Old stuff that wouldn’t pass muster today...

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This kind of children's slide was common place in the recreational corner of public parks when I was a child. A group of us would polish the slide to make it superfast. What we did was to use the waxed paper that back then, was the wrapper of a sliced loaf. One kid went down the slide sitting on the waxed paper, the next kid slid down and polished the waxed surface, then we alternated each sliding with waxed paper followed by polishing. After about five minutes the slide could launch a rocket.

On one particular day, a mother arrived with her little boy, he was no more than four years old. Step by step he climbed the stairs, at the tower he waved down to his mother, then sitting on the highly polished slide, he launched himself. That kid all but broke the sound barrier, at the bottom he went straight off the end, his speed so fast that he didn't touch the floor, instead he covered a good fifteen feet and went straight into the shrubbery.

Mother rushed to help her son, then after picking him up, she turned around to remonstrate with the culprits only to find the recreational area, completely devoid of any kid. We were all hiding behind the public toilets trying hard not to be heard by laughing out loud.
 
RubyK said:


We hung clothes outside when I was young. My job was to hang up socks for a family of 7. Each sock had it's own clothespin. It took forever.

There was a railroad track at the end of our street. In those days (1940s) the locomotive spewed black smoke. So when the clothes were still wet and the train was coming, we had to rush out and take down the clothes or they would get dirty and have to be rewashed! Most housewives stayed home in those days and would help each other remove the clothes. That was neighborly.
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I remember how good a wind dried sheet would smell when my mother took it off the line and put it on my bed.
 
Frank Fontaine regularly appeared as the character Crazy Guggenheim in the Joe the Bartender sketches on the Jacky Gleason Show in the early 1960’s. The character was portrayed as chronically drunk, and “funny” drunks were stock characters on TV at the time. Fontaine would finish his appearances by singing in a beautiful baritone voice. His Crazy Guggenheim character was the voice model for Barney, the barfly on the Simpsons show. You won’t see alcoholics portrayed as comic characters on TV much these days…

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