Category: Culture

Please Hold

Bill Averett

All images are from the 1961 Baylor University Round-Up.

Bobbie Sue Wilson

According to these pictures from over a half century ago, folks have always had a love affair with phones. All that was available at the time was the black, corded rotary kind, like the one we had in our dining room for years.

Larry Hodges

I still have nightmares, where I’m calling someone on a rotary phone, and I have to start over again, or the rotary won’t work right.

Darla Prudom

I remember waiting for hours for my friends’ numbers to stop giving me the busy signal, so that I could update them with the latest dish. Sometimes, I’d just give up altogether. There was no voice mail, and you had to get through to the line in order to leave a message on the answering machine.

Gerry Frederick

We couldn’t walk around the house, either, so we were tethered to the base. And the cords would inevitably get wonky in their coil. You remember janky, improperly-coiled cords? I guess that still happens to office phones.

Bruce Peterson Photo

By the way, did anyone ever clean their receivers? These days, I Lysol-Wipe our phones regularly. I guess those were the days before antibacterial soaps and hand sanitizer.

Mrs. Hardcastle

The university even had a Cotton Bowl float devoted entirely to the phone!

So don’t let anyone tell you we haven’t always loved our phones, even before they were smart!

giphy.com

Putt Putt

I Remember Distinctly

Garnet Carter built his first “Tom Thumb Golf Course” in Lookout Mountain, TN in 1927. Two years later, he drove to Miami to build another. By the following summer, mini golf courses were springing up around the USA along roadsides. Folks could stop and play on greenswards made of cottonseed hulls (Astro Turf was not patented till ’65) and roll their balls through the pipes. Living through The Depression may have stunk, but at least there was putt putt.

Suit Up For Spring!

Is anything more refreshing than a lakeside dip in seven pounds of swimsuit? It looks like a good way to get pulled under by a current. And who’s got time for a watery grave these days? Hard pass.

NY State Historical Association, Hometown USA

At the turn of the century before the turn of this last century, folks was modest. Bared female knees were considered skanktastic, although this man’s naked knees are evidently enjoying 1900, where the living is easy. He does seem a bit cold, though. Perhaps he also should have worn a button down dress.

Photographer Telfer snapped this pic in Cooperstown, NY, at the waters of Otsego Lake. Americanheritage.com says, “Most people know Coooperstown as the home of novelist James Fenimore Cooper, a beautiful resort, and as the place where baseball was supposedly invented by Abner Doubleday.” But I’ve never heard any of those things until about three minutes ago, so there you are.

Bountiful Crop Of Babies

Nat Geo 12/49

“Here the atomic bomb is developed. People in Los Alamos lead almost normal lives. Residents have no unexpected visitors, no graveyards, no unemployment, and no real-estate taxes, but they do have a bountiful crop of babies. By showing passes, they are free to leave the reservation as they please; yet some complain of feeling shut in.”

Take These Jobs And Shove Them

Look At America

I’ve my thrown my back out several times both sneezing and stepping off curbs the wrong way. I am not cut out to drive logs on the Swift Diamond River in New Hampshire, like these fellows. I am weak.

Nor can I tug wagons o’ tires.

Phillip Gendreau

When rubber came to Ohio in 1910, Akron became a boom city, and guys like this were able to breathe rubber fumes all day.

Here’s another job I can’t do due to my fear of heights. Is he washing windows? Is he scaling the sides of buildings to fulfill a male superhero fantasy? All I know is that was 40 years ago, and he ain’t doing it now.

1979 Cactus

And the last job I wouldn’t want: naked bakery boy.

Nat Geo 12/49

It’s not because I’m uppity or that I don’t love gluten, because I loves me some glutenny gluten. But I would need an apron. And some sort of hair net so as not to get stray hairs into the sourdough.

When Your BFF Is Packing Two Coors Banquets In Her Hair For Later

Blackcat 1970

Coors Banquet beer was black market back in the day, only distributed within some 13 western U.S. states. Per firstwefeast.com, in the 1970’s:

Coors claimed that not only could they not make enough beer, but that their unpasteurized brew demanded being distributed exclusively via refrigerated trucks, lest it “spoil.” Thus, a mystique was built, and soon east coast folks were smuggling cases upon cases of the beer back home after a visit to the Rockies. In 1977, Coors even took out an ad in the Washington Post saying “Please don’t buy our beer,” insisting any in the area was clearly black market, mishandled, and prone to becoming “watery” (you can laugh now). This insane thirst for Coors hit its apex with the release of Smokey and the Bandit, the Burt Reynolds action-comedy about a legendary trucker willing to risk life, limb, and the law to illegally smuggle crates of Coors back to Georgia.

This ’79 ad for said beer plays like an ad for America itself. Coors Banquet is “born where eagles speak, and the sunrise slides from peak to peak.” Clearly, it’s “no downstream beer.”