Category: Things that Disappeared When You Weren’t Looking

Thanks to Awkward Family Photos for reminding me of this one. Remember walking into the houses of friends and seeing these stretched pop bottles? They definitely had a youthful appeal, so it may have been in the bedroom of a teenager where they might be most readily spotted.

I couldn’t find any history on who first heated up a 7Up bottle and stretched the neck (it was usually 7Up, as I recall). But I know that you couldn’t attend a county fair or carnival in the early 70’s without seeing them offered as prizes at game booths. Stephen C Jackson invented and sold a machine that would make the process easier (and apparently made a mint doing so!).

They might be twisted into spirals, or they might simply be elongated. The straight ones were perfect as vases for long-stemmed flowers made of paper or plastic.

Many had lids, and what was apparently the original contents inside. No doubt they were uncapped, emptied, altered, and refilled and carefully recapped.

The pop bottles stood up well to such abuse, because they were built to be refilled literally hundreds of times. The glass was thick and of high quality.

Looking back, pop bottles were a pain. They cost an extra two cents (unless you brought one to trade in), and needed to be saved afterwards, unless one was so wealthy that he or she didn’t mind squandering enough money to buy two pieces of Dubble Bubble.

But oh, what wonderful artistic statements could be made with them!

Speaking of the fairs, that was actually the ONLY place you could find these puppies “new,” as I recall, but a ready supply of them could be found at neighborhood garage sales. In appreciation of the artistic factor, they would generally be sold at more than face value. Of course, you’d be hard pressed to find a grocery store that would take such a bottle in and pay you two cents for it.

The stretched bottles can still be found, but the problem is not just that they are scarce, it’s that pop bottles in general are now rarities. Sure, you can pay a premium price at the grocery store and get a six-pack of 6 oz. Cokes in a carton, but check out the thin glass they are made of. Nope, that’s not the Real thing.

So the next time you’re out yard-saling, keep an eye out for these vintage pieces of Americana. You might get lucky and grab yourself a piece of history that once resided in a youthful bedroom circa 1971.

We enjoy a love-hate relationship with our computers. When they work well, they’re our pets. But when the act up (generally because most of us are stuck running Windows), we fantasize about throwing them in the nearest body of salt water.

But by and large, we were exposed to computers in some form or another at an early age. And we accepted their usefulness, and ran out and got our own as soon as they got cheap enough. Now our Depression-surviving parents were another matter. For the most part, they had a deep-seated distrust of thinking machines that came along well after they had learned how to get along, and especially pay bills, without them.

In fact, if there was any sort of technological glitch, they were quick to blame those blasted computers.

So when many of their bills started showing up in the mail during the 60’s as punch card bills, they were quick to scorn the newfangled things.

It was a no-brainer for utility companies to send out bills on cards that could be inserted into a reader for quick data entry, as opposed to paying someone to hand-type the payee’s information in (and increase the risk of errors). But that didn’t mean our parents had to like it.

They were used to seeing newspaper stories about folks getting billed a million dollars and some change for a month’s water usage. And of course, the accounts always blamed the problem on a computer error.

The truth be known, the mainframe computers in use were some of the most reliable machines man has ever built. The error was invariably the fault of a programmer or someone’s mistyped data entry.

Punch cards used to be one of our most common sights. Dumpsters outside office buildings would contain hundreds of thousands of them, long before recycling caught on.

Nowadays, you can buy them on eBay as collector’s items. But we Boomers can remember mom or dad opening those bills and griping about how computers were taking over the world.

In my photo albums from the 60’s, every woman over the age of thirty is wearing a pair of these pointy glasses.

These were quite the craze among the WWII generation, that is, our mothers and aunts. My mom had at least three pairs of them, which she was always losing and imploring me to help her find.

However, the glasses were also a hit with many of the younger generation as well. Pointy glasses and stirrup pants adorned at least a few nubile figures in advertisements of the day.

