Obsolete: An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us By
I watch enough “vintage” movies and television that I find myself thinking about bygone customs and technology a lot — like how writers will contrive to have characters overhear phone messages not meant for them, now that nobody has an answering machine anymore. I thought about it while writing up Grounded, about soda fountains, about the Woolworth’s every town used to have.
Reading Obsolete gave me a few twinges for things I took for granted as a ten-year-old that a ten-year-old today would have to have explained to her: plaster casts; pop quizzes printed on a mimeo or ditto (the purple ink smelled so official!); cursive writing; lickable stamps, not just postage but Green Stamps too. We evolved past these things for good reason, mostly, but it’s a little sad that, in a generation, we’ll have forgotten them. So it’s nice that we’ll have the book, as the culture gets farther and farther from any firsthand experience with boom boxes and non-microwaved popcorn. The use of the word “encyclopedia” is facetious now, but will have the ring of truth in 25 years’ time.
The concept is fab, but the execution is problematic at times; author Anna Jane Grossman tries too hard with the jokey, faux-anthropological tone. The “Girdles” entry is a good example:
Elasticized undergarments that made the wearer look sexy, eliminating the need to diet, exercise, or marry a surgeon. Those who relied heavily on girdles during the day also relied on very dark rooms at night.
It’s the kind of “humor” that’s shoehorned in during a second edit, and the material doesn’t need it. Grossman has a lighter touch elsewhere, and when she’s playing it straight with the occasional dry aside or quotation from an expert (the “Focus Groups” entry does that very well), the prose is perfectly engaging — but it’s as though she couldn’t decide whether she wanted to examine these obsoletoids in depth, or coast on the gimmick. As gimmicks go, the table of contents is a damn good one, but the book is far better when it explains in depth what a given object was, or did, and why it fell from grace (“High-Diving Boards”), instead of passing the buck with a weak punchline (“Singles Bars”).
It’s a great idea for a book, it’s timely, and it will remain timely; Grossman could do an annotated edition every couple of years and not run out of material. I hope she does come out with an updated version or a sequel, and I hope she reins in the clunky jokes, which don’t add much, and adds more supplementary research, which does.
I’ll give it this without reservation: it’s a great gift book. Secret Santas, take note.
Tags: Anna Jane Grossman books S&H Green Stamps unmourned odors of childhood
My 12 yo son had to learn cursive writing in 3rd grade. In 7th grade however, they don’t seem to require that it be used, so I see him turn in ELA assignments that are printed which is just…odd. My own writing is sort of a mix of cursive and printing. The cursive capitals just always seemed weird to me, so I eventually just kind of dropped them.
We have a landline and the cordless phone base has an answering machine, but we use the cable company voicemail. I did miss the blinking light and would forget to check the voicemail, but now I have it set up to e-mail me when I have a message. So I get an e-mail, via my cell phone, to let me know I have a voicemail on my land line.
Film is another good one — all of my son’s early photos were taken with film and I’ve got piles and piles of negatives. His 2 yo sister — all digital.
Man, home milk delivery was the best. So convenient. And the little lined-metal box that sat on your back porch to hold the dairy goodness had a completely distinct sound when the lid (unlocked, of course — who’d ever think of swiping your milk!?) thunked down. And in winter, when the barest layer of ice formed before you got it inside? Nothing better.
Leigh–I’m told that there are still church circulars printed in ditto machines. I suspect on the same principle as my continuing use of the answering machine–the system and the machine are working just fine, so why change it?
@Mollie: Hee, “pop by.” And yes, but in a microwave bag.
@Bridget: I remember the erasables so well! My school didn’t allow us to use “real” pens until middle school, but if we’d passed our 3rd-grade penmanship test, we were “allowed” to write with erasable pens. The erasers totally sucked, and the ink was very tacky and smeary (that’s probably why they were erasable), so most of us switched back to pencils until we could use a regular Bic Stic.
The super-fat five-color pens were just as bad, but we looooooved those. I still have one.
Oh man, I remember having a passionate argument with an elementary school teacher about using a pen! “You have to do assignements in pencil until 4th grade!” “But this is an ERASABLE pen!” I thought it was a great injustice at the time.
