Vintage Things That Have Disappeared In Your Lifetime?

[Inkstainedwretch]

Virtually all the paraphernalia involved with smoking is gone: restaurant ashtrays, Ronson table lighters, cigarette vending machines ... How many people now would even recognize a "silent butler" if they saw one?

 

[Stanley Doble]

"Where's this restaurant?

I want to tell them over here how it should be done.

thanks. "

America is famous for the Boston Tea Party, when a gang of wild Indians threw a shipload of tea into the harbor. Their technique has not improved.

 

[Fading Fast]

Virtually all the paraphernalia involved with smoking is gone: restaurant ashtrays, Ronson table lighters, cigarette vending machines ... How many people now would even recognize a "silent butler" if they saw one?

I would - my Dad was a smoker until he wasn't.

Does anyone remember a "crumb sweeper - " a small, hand held "brush" that would sweep up the crumbs off of a table cloth between the entree and dessert in "finer" restaurants?

 

[2jakes]

Where's this restaurant?

I want to tell them over here how it should be done.

thanks.

America is famous for the Boston Tea Party, when a gang of wild Indians threw a shipload of tea into the harbor. Their technique has not improved.

Salt- tea ? lol

so that’s how it’s done ....thanks Mr. Doble !

 

[LizzieMaine]

I would - my Dad was a smoker until he wasn't.

Does anyone remember a "crumb sweeper - " a small, hand held "brush" that would sweep up the crumbs off of a table cloth between the entree and dessert in "finer" restaurants?

We use one of those to sweep the dud popcorn kernels out of the popper during nightly cleanup. The bristles are stained deep yellow from the oil.

I also remember all the smoking paraphernalia, and shudder at the memory.

 

[tonyb]

...

I also remember all the smoking paraphernalia, and shudder at the memory.

As do I, but for perhaps different reasons.

I was a heavy smoker for three and a half decades or so. Thought I would never quit, and didn't really wish to, until an unfortunate event made it undeniable that the habit was killing me.

So yeah, I shudder to think that I and so many millions (billions, probably) of others were so stupid or narcissistic or solipsistic or whatever to think we were immune to the laws of nature, which do indeed inflict severe penalties for drawing smoke deeply into one's lungs on a nearly constant basis for 35 years. Shudders.

But, like many an honest ex-smoker, I admit that I'd pick up the habit in an instant if it, through some miracle, were made harmless. I loved it, really. I loved the smoky bars and the smoky hash houses and the smoky meeting halls. But that was then.

These days the smell of cigarette smoke nearly gags me. About the only indoor public places where smoking is still permitted are tribal casinos. Even with their sophisticated air filtration systems, the smell of the smoke hits me like a shovel to the face when I step in from the fresh out of doors. I count it among the many reasons to avoid casinos. Still, I suspect I would get to not smelling it at all, as I didn't smell it back when a cigarette was my ever-present prop (in more ways than one). I've reminded myself, when I think how back in my youth older people couldn't smell the smoke on us kids, and consider how that would involve almost willful ignorance (I can smell a smoker from 10 feet away), that the reason it wasn't detected through the nostrils is because the WHOLE DAMN WORLD smelled of cigarette smoke.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

I would - my Dad was a smoker until he wasn't.

Does anyone remember a "crumb sweeper - " a small, hand held "brush" that would sweep up the crumbs off of a table cloth between the entree and dessert in "finer" restaurants?

I first encountered crumb sweepers in New Orleans as a teenager. Back then all the restaurants featured a roll shaped like a small loaf which, when you broke them open, unleashed a volcano of crumbs that carpeted the tablecloth, which a waiter would sweep up dexterously with his crumb sweeper. It was the most wonderful-tasting bread of my memory. When I went into basic training at Ft. Polk, LA in 1967, a black NO kid in my unit told me that this was called "12-cent bread." I guess with inflation that translates as $40 bread, so maybe that's why I no longer see it in NO restaurants.

 

[Stanley Doble]

Smoking is a hobby with staying power. You can enjoy it every day until you die. If it didn't cost a fortune and kill you, I would still be a smoker. Quit cigarettes in 1992 and pipe and cigars in 2003, and still want a cigar from time to time.