All of my grade school teachers wore them, too. In fact, Mrs. Finley looked pretty hot in them!

Then, I would see a picture of my sweet Aunt Leah, and I would be brought back to earth.

Most of my aunts (and my mom) moved on to big plastic in the 70’s. But many who have reached their golden years continue to wear the 1960’s-signature pointy glasses. Here’s to all of them.

Ah, the services that we grew up with we took for granted would always exist. The guy at the gas station would always be willing to throw in some nice freebie just so we would continue to buy his fuel. Your favorite AM station would continue to blast great rock and roll music across the country after dark. And you could always duck into a phone booth to make a call insulated from the elements and noise of the street.

Individual telephone booths still exist, but the ones that do have been in place for many years. As they decay, they are being removed, to be replaced by small standalone kiosk phones, or perhaps not being replaced at all.

After all, we all carry cell phones nowadays, don’t we?

Telephone booths first began showing up in American city street corners late in the 19th century. Besides providing a nice shelter for making a call, they also isolated the user and the outside world from each other, necessary for the welfare of both. The noise outside was a distraction for the caller, but he/she also had to practically shout into the phone to get their lossy signal to the other end at a volume discernible to the callee.

Phone companies were making good money from phone booth customers, so they began proliferating all over the country. By the 60’s, a phone booth could be seen at practically any corner grocery, gas station, or supermarket, as well as many busy street intersections. It seemed that you were never more than a few hundred feet away from a phone booth.

It became a part of American culture. We all know where Superman preferred to change his wardrobe. Phone booths became familiar places for plot twists and high drama in movies and television shows. And of course, the opening scene of Get Smart would feature Don Adams disappearing in a phone booth in order to get into CONTROL headquarters. Plus, college students of the 50’s delighted in seeing just how many individuals that could be stuffed into them at one time.

But we Boomers used them for their actual purpose, as well. I made hundreds of phone calls from booths. Many times, it was for the purpose of getting a little privacy (as in a homebound teenager calling a young lady ;-). But when you were away from home in the 60’s and 70’s, making a phone call meant finding a phone booth. You simply didn’t have any other options.

The numbers of phone booths in the US peaked in the late 60’s. They were expensive, and also not very accessible to the handicapped. Their days were clearly numbered. Free-standing telephone pedestals would usually replace phone booths that had become decrepit, as they were wont to do. Indeed, phone booths were often pretty disgusting places to be. Grime and trash would build up in their confines, and who had the job of keeping them clean? Nobody, that I can recall, except perhaps nearby business owners.

A few phone booths persist. Perhaps you have one somewhere close to where you live.

If so, slip inside, drop a quarter into the slot, and make a call for old time’s sake. Who knows, for just a moment, you might be able to take a little trip in time back to when gas was cheap, Sullivan was on Sunday nights, and JFK’s death was still recent enough to hurt. Pretty good investment of 25 cents, wouldn’t you say?

There weren’t many things that a Boomer kid could spring for without bugging mom or dad for a nickel. Basically, such an item had to cost a penny. While nickels were hard for a kid to come by, pennies could be found in all sorts of places. You might spot one or two in the kitchen junk drawer. Digging in the dirt could possibly uncover one. It wasn’t unusual to spot a cent lying on the sidewalk.

So what could a kid do with a single penny, besides springing for a miniature Tootsie Roll?

He could take advantage of a finely-tuned scientific instrument that could be found in many small-town locations, drug stores in particular. He could spring for getting weighed.

The penny scale was a wonderfully massive thing to a kid. It was big, heavy, and stable. And it was just tall enough that it made a kid feel big to be able to see the weight window. Plus, a child with a penny could become a paying customer with no help from a parent, something that would make him feel grown up.

The penny scales were produced by the hundreds of thousands during the Great Depression, mainly (in the US) by rivals Peerless Scale Company and National Scale Company.