I thought about that “ditto” thing when Ghost was running on repeat on Lifetime after Patrick Swayze died…how will future kids make any sense out of that exchange without it having to be explained?!
I was just thinking about this kind of thing yesterday–it was Friday morning, and I was watching The Office and 30 Rock on the DVR, and it was set up wrong or something, and I didn’t get all of 30 Rock, and I thought, “well, I’ll watch it on Hulu.” And then I remembered my mom telling stories about what TV was like when she was a kid–not just before DVR and online viewing, but before VCRs and reruns. It used to be that if someone missed their opportunity to see a TV show, it was gone forever!
It’s the same thing with computers. I have friends who completed grad school in the age of the typewriter–when you made one tiny revision to page 11 of your dissertation and had to retype the other hundred pages so everything matched up.
It’s amazing how material changes can have such an effect on habits and values.
@Bridget – Wow, they’re still teaching D’Nealian? That was the new thing when I was in 1st and 2nd grade…not quite 25 years ago. I still write “k” in that style too, but not a single other letter.
I feel ambivalent about cursive going away. Mine’s okay, and I suppose it keeps improving (only because I frequently journal), but I feel like real cursive should be as pretty as my grandmother used to write it. I don’t see cursive like that anymore.
Speaking of legal liabilities and kids, I went to Japan on holidays recently and was amazed at what awesome death traps the playgrounds still were.
They had equipment that would have been ancient when I was young, it was certainly rusty enough. They had stuff that has long vanished here in Australia and I’m guessing the US. There were monkey bars, see-saws that were just a plank of wood and a metal T-bar at each end and it had no spring to make sure you didn’t break your spine when you hit the ground. But the kicker was the slide, which was made out of solid concrete. My daughter made me go down it with her, and my legs came out nicely exfoliated.
I’m glad we have all the plastic and rubber jobbies here, but it was cool daughter could experience what I used to play on, even if I was anxiously holding my breath while she did it.
And I never felt so old than a time when I was an antique shop and there was an early 1980s era push button phone and this ten-year-old boy pointed to it and said “mum, what’s that?”. I mean, it wasn’t even a rotary phone!
@Bridget: “those erasable pens that PaperMate put out in the late ’80’s?” That totally makes me remember what that ink smelled like. The odor is as much a time-capsule for me as ditto ink, which is another era-specific aroma I will probably never smell again.
I remember asking my mom: “If we have a machine we can hook up to the radio to record the sound, then why isn’t there a machine we can hook up to the TV to record the picture?” She should have said, “Wait 10 years, kiddo. We’ll blow $800 on one, and you’ll use it to record collections of MTV videos.”
Back in that era, we had a TV with a remote when the TV still had a dial on it. It worked like this: “Babe? Can you put that on Channel 7 for me? Get Daddy a soda while you’re up. [kssssssh!] Here, add this pop-top ring to the chain. Thanks…”
@Cyntada: My older sister loves telling her kids that I used to be the remote control for our television back in the 1970s – since I was the youngest, I was required to change the channel as directed by my siblings.
@ Sars: “The super-fat five-color pens were just as bad, but we looooooved those. I still have one.”
Really? I … the ugliest and most unlikely wave of envy just passed through me. Those were rad.
Something else I just remembered: busy signals. It happened so imperceptibly that I didn’t notice when calls all started going straight to voicemail instead of beeping when busy. Recently I called an office and I thought there was something wrong with the phone when I heard that “beep .. beep .. beep!” I was so confused for a second that I thought there was something wrong with the phone cuz it’d been years since I heard that tone and I’d completely forgotten what it meant!
Wait, when did CURSIVE WRITING go away??? And why didn’t I get a copy of the memo??
When I was in school, I’m pretty sure we were using pens by the third grade – the kicker is, we had to use FOUNTAIN PENS. We weren’t allowed to use BALLPOINT pens, not in Catholic school, ooooh, nooo. I still remember the occasional exploding cartridge – not to mention the occasional LEAKING PEN, all over EVERYTHING, thanks very much.