 

[tonyb]

Yup. I still get the occasional jones for a smoke, after nine smoke-free years. Persistent as the habit is, though, I found it remarkably easy to quit once I decided I was gonna quit.

In the years since then I've found myself growing impatient with people who are "trying to quit smoking." Ain't no trying about it. You either quit, or you don't. Playing with the idea of quitting isn't trying to quit. And having a smoke after lunch sure as hell isn't trying to quit. Forget the trying and just f*&#ing quit.

Wanna quit smoking? Don't smoke.

 

[sheeplady]

I've often said that if I was dying, I would totally take up smoking.

One of the things I thought was a shame is that they took cigarettes away from my grandmother-in-law when they moved her into the nursing home to "protect her health." (It was more likely a safety issue and building policy, but they hid it under the guise of doing it for an already dying woman's health, which is a mis-truth I never really appreciated.) The woman lived 3 months and she enjoyed smoking. It didn't kill her and three more months of it wouldn't have hastened her death. She made the decision to smoke the 70+ years she was an adult on the outside; taking away her agency seemed an injustice.

I know- a small point- but they at least could have said, "we don't allow our residents to smoke" rather than saying, "smoking is bad for you, we're protecting your health." The second seems so disempowering to say to someone who's just lost their ability to live on their own and knows she's dying anyway.

 

[tonyb]

^^^^^^

Yes, ma'am. Couldn't agree with you more. It's downright cruel (not to mention totally disingenuous) to tell an elderly person in a terminal condition that you wish to curtail certain of his or her behaviors for the sake of that person's health. That just adds insult to the injury.

 

[Stanley Doble]

Yeah but it's 'politically correct'.

 

[Zombie_61]

Yeah but it's 'politically correct'.

Right. And if my grandmother had wheels she'd be a wagon.

 

[sheeplady]

Like I said, I'm sure it was for safety reasons, which I had no problems with. But there's a certain indignity in telling a dying woman that she can't smoke because it's bad for her.

I know a woman who has stage iv lymphoma. She's dying, slowly and surely in her early forties. She's got four kids, two of which her and her husband adopted when they were newlyweds to prevent them from going into fostercare. (So in their early twenties, they were raising kids half their age.) There is one shot at a cure for her, a bone marrow transplant that has a 1 in 5 chance of her dying short term, but 80% chance of a cure. She was denied a transplant.

This is a death sentence for her. She's not going to live to see her 9 and 12 year old kids graduate high school. She's in constant pain. Her body is breaking down between the cancer and the treatment.

She started smoking, because it helps distract her and is stress relief. Some idiot (who knows she's terminal) told her she should "quit for her health and to set a good example for her kids." Because she doesn't have enough to worry about leaving 4 kids without a mother.

 

[LizzieMaine]

My grandfather demanded his pipe while he was in the hospital in the last throes of dying from emphysema. My mother tried to smuggle it in to him, despite all the oxygen bottles around.

It was watching him -- and my grandmother, and my uncle -- all die of smoking-related illnesses within the space of a year and a half of each other that made me into a militant enemy of the tobacco industry. Before that I hated the stench and the filth of it, but hey, live and let live and all, but after that I changed my tune. Tobacco destroyed my family, and I've never forgotten or forgiven. The tobacco business is pure, unadulterated evil.

 

[Fading Fast]

My grandfather demanded his pipe while he was in the hospital in the last throes of dying from emphysema. My mother tried to smuggle it in to him, despite all the oxygen bottles around.

It was watching him -- and my grandmother, and my uncle -- all die of smoking-related illnesses within the space of a year and a half of each other that made me into a militant enemy of the tobacco industry. Before that I hated the stench and the filth of it, but hey, live and let live and all, but after that I changed my tune. Tobacco destroyed my family, and I've never forgotten or forgiven. The tobacco business is pure, unadulterated evil.

