Remember when?

.... A time BEFORE television when entertainment at home was via a radio receiver or people made their own entertainment.

I remember listening to radio programmes - Journey into Space, The Goon Show, Take it from here, The Jimmy Edwards show and children's favourites with 'Uncle Mac'.

 

And Workers Playtime and the Pools Results I expect. New recharged accumulator once a fortnight, not forgetting Dick Barton, Special Agent.

 

One guy I knew in the State Labor Council called it for what it is….”no rights at work” legislation.

 

well my mom had a television before i was born, but refused to have any technology that came after that. my dad had a transistor shortwave when those became available.
never had a car though, until the year i graduated high school. rode the trains on his employee pass, free for him, and until i was twelve, for me too, half fair for ma' if/when she came along. when he finally got one, a second hand datsun pickup, made up for lost time exploring back roads.

my personal entertainment (and anxiety relief) was going for an all day walk in the woods, or drawing imaginary model railroad layout plans. also model railroad magazenes and imagining running trains on the layouts featured in them. oh and we always had cats, and there were wild blackberries we could pick in the woods. it was also my dream, from the first wide wide world feature about the univac that some day ordinary people would be able to have computers and be creative with them, but that dream, by the time little 8-bit byters became something you didn't have to build yourself, well 1977 i was 29. never well enough off to afford the newest and most powerful. still not. but sure thankful for what i can and do now.

oh i also remember we had cameras, that had film, that you took to the drug store and waited a week or two to get back your prints and negatives.

 

so many remembering things as old, that didn't exist yet when i was born.
happens when we live long enough, and i hope to keep living long enough to see more.

 

This is what I grew up with.

 

Remember what, now?

 

we had these when i lived in the railroad company towns. we had regular dial phones to connect to the phone company, but we also had these as a kind of intercom. the railroad had multiple lines and kinds of phones. these were mostly gone already in the outside world. they were on a kind of always open party line, and we had, if you wanted to call a particular phone, you could ring a combination of long and short rings, that would be like the address of that particular phone. the big box has a button on the side, that was an add on, that you didn't have to turn the crank to generate the tones. you could just push the button. but you could use the crank. it was still fully functional too.

inside that big wooden box, was mostly taken up by two ginormous 1.5 volt, single cell batteries, each about half a gain larger then a 12oz beercan. or i think a pringles tube comes close to their form factor.

 

Many years ago I lived in Missoula, Mt, and incredibly a local of IWW was located there. A local folk singer, Mark Ross put on performances of many of the labor songs including the one you posted. He also sang of Frank Little, IWW organizer who was murdered in Butte in 1917; could Pinkertons and a certain Copper company have been involved? I read today that Chile elected a leftist President and if we can keep the copper companys and the CIA company out, it might be a better outcome than the Allende experience.

 

I remember that the town where I grew up had a jeep and they would ride around town in the summer spraying a large cloud of DDT with some kind of machine. They figured it would kill mosquitoes and I suppose it killed some. I remember also riding my bike in the cloud of poison thinking somehow that it was fun! We didn't have AC in the house I grew up in--just a swamp cooler for a two story house. You had to choose--cover up with a sheet to keep the mosquitoes from sucking on you and sweat like hell. Or let the little buzzing critters have at you!!

 

The book Silent Spring by Rachel Carson alerted the American public to the dangers of DDT

 

And before that book we breathed it and enjoyed every minute.

 

I worked in a small orchard in WI in the late 50s and they sprayed the trees 12 times a year with a mixture of lead arsenic and DDT!

 

!!!!!!!!!!!! indeed!!!

 

Well... Nobody likes worms in their apple. Toxins are fine, though. "Better Living Through Science"