Heck, I got my first microwave ten years ago. I hadn’t had one before, didn’t see any need for it, managed fine without it.
Of course, I was still using a ROTARY PHONE at the time.
One of my favorite stories in our family lore occurred when my sister and our cousin were about 10 (so 1990-ish). My cousin had been at our house for DAYS (oh, the joys of summer vacation!), and my mom told her to check in with my aunt by 4:00 p.m. to see if she was staying over again or going home. At about 4:30, my mom asked her if she had called and was told no, at which point my mom started yelling exasperatedly about no one ever doing what she told them to. And then my cousin burst into tears, and said, “But I don’t know how to read your clock (analog) or use your phone (rotary).” My mom felt kind of bad after that.
The last time I wrote in cursive was when I took the GREs in 1989. You had to copy out this pledge that you were you and you weren’t taking the test for someone else. I was the last to finish because I hadn’t written in cursive for years before that, and couldn’t remember how to make some of the letters. It was crazy.
I just looked down at my to-do list for the day, and it’s entirely in cursive, except for currencies (EUR is not cursive-able, really) and one side note to mysel that I apparently felt wasn’t important enough for cursive.
*is amused*
Taking an informal survey of the notes and to do lists at my desk, most of it is in cursive. I think I write most of my letters and thank you notes in cursive-y script (its not perfect cursive by any means). I print for writing addresses or filling or forms or what-not.
27. Haven’t had a land-line since…okay, I guess I technically had one in college, but never used it. I’ve moved an average of once a year since, so it’s always seemed like too much trouble–plus, if anyone needs to get in touch with me when I’m home, they can just email.
I learned cursive in elementary school, but I so don’t see the point: if something’s fancy enough to merit elaborate writing, it’s fancy enough for me to type up. Otherwise, I print. (And usually the only things I handwrite are notes for myself, which only I have to read, so I don’t worry too much about legibility to other people.) White-Out is the same principle: either something’s important enough to be completely on the computer, or it’s unimportant enough that, enh, fuck it, scratch it out and write above.
This year, I went from working at a job in a very geeky high-tech industry to one in a fairly well-established but not huge architectural firm, and was sort of amazed at the difference. White Out? Mechanical pencil refills? (Not for fancy pencils, either–for the $.30 Bic jobs.) Calculator ink? Where’s Doc Brown and the DeLorean?
So, this is much less ubiquitous, but shorthand is pretty much dead. I wanted to learn it in college, as a journalism student, and I ended up having to teach myself from a 1950s textbook on Gregg shorthand I found at the library. It was not offered anywhere, at the major university I went to — not at the business school; nowhere. This was about seven years ago.
Now a lot of people seem really amazed when they see me take notes in shorthand; it’s seriously like something from another era.
High diving boards. Shiver.
My youngest daughter’s fifth grade class had a swimming party at the end of the school year at a pool with a high dive. All of the boys were daring each other to jump off the high dive. One of the boys jumped off the side of the board, not the end, hit his head on the edge of the pool and rolled into the deep end. Several of his classmates pulled him out…blood everywhere, screaming fifth graders, panicked parents & teachers, paramedics…shiver.
The boy needed stitches, was and continues to be okay. My daughter is now a college grad. Any conversation with her circle of friends can still be brought to a dead halt by metioning ‘CJ and the diving board’.
What LaBellaDonna said…I also learned cursive with a fountain pen.
Bet I could still shoot ink across the aisle with one, too. I got very good at that. (I love my penmanship because it looks so much like my late mom’s.)
I had skates that pinched onto your shoes, made of all metal, no rubber stop-toes and adjustable with a skate key.The wheels were two in front, two in back, on opposite sides of your feet. Indestructable, fit everyone, weighed a damned TON. I still have that skate key.
