TBT…

Who remembers…

Standing in line to use the ONE working payphone at school? And everybody listening to your phone call?

Or when Cracker Jacks had real prizes?

When your grocery store ‘chain’ was either Piggly Wiggly or the A&P? And they had the produce in the front window showing how ‘fresh’ it was?

And you have to give old man Sinclair credit for a dinosaur for a logo based on the then-common idea that oil deposits beneath the earth came from the dead bodies of dinosaurs (and making it really easy to find a Sinclair full service gas station).

Comments

TBT… — 27 Comments

  1. Busy signals! Who remembers those?
    And the difference between a fast busy and a slow busy?
    Party lines! And the snoop who always listened in.

  2. I think there is still a Sinclair corporation but their presence is pretty regional. I do remember the dinosaurs at the Worlds Fair in NYC when I was a kid.

  3. My dad drove a Sinclair Tanker truck for 30 years, and we always had the green dinosaurs to play with.

  4. John- Oh hell yes…

    Gerry- I didn’t know that.

    Ian- LOL

    CP- Too bad you don’t have a couple of them today. $$$

  5. I remember all of those. Sinclair is still around. A few years ago, I lived and worked in Rawlins, WY. Sinclair, WY, home of the still operating Sinclair refinery, is 10 minutes away.

  6. I never used a pay phone in school.

    Cracker Jack? Don’t have any prizes left. Moving a few times will do that.

    Piggly Wiggly: I’ve been in one.

    Sinclair Dino: Seen one or more, bu not for yearrrrrrrrrrrrs.

  7. Even worse than using a pay phone is having the operator dial for you for long distance.

    Piggly Wiggly still exists in Tennessee.

    Now, how many remember getting dishes and glassware from gas stations?

    • There was a Pig a few blocks from me; mighty convenient for hauling groceries in my backpack. Then they moved a mile further away, dammit! I didn’t want that much exercise.

      RE glassware: a few years ago I was in a gas station for an hour servicing some gear. The poor clerk was reduced to demanding customers take a free glass cuz NOBODY wanted them.

  8. I remember the Sinclair vending machine injection molding a green dinosaur for you while you watched. Unfortunately, too many years, and too many moves. It’s gone along with a lot of other stuff from earlier years.

  9. Hey Old NFO;

    There are Piggly Wiggly in the rural towns here in Georgia and Tennessee. Also I saw a live Payphone a few months ago at a home depot….I was shocked…and it was working!

  10. Or in the Navy, trying to make a call home to your wife with everyone in line offering suggestions as to what you should say. That was special.

  11. I saw a Sinclair station with dinosaur in northern NJ, summer 2019. First one I’d seen since [197?]. Divestiture then, but they were able to re-establish gas stations. And, who doesn’t like seeing the dino?

  12. All- Thanks for the comments, and yeah LL, Navy phone calls… sigh…

    Posted from my iPhone.

  13. Who had a phone in high school? As far as Navy phones, try calling your detailer from Cubi Pt. at 4 AM from the phone in the barracks stairwell.

    • “Autovon” is German for Auto-drop, in my limited experience. I remember the detailer begging the operator to not put him on hold.

  14. No pay phones where I went, but it was Catholic, so probably barred as work of the devil. We would have been guilty of SOMEthing if we had used one.

    But just a little later I did stand in line of sorts waiting for my turn, which sometimes never came, for a MARS call to go through “OVER!”.

  15. I do remember! Well, maybe not the Piggly Wiggly front of shop, but still…

  16. I’d be more like the last guy on that line for the phone. He’s not listening to the fat gal’s call, he’s checking out the skirt!

  17. Heck, at 78 I remember all the stuff in the photographs, but I can’t remember what I had for breakfast this morning. How about “Snap-Jack’s” shoes on guys and “Poodle Skirts” on girls?

  18. One pay phone outdoors in my all boy high school, and guys hiking into their shoulders to say ‘I love you’. I could give a shit. ‘Love you baby!’

  19. No phone in my high school but there was the overseas phone center in Dubai in 1991 where you could figure out what time it was back in the USA, let the operator know the number of your parents, and then go sit for an hour while they placed the call. Collect, of course.

  20. No Sinclair stations in the NYC metro area when I was growing up, but after seeing this all I can think is “Is THAT why the father in the TV sitcom Dinosaurs! was named Earl SINCLAIR??? ROTFL!!!

  21. There’s still a full-service Sinclair station in Scottsdale, AZ.