If a guy could scrape fifty bucks together during the 1930’s, he could make some serious money. That was the price of a brand new penny scale. Placing it in a well-traveled location could result in a cool 50-100 bucks a month. That was a pretty amazing turnaround on a modest investment! It’s hard to imagine that anyone ever got rich through penny scales, but they made for many a wealthy Depression-era entrepreneur.

After all, even in the economic darkness, EVERYBODY had a spare penny!

By 1950, inexpensive bathroom scales were readily available to consumers. Thus began the gradual disappearance of the ubiquitous street-corner scale.

But many businesses still had 40+ year-old scales in use in the 60’s. And hey, if they were bought and paid for, why not let them earn a few dollars per month?

Sadly, in the years since, they have pretty much vanished. So have the friendly corner drugstores that were the last havens of the massive weight-measuring machines. I defy you to spot a penny scale at Walgreen’s.

I recall that the scales would typically have a metal shade that would block the weight reading. Dropping a penny in the slot would cause it to move aside. If you really strained, you might be able to see your weight through a small crack that wasn’t covered by the shade.

The fancier models that would give you your fortune would have two movable shades, the second one being dislodged by a considerably more dear nickel. I’m not sure I ever wanted to know my fortune that badly, when I could get a Payday to munch on for the same price.

Other scales that I remember had trivia questions or horoscopes available in addition to your weight.

You can still find antique penny scales for sale. They have become hot collectibles, though, so don’t expect to obtain one for the original 50-dollar price tag.

For me, I’ll just have to close my eyes and take a virtual trip back to the Rexall Drug on Miami’s Main Street circa 1967. It feels good to drop my own penny in and become a paying customer.

If you grew up in a city, the subject of today’s column may not ring any bells, so to speak. But if you grew up in small town America, or perhaps grew up in the country, you no doubt remember the concept of a party line.

As America was wired for telephone service, it was impossible to give everyone their own private line. So neighbors would share a single connection, each having their own phone number. Strange stuff, but it made sense to Ma Bell.

Now consider what was required to complete a phone call in Centerton, Arkansas circa 1971: A line, shared by ten or so households, would have to be unoccupied. Otherwise, the caller would get a busy signal.

That meant that if you had a neighbor who liked to yak, you would miss lots of calls. Not good.

Of course, we had a neighbor lady who loved talking on the phone. And, more than once, she had to be tactfully told that an important call was expected, and could she please hang up for a while. And no, she didn’t like being asked AT ALL.

I don’t know why. She would enjoy listening in on the conversations of others almost as much as she loved having her own.

Party line users soon became adept at knowing the telltale signs that another neighbor was listening in. The call, particularly if long distance, would have line noise mixed in with the other person’s voice. However, a nosy neighbor’s breathing, etc. would come in crystal clear.

I grew up with three different party lines. The first one was when we moved to southwest Missouri, three miles up a dirt road out in the middle of nowhere. We lived there for nearly a year before we even GOT a phone! It took that long for the phone company to run new wires. Important calls would be made from a pay phone at a store on the main highway. So the nuisance of other neighbors using the same line was welcome, after being cut off from the world!

At least our phone rang independently, on all of the party lines we had. We visited a friend once whose phone rang several times an hour. I asked her why she didn’t answer it, and she told me that her ring was “two shorts and a long.” That’s when I noticed that the rings were in different patterns, sort of like Morse code.

Imagine getting used to constantly ringing phone in your house, to be ignored 90% of the time!

Nowadays everybody has their own connection. By 2004, there were about 5000 homes hooked up to party lines, but 90% of THOSE had only one party. Weird, I know, but that’s how the phone companies classify them. So in reality, about 500 families still have to wait for the line to clear before they can talk.

My problem is the opposite one: I have TOO STINKING MANY phone lines! I still have a land line, because it comes with the DSL. But I also have that lovely little cell phone that always seems to go off at bad times.

However, we children of the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s can recall a time when making a call sometimes meant politely asking a neighbor to hang up, and then making sure she STAYED hung up!