Who remembers these things back in the day ?...come and add your own memories..

jujube said:
One telephone in the house and it was either in the kitchen or the hall, meaning there was no such thing as a private conversation.

"Party lines", 2, 3 or 4 households on the same line. Everybody had the nosy old lady who would listen in on others' conversations. You could hear her breathing or her dentures clicking. My dad would say, "Stop listening, Mrs. Frederickson" and she'd always say indignantly, "I am NOT listening!"

When someone called "long distance"....." IT'S AUNT ROSE AND SHE'S CALLING *LONG DISTANCE*" and everyone came running because you knew it was a new baby or a death or something VERY important as no one called just to say hi or ask about your weather. That's what letters were for.
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that's soooo spot on... that's exactly how it happened in our house...The phone was always in the hall on the little wrought iron phone table attached to the wall..

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If you had money you had something similar to this...instead of the cheap wrought iron one...

retro-telephone-table.jpg


...and then the phone was the 706 or 746 ( excuse the nerd in me, I collect vintage phones)... They were rented in those days and the cheapest colour was pea green... like this..
gpo-700-series-telephone%201.jpg
so we had green while my friends had red...swooon... and or white, or black... :D


il_570xN.4209217886_a1n8.jpg
 
Pappy said:
I remember having measles, chickenpox, whooping cough and chicken pox. Thank god they are mostly behind us now.
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Pappy did you have chickenpox twice ? :sneaky::D

I got mumps but never had any other childhood malady... My sister got chickenpox while we were in a chicldren's home.. she was 6 , I was 9.. and it was my job to put calamine lotion on all of her spots... I remember writing to my mum, and telling her exactly how many spots my sister had.. my mother reminded me of these years after..
 

hollydolly said:
Loved those elavators, we can still find an occasional one.. there's always great delight from us oldies when we do and horror from the young...:ROFLMAO:
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In Germany not long ago there was one of several fatal accidents with a paternoster elevator. I always wondered why they are named 'paternoster' which is the name for the Lord's Prayer in Latin, since it starts with "Our father", which is "pater noster" in this language. Maybe the people who used this elevator, were praying before using the pater noster. It could have been their last one :ROFLMAO:.

Although they were frequently used decades ago, I have only seen one of them in my lifetime. It was decades ago in an official building.
 
Not things but a memory: As a child at about 10 I was fishing tadpoles together with other kids in the neigborhood in a small ditch a mile away. We carried them home in a bucket, but unfortunately spilled some of them near our houses and were trying to pick them up from the ground. I've never forgotten this.
 
George1959 said:
In Germany not long ago there was one of several fatal accidents with a paternoster elevator. I always wondered why they are named 'paternoster' which is the name for the Lord's Prayer in Latin, since it starts with "Our father", which is "pater noster" in this language. Maybe the people who used this elevator, were praying before using the pater noster. It could have been their last one :ROFLMAO:.

Although they were frequently used decades ago, I have only seen one of them in my lifetime. It was decades ago in an official building.
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They were called pater nosters because they were like rosaries or prayer beads.... continuous and never-ending.

My theory, also, is that you'd better say a prayer before you jumped on or off of one.....
 
George1959 said:
Not things but a memory: As a child at about 10 I was fishing tadpoles together with other kids in the neigborhood in a small ditch a mile away. We carried them home in a bucket, but unfortunately spilled some of them near our houses and were trying to pick them up from the ground. I've never forgotten this.
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we did that...fished for tadpoles with a net, and we'd put them in an old jam jar... goodness knows what we intended doing with them...lol
 
hollydolly said:
we did that...fished for tadpoles with a net, and we'd put them in an old jam jar... goodness knows what we intended doing with them...lol
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It seems that many children did such things. But it isn't possible anymore for many of them. The ditch I've mentioned is existing until this day but it didn't have tadpoles for centuries.
 
hollydolly said:
why is that ?... I have a garden pond and there's tadploles and frogs in there
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Well, most often there is no water anymore in that ditch. And if there is water after much snow in winter and heavy rainfall in spring, there are no tadpoles. Pollution? I think that the use of herbicides and pesticides are the reason for this.

I show you a Google satellite pic. I've marked the small ditch by the red arrow. It's named "Sendelbach" (Bach is "brook" in English). But nowadays mostly there is no water in it, as in this pic. Left of it is the "Rhein-Main-Donau-Kanal" (Rhine-Main-Danube-Canal), which is very frequented by river cruises, even with many people from the U.S. On the right side is an allotment site. As we were fishing there in childhood there was always water and no allotment.

sendelbach.jpg
 
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