My Dad and the only two alive-in-my-lifetime grandparents all died horrible smoking-related deaths. To this day, since no immediate family member every died of heart disease - heart disease, in my mind, is a bad thing in the "lots of things in life are bad" category - but smoking and cancer are evil, horrible things that kill people in long and painful ways. My reaction is visceral just to the words smoking or cancer. (Let me emphasize, I know heart disease is horrible and I have great sympathy for those suffering from it, I just mean that I haven't had the close-relative experience, thankfully, that makes it more emotional.)

I have no disagreement with your assessment of the Tobacco Industry - none. But I would add, from my perspective, especially for my father, he knew (and acknowledged it) that smoking kills you but he wouldn't stop (until he finally did in the '70s after a health scare); hence, there is some element of personal responsibility (yes, they get hooked, yes, the industry is a drug dealer, but when he wanted to, he stopped). And for young adults starting today, I think the personal responsibility part of the equation is higher.

Finally, I also recognize that, effectively, the government is the Tobacco Industry today. Via the settlement (remember, the Tobacco Industry makes huge annual payment and made one-time settlements to the Federal government and various State governments for smoking-related healthcare costs) and via taxes, the governments profit more from Tobacco than do the companies. And the companies fund all those anti-smoking adds we see - not the government as most of the governments use their smoking revenue (in most cases and against what the governments said they would when they sued and won) for general needs, not smoking related healthcare.

It might be the best of only bad choices, but effectively today, the Tobacco Companies are beards for the real Tobacco Giant, the Federal and most State Governments.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Don't worry, once I'm dictator all that will change. The entire tobacco industry will be expropriated and liquidated, and all its holdings turned into vast preserves for the care and nurturing of homeless cats.

 

[tonyb]

...
I know a woman who has stage iv lymphoma. She's dying, slowly and surely in her early forties. She's got four kids, two of which her and her husband adopted when they were newlyweds to prevent them from going into fostercare. (So in their early twenties, they were raising kids half their age.) There is one shot at a cure for her, a bone marrow transplant that has a 1 in 5 chance of her dying short term, but 80% chance of a cure. She was denied a transplant.

This is a death sentence for her. She's not going to live to see her 9 and 12 year old kids graduate high school. She's in constant pain. Her body is breaking down between the cancer and the treatment.
...

Why was she denied the transplant?

 

[sheeplady]

I think the one thing to remember is that it's basically a genetic and environmental crap shoot to getting cancer. While smoking does cause cancer, there are plenty who don't and have never smoked who die of lung cancer. This is why lung cancer rates have leveled off despite drastic decreases in both primary smoking but especially exposure to secondhand smoke. In addition, even if one smokes, there are plenty of people who smoke heavily who never develop a smoking related cancer. Even if you smoke and develop lung cancer, it's largely a genetic crap shoot that you did.

If you ever have cancer you will encounter the "fearfuls." These are people who are so afraid of cancer that they must ask you what you did to cause your cancer in order to reassure themselves that they will not develop it.

Questions like, "Did you smoke/ drink /eat organic/ where you breastfed/ did you breastfeed/ did you ever have an abortion/ did you ever have a miscarriage/ work a stressdul job/ have a voodoo spell placed on you?" are highly inappropriate to ask someone who has or had cancer. (I've been asked all of those, minus the voodoo spell.) That's the kind of information that if you're supposed to know, you'd know about me.

A girl friend, who had a brain tumor at 17 responds to any of those questions with, "yes, I was a pack a day smoker for 40 years, drank heavily the 14 years before I was diagonosed, had 25 kids, and said hail mary into a mirror 3 times before I got my brain tumor AT 17. Don't worry, you're safe."

 

[sheeplady]

Why was she denied the transplant?

She's been on chemo so long that she has a lot of issues related to that. Sadly this is a new treatment that wasn't available when she was diagonosed (which she spent 5 years going to doctors knowing something was wrong). For instance, she had a heart attack a few years ago. I guess the big thing is her liver function is really quite bad.

I am not sure if she was specifically denied because she's in such poor health she wouldn't survive the procedure
or if given the demand for bone marrow that because she's in bad shape they'd rather it go to another who's survival rate is better.

Eta: I know several people who have been saved by bone marrow transplants from complete strangers, including a friend's baby. If they ever want mine, I'm getting on that list so darned fast...