Vintage Things That Have Disappeared In Your Lifetime?

[Trenchfriend]

How popular is pipe-smoking in the US, today? Cherry-tobacco, vanilla-tobacco, apple-tobacco?

 

[LizzieMaine]

My grandfather and uncle were both pipe smokers, but they only smoked the cheapest tobacco from the drug store - usually "Half and Half." Sometimes they'd chop up old cigar butts and smoke those in their pipes. A delightful aroma.

 

[Harp]

How popular is pipe-smoking in the US, today? Cherry-tobacco, vanilla-tobacco, apple-tobacco?

Frog Morton tobacco is my regular brand. When I was in college a history prof of mine smoked Captain Black in his office, a common blend of no particular merit,
but memorable to me because this Orientalist tore my Japanese paper to shreds all because I failed to use any of his suggested sources.
The smoke added ambience to the cutting episode.

 

[BlueTrain]

I think whoever sold the tickets exercised more control over what I saw than anyone else.

I recall the 1950s as a period that was loaded with titillation, perhaps even more than now. The medium has changed, of course, and I don't read magazines the way I used to. I mean I still read them the way I used to, I just don't read so many. Even a workshop and gadget oriented magazine like Mechanix Illustrated had a regular pin-up girl inside every issue. Her name was Mimi and there may have been better reasons to read the magazine but she was one of the better ones. However, I only read comic books for the stories but there were rather suggestive advertisements in the back for glasses that would enable you to see through clothing. I don't know if they worked or not. I never had a pair. All the pulp magazines of the literary variety like Argosy, True and others usually had a nice looking woman on the cover in grave danger of losing what little clothing she was wearing. Things like that attracted boys, you know.

Look was a mass circulation magazine and even it had "nice" pictures from time to time, along with advertisements for Wildroot Cream Oil and Nicholson Files. You don't see ads for files anymore. In comparison with Look, The Saturday Evening Post was positively cerebral, at least to a ten or twelve year old boy like myself. Of course, my mind had already been ruined by reading comics like Wonder Woman, Blackhawk and Sad Sack. Anyway, I knew nothing of the Korean War when it was going on, very little about integration (I probably would have in other places), or floods on the Mississippi.

There have always been floods on the Mississippi.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I think whoever sold the tickets exercised more control over what I saw than anyone else.

*Exactly* my point.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

A fellow writer and sometime editor of mine, the late Robert Jordan, smoked a pipe defiantly through the most militant anti-smoking years. Just to rub it in, he was known to wear a bandolier of pipes across his chest and a big leather pouch of expensive tobacco on his belt. He and Joe Haldeman would sometimes have a contest to see who could keep an ounce of tobacco burning the longest. They'd sit staring at each other, puffing away. Passersby would lay bets on who could make his pipeful last the longest.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Stumbled across yet another interesting newsstand photo, which I'll post because it captures the transitional period between the "something for everyone" newsstands of the Era and the gamier versions that followed.

The year is 1963, as pegged by the Christine Keeler headlines, and while the resolution isn't good enough to identifiy a whole lot of what's on the magazine racks, it's pretty obvious what the trend is: the gossip tabloids are in full bloom. These papers exploded in popularity in the mid-1950s, and by the early sixties they were utterly inescapable. The National Enquirer is visible, and had been around as a gossip rag since 1953, but it's overshadowed by the National Insider, an even sleazier competitor which flooded the newsstands in 1962, Confidential Flash, which went in heavily for stories of brutal sex and violence seasoned with fascist politics, and by Midnight, a sheet of Canadian origin that was probably the rawest of the papers seen here. It was just a short step from this stuff to the even greasier stuff that would follow.

 

[Harp]

Cannot see The Irish Catholic or the American Bar Journal, hmm...

 

[LizzieMaine]

Well, there's "True Confessions."

