world.
Nostalgia is fun, but I am posting this on a computer that has a 40 inch 4K monitor with a 3840 X 2160 resolution. (I do a lot of photography.) It’s larger and sharper by magnitudes than any TV I ever saw in my youth. I would not trade it for all the nostalgia in the world.
Roy
All- Thanks for bringing up even MORE things… LOL And yes, one time on the flyback was enough! Just like ONE time of grabbing the coil wire!
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Emergency brake to parking brake? It happened in the late 50’s to early 60’s when the single bowl master cylinder was split into twin bowl master cylinder. One for the front brakes and one for the back brakes. If you lost the brake fluid in a single master cylinder you lost all braking, on a double cylinder you had front or back brakes.
Missed by a decade. Late 60’s. ’67-’68, IIRC. ’66 Ranchero didn’t, but ’68 Chevelle did.
Early experiments tried one front wheel and the opposite rear wheel, but stability suffered.
DW- Oh yeah!!!
On the farm in rural south Georgia the animal feed used to come, not in burlap sacks, but in print cloth. My mother and aunts used to get to choose which print my grandfather would buy his feed in so that they would have pretty cloth to make dresses into. I’ve seen a few that my youngest aunts wore, when I was a youngster and helping on the farm in the summer.
Craig- Oh yeah, feedsack dresses AND quilts!
I still use a percolator to make my coffee! People get in line and pay $5.00/cup for coffee. My perked coffee is better, and costs pennies per cup! My two loyal steeds; a “final run” Corningware pot from the early 70’s, and a “first run” Pyrex all-glass from 1951, I believe. It was the “first generation,” before Pyrex put the “D” handle on them.
1st car had the floor dimmer and no seatbelts. 2nd car had the floor dimmer and did have seatbelts, which were an option in ’63. The first owner must’ve hit the lottery, because that old Ford Galaxie had a dealer-installed, underdash A/C, and (gasp!) factory POWER WINDOWS! I had to canibalize wrecked Lincolns when the gearboxes on those motors went bad, as almost NO other Ford product had them. My friend had a ’63 Chevy with a “Powerglide” Tranny.
These days, a stick shift IS an antitheft device. Wanna get that “zombie” look from your kids? Tell ’em to try and start something with a manual choke…
How about Zenith’s first remote; the “SPACE COMMAND?”
And what about the old phone company exchange codes like “Sunset 5-xxxx” and “Pennsylvania 6-5000,” of Glenn Miller fame?
I still hear “That’s a Doozie” now and then, even though no one knows the car it referred to. I still say “far out” and “ZOUNDS!” Why? Just to get that zombie look from the kids…
The fun thing? Although no longer referred to by that naming convention, the Hotel PEnnsylvania in NYC *still* has that number to this day.
I remember all of these
It has always been a “Parking Brake”. Emergency brake is incorrect. It was so a vehicle with a low compression engine could be parked and not roll down the hill. When automatic transmission first came out there was not a Park position so a parking brake held the car in position. Also, all it does is set the service brakes. If the service brakes fail you can pull the lever all you want and nothing will happen. And I don’t want to hear about that one in ten million that has a parking brake on the drive shaft
My mother’s elder brother’s first car was a 1934 Ford Phaeton. When he wanted a new car he sold it to the ‘boy next door’…whose family (last I heard) still has it running.
Which is an elaborate way of saying that I have ridden in a ‘rumble seat’.
When I was growing up, my folks bought Rambler station wagons. The summer I was nine, my father traded a summer teaching at UCLA for access to some rare papers, and we drove from Cleveland to Los Angeles in a Rambler Station Wagon with a mechanical air-conditioner mounted in a window.
They work, but not very well. Needless to say we did our desert crossings at night.