Tell us your old without telling us you are old......

And good old bunk beds!!!

Had a set of these in our house for ages when the kids were little! My youngest two went googly over them, so much so that I had to layout an understanding that one of them got the top bunk for a week, then the other one got the top bunk the following week, and so on and so forth.

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Kadee said:
What drinking fountains we all drank out of at school right after other kids coughed spluttered all over them , I doubt if they were ever cleaned because they were outside and always covered in dust / grime
In Australia different states have different names for things , and I lived in New South Wales till I was in my mid 20’s and we called the drinking fountains bubblers however when I moved to SA they called them fountains
I still to this day call them drinking bubblers

Where I live we have one in the Main Street ( not working that dates back to the early settlement 1860 of the area I live in )
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You had to be careful with the ones that looked like porcelain balls with the water bubbling out the top.

Before drinking, it was always wise to look around to see if any of the school bullies were near. They liked to wait for a kid to bend over close to the bubbler and then hit them in the back of the head. Many a tooth got chipped that way....or knocked out.
 

Aunt Marg said:
And good old bunk beds!!!

Had a set of these in our house for ages when the kids were little! My youngest two went googly over them, so much so that I had to layout an understanding that one of them got the top bunk for a week, then the other one got the top bunk the following week, and so on and so forth.

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Three of my younger sisters slept in triple-deckers. There was a trundle that pulled out from under the bottom bunk. The youngest one slept in the trundle. The other two would often push the trundle back in, trapping her under the bed. Sisters.....
 
jujube said:
Three of my younger sisters slept in triple-deckers. There was a trundle that pulled out from under the bottom bunk. The youngest one slept in the trundle. The other two would often push the trundle back in, trapping her under the bed. Sisters.....
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How nifty is that!!!

I'm laughing pleasantly right now thinking about the setup you grew up with, thinking I should have added another bunk on top of the top bunk!

Of course ceiling height would have played in, but what a novel solution to a small home with not enough bedrooms.
 
I still remember three phone numbers. Two at home and one at my grandparents. Rotary phone at gramps was so heavy. They never changed model, I don't really know how long they had it, but it was a while I guess.

In my parents house, we had the same phone number on rotary until Papa died. Then we were the first in our area to get a push button phone and we got a free change of phone number, hence the three numbers I remember. 😂

The code for phone number on my grandparents' phone began with PR- then the remaining numbers.
 
dilettante said:
I remember getting up before the family to rekindle the furnace and baby the first load of coal for the day. I was in the 5th grade.
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Same here. We had a 'coal bin' in the basement where the furnace was. Once a month or so in the winter, the coal truck would pull into our driveway, arrange a chute from their truck to our basement chute and a ton of coal noisily slid into our coal bin which was a room about 10x10. Each morning, a couple shovels of coal had to be loaded into the furnace. It was tricky sometimes when the fire was already going good. Our shower was also in the basement - just a shower head above the drain, no partitions. Everyone in our block had the same.
 
Supernatural said:
I still remember three phone numbers. Two at home and one at my grandparents. Rotary phone at gramps was so heavy. They never changed model, I don't really know how long they had it, but it was a while I guess.

In my parents house, we had the same phone number on rotary until Papa died. Then we were the first in our area to get a push button phone and we got a free change of phone number, hence the three numbers I remember. 😂

The code for phone number on my grandparents' phone began with PR- then the remaining numbers.
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Do you mean that your phone number was only three digits (instead of seven)? Wow. That would be a long time ago. But I too, recall when I was a kid that the first two digits were letters. BA....(which I think stood for Baldwin)
 
vintageMo said:
Do you mean that your phone number was only three digits (instead of seven)? Wow. That would be a long time ago. But I too, recall when I was a kid that the first two digits were letters. BA....(which I think stood for Baldwin)
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No, I remember three full phone numbers of seven digits each. 🤣🤣🤣
 
OldEngineer said:
Same here. We had a 'coal bin' in the basement where the furnace was. Once a month or so in the winter, the coal truck would pull into our driveway, arrange a chute from their truck to our basement chute and a ton of coal noisily slid into our coal bin which was a room about 10x10. Each morning, a couple shovels of coal had to be loaded into the furnace. It was tricky sometimes when the fire was already going good. Our shower was also in the basement - just a shower head above the drain, no partitions. Everyone in our block had the same.
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Our heat came from a fire in the basement, and the grate was in our hallway, halfway between my bedroom and the bathroom. I was only four when I fell on it and singed my arm. For years I thought I tripped and fell on it trying to get to the toilet...Wasn't til I was in my late 30's that my brother told me he had dropped me on it! Bless his heart.:LOL:
 
vintageMo said:
Do you mean that your phone number was only three digits (instead of seven)? Wow. That would be a long time ago. But I too, recall when I was a kid that the first two digits were letters. BA....(which I think stood for Baldwin)
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In the 1940's our town had far less than 999 telephone subscribers and consequently only needed 3 digits for phone numbers As the town grew, the phone company ("Ma Bell") was able to double the number of users without adding expensive telephone poles and wires by implementing 'shared' or 'party' lines.

So in the 50's, our first phone was a yellow, plastic, rotary-dial device installed in the kitchen.
The handset was attached by a soft-coiled wire about 12 feet long that drooped to the floor when on-hook or stretched all the way into the living room when extended. We thought it was "the livin' end" to talk on the phone from 2 different rooms!
We had a shared line - our number was 7049 and our neighbor's was 7048.
There was no privacy. If you went off-hook and heard a dial tone you could call out. But if you heard someone talking, you said "Oh, excuse me" and hung up. Sometimes this encouraged the neighbor to end their call sooner so we could make our call. Sometimes it worked in reverse.

Shared lines used the same physical line and so incoming calls rang both phones simultaneously. To signal which number was being called, there were 2 ring patterns. Our pattern was once every 6 secs and the neighbor's pattern was twice every 6 secs. There were no answering machines so sometimes one neighbor might ask another to answer their phone during a time they would be away and take a message - usually in case of emergencies or important events.

Listening in on neighbors' conversations was great sport (and dubious unethical behavior). It took great precision to lift the receiver slowly enough to reduce the clicks and mute the noise in the room least we be discovered eavesdropping. Dogs and kids required special skills to mute.

After a few years we finally got our own private line but the number changed to 877-7049. It remained that number for 60 years even after the area code was implemented.
 
Aunt Marg said:
Back to page 4, for a moment, those retro traingular car windows worked like a charm!

Mom would keep her cigarette in close proximity to the open window, and the draw from that traingle window sucked the smoke from her cigarette straight outside as if there was a vacuum attached.
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I remember the same thing...my dad with his arm perched right by that little window, and with a sudden flick of his wrist, the ash would fall from his cigarette into the wind.
 
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dobielvr said:
Looks like it needs to be combed out a little... :giggle:
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Well now I don't know about that! Sometimes Jean Shrimpton and I wore our like that for a big evening out. I had it done like that once in 1968 and the hairdresser worked her rear off pinning in each big loop with a hairpin. She took a lot of pictures and I sure wish I had one today.
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I remember sitting waiting for my mom to finish up under the outer-space looking dome hair dryers, and there would sometimes be 6, 7, 8 or more women sitting under the dome dryers smoking cigarettes.

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