 

[Fading Fast]

Stumbled across yet another interesting newsstand photo, which I'll post because it captures the transitional period between the "something for everyone" newsstands of the Era and the gamier versions that followed.

View attachment 63853

The year is 1963, as pegged by the Christine Keeler headlines, and while the resolution isn't good enough to identifiy a whole lot of what's on the magazine racks, it's pretty obvious what the trend is: the gossip tabloids are in full bloom. These papers exploded in popularity in the mid-1950s, and by the early sixties they were utterly inescapable. The National Enquirer is visible, and had been around as a gossip rag since 1953, but it's overshadowed by the National Insider, an even sleazier competitor which flooded the newsstands in 1962, Confidential Flash, which went in heavily for stories of brutal sex and violence seasoned with fascist politics, and by Midnight, a sheet of Canadian origin that was probably the rawest of the papers seen here. It was just a short step from this stuff to the even greasier stuff that would follow.

I swear to God if they ever crack your head open after you pass away, there will be a ripple in the universe and before our eyes will be the largest research library ever imaginable.

 

[Fading Fast]

Stumbled across yet another interesting newsstand photo, which I'll post because it captures the transitional period between the "something for everyone" newsstands of the Era and the gamier versions that followed.

View attachment 63853

The year is 1963, as pegged by the Christine Keeler headlines, and while the resolution isn't good enough to identifiy a whole lot of what's on the magazine racks, it's pretty obvious what the trend is: the gossip tabloids are in full bloom. These papers exploded in popularity in the mid-1950s, and by the early sixties they were utterly inescapable. The National Enquirer is visible, and had been around as a gossip rag since 1953, but it's overshadowed by the National Insider, an even sleazier competitor which flooded the newsstands in 1962, Confidential Flash, which went in heavily for stories of brutal sex and violence seasoned with fascist politics, and by Midnight, a sheet of Canadian origin that was probably the rawest of the papers seen here. It was just a short step from this stuff to the even greasier stuff that would follow.

Also, not to go unmentioned, is the iconic shot of the woman in classic attire - simple short-sleeve dress modestly fussed up with a contrasting collar, practical handbag in an archetypical position on her bent arm with an "I'm a hat and proud of it" hat on her head and efficient wide-healed shoes. Seven years later and she'd look like an anachronism.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Pretty much the same way the average woman in 1919 would have looked if thrust forward in time to 1926.

 

[Fading Fast]

Pretty much the same way the average woman in 1919 would have looked if thrust forward in time to 1926.

Again, we see the echo of the '20s in the '60s.

 

[ChiTownScion]

Stumbled across yet another interesting newsstand photo, which I'll post because it captures the transitional period between the "something for everyone" newsstands of the Era and the gamier versions that followed.

View attachment 63853

The year is 1963, as pegged by the Christine Keeler headlines, and while the resolution isn't good enough to identifiy a whole lot of what's on the magazine racks, it's pretty obvious what the trend is: the gossip tabloids are in full bloom. These papers exploded in popularity in the mid-1950s, and by the early sixties they were utterly inescapable. The National Enquirer is visible, and had been around as a gossip rag since 1953, but it's overshadowed by the National Insider, an even sleazier competitor which flooded the newsstands in 1962, Confidential Flash, which went in heavily for stories of brutal sex and violence seasoned with fascist politics, and by Midnight, a sheet of Canadian origin that was probably the rawest of the papers seen here. It was just a short step from this stuff to the even greasier stuff that would follow.

The one headline in that photo ("PHONY PREACHERS PREY ON PUBLIC") could have been released today- or a century ago. Some things never change.

 

[tonyb]

I recall my sleep being disturbed by what I saw on the covers of the slimier tabs when I was a little kid. Cannibalism. Necrophilia. Et cetera.

I knew not to even touch the things, let alone page through them. There was no reason to so much as mention them in my childhood home. It was just tacitly understood that we didn't have any part of such things.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

Nobody seems to have mentioned the ultimate scandal rag, "Confidential, " which specialized in the sexual and political pecadillos of celebrities. James Ellroy used it as inspiration for his "Hush - Hush" magazine in his LA Quartet and Underground USA series of books, imitating it down to its staccato , alliterative prose style. They just don't make ém like "Confidential" anymore.

 

[basbol13]

I've been sitting here pondering so many things that have disappeared since I was young and in reality there ARE so many things .....Manual Typewriters, Electric Typewriters, people powered lawn mowers, tube TV's, tube Radios,( I remember going to the corner drugstore for my dad with 2 or 3 tubes to try in the tube tester and see which ones needed replacement). Real butcher shops that had sawdust on the floors. I remember going with my grandfather and watching him looking at the live chickens in cages and picking out what he felt was the prize one of the lot, and while we waited the butcher prepared the chicken, talk about fresh. The only down side was the chicken smell pretty overpowering for a kid. I remember riding the bus in Chicago, you might say "aw come on we still have buses", but how many of you rode electric buses? They were so cool, the didn't smell didn't make any noise like our "modern ones". As an added bonus for us kids, in those days the buses had two separate lines running from the bus on two separate shafts (like you see on the old trolly cars) and by making contact with the electric lines powered the bus, we would pull on the shafts thus breaking the contact and stopping the bus much to the consternation of the driver. We'd laugh and run away, and sometimes the driver would run after us which made all the more fun. There are so many more things not around anymore, that I'd have to write a book, but I think I've written way too much so I'll apologize before hand.

 

[2jakes]

No apologies needed !

Something I don't see anymore.
Buying watermelons and the seller would cut a plug so you could
taste the sweetness before making the purchase.

Vintage photo-bombing!

 

[LizzieMaine]

Nobody seems to have mentioned the ultimate scandal rag, "Confidential, " which specialized in the sexual and political pecadillos of celebrities. James Ellroy used it as inspiration for his "Hush - Hush" magazine in his LA Quartet and Underground USA series of books, imitating it down to its staccato , alliterative prose style. They just don't make ém like "Confidential" anymore.

"Confidential's" founder Robert Harrison cut his teeth in the twenties on Bernarr Macfadden's New York Evening Graphic, without question the most outrageous daily newspaper ever published in the United States -- and he used the Graphic's methods in "Confidential," especially his claims to be doing a high-minded work by exposing scandal -- and if the scandals he uncovered were titillating to the public, well, that was the fault of the celebrities he exposed. Quite a few of those celebrities sued him and cost him a great deal of money, and Harrison eventually decided that it was in his interests to be a bit less Macfaddenish in his choice of material.

The Graphic, of course, was the paper that made Peaches Heenan, Daddy Browning, and the African Honking Gander household names in 1926-27:

 

[ChiTownScion]

I remember riding the bus in Chicago, you might say "aw come on we still have buses", but how many of you rode electric buses? They were so cool, the didn't smell didn't make any noise like our "modern ones". As an added bonus for us kids, in those days the buses had two separate lines running from the bus on two separate shafts (like you see on the old trolly cars) and by making contact with the electric lines powered the bus, we would pull on the shafts thus breaking the contact and stopping the bus much to the consternation of the driver. We'd laugh and run away, and sometimes the driver would run after us which made all the more fun.

What still amazes me about them was the acceleration on the trolley buses. Late at night on a route with little traffic and a wide street (such as Irving Park Road west of Central) , a driver could "open it up:" the speed limit was 30 miles an hour but topping 45 as the wires above literally sang was not unusual. They got rid of 'em in 1973: maintaining the wire on a trolley bus route was six times the cost of a propane (later diesel) bus route. A recent vacation to Vancouver was a trip down memory lane for me as far as riding the trolley buses.

A little known fact was that a bus driver did not need a driver's license to pilot a trolley bus for the Chicago Transit Authority or predecessor Chicago Surface Lines: the electric buses were street railways under law.