Do they still make caps & cap-guns? Letting children play with gunpowder was nothing as compared to…
…LAWN DARTS! Wiki says “They are typically 12 inches (30 cm) long with a weighted metal or plastic tip on one end and three plastic fins on a rod at the other end.” Ours were metal & sharp as hell. They were banned in 1988. They were awesome weaponry. I could show you scars…
And I grew up on a party line – the same landline was shared by several families because there were no phone facilities. Each household had a different ring (we were one long ring, another house was two shorts, the third house was a short and a long ring.) Sometimes when you picked up the phone, you didn’t get dial tone, you got the middle of someone else’s conversation. You could ask politely to use the line or wait your turn. Our party line was three little old ladies and our family of 8. When they left the house we were thier answing machine…”I’ll be away this afternoon, if you hear two shorts, would you pick up & take a message?” They listened in on us all the time, you could hear them breathing. I remember Mama asking us to “quit baiting the old ladies! They came to the shop today to tell me you go to orgies & use heroin. (We were 12 & 14 at the time….)
Wow, I really miss my childhood now! Not sure I’d want to read that book, though, based on the girdle entry…
Oh, sodapop nostalgia on top of everything else – first of all, I remember going to the laundromat with Mom (weekly from 1970-1979, though I don’t remember much before 1973 or so) and buying 16-oz. glass bottles of pop for 20 cents from the machine. The grocery store carried 8-packs of 16-oz. glass bottles well into the 80s, and we had a brawer half-full of bottle stoppers and caps for them. We also experienced breakage in several ways, including garage-floor and grocery aisle tragedies and Dad putting bottles in the freezer to cool quickly and then forgetting them.
Secondly, Dad would take us golfing with him, and in the little shed where the pop machine lived on the ninth hole, there would always be a foot-high pile of discarded pop tabs. Everywhere else you went in public you’d see one or two of those things on the ground (along with bottlecaps,) and you’d step on them in the grass at parks and stuff and hurt yourself. Obsolescence can be a good thing.
And then there were the crocheted hats made of panels from beer cans…
Senlin: No, no, no! I STILL use my shorthand! I use the THIRD kind of shorthand, though: not Gregg, not Pitman, it’s … some other darn thing that was taught at the School For The Disadvantaged Learning A Desk Trade, which I attended lo these many years a-gone. And I DO still use it. I also still write in longhand – I have most of a Very Long, Brisk, Sci-Fi Novel written out in longhand and then rapidly typed up. I keep lists, and MULTIPLE notebooks, which I write in two DIFFERENT kinds of longhand, since I never did settle on what my handwriting should look like; “attractive,” unfortunately, is NOT one of the styles; one version is skinchy and leans to the right, one is loopy and upright and staccato; both are variably “legible”. And my writing “voice” is different, depending on whether or not I draft in longhand or on the computer. I’m much, much faster on the computer; I’m … different in longhand. The notebooks are lined, and usually brocaded, too. I talk to myself a lot. In ink.
Margaret in CO: Now, if you go to a stationer’s, you can get a DISPOSABLE fountain pen!!! I stared at one in fear and longing – apparently cartridges aren’t available, and it just seemed wrong to me to throw out a fountain pen when it was empty … until I realized that’s what I do with EVERY SINGLE BALL-POINT PEN I’ve ever owned! – the ones I kept long enough to run out, that is, that weren’t FILCHED before then.
YES! I had those metal skates, too! And your Mom wouldn’t let you put them on when you were wearing SNEAKERS, oh, no! You had to go and put SHOES on, and THEN put your skates on!
Honestly, I really preferred those side-by-side pairs of wheels. I never learned to ice skate, which meant, of course, that I never mastered in-line skates, either, and since I have the weakest ankles on the eastern seaboard, I’m not rollerskating until someone brings back skates with pairs of wheels.
Think of the generations of little kids who won’t know why it’s funny when the turkey on Bugs Bunny eats corn by pecking away at it down each row and the bell goes DING! at the end of the row ….
From the manager of Word in Brooklyn:
The author will be present, and Brokelyn’s Faye Penn is moderating.
My gosh, LaSalleUGirl, your poor cousin! I can see how that would be mortifying. Except I must be a TERRIBLE person, because I can’t stop laughing.
La Bella Donna: “since I have the weakest ankles on the eastern seaboard, I’m not rollerskating until someone brings back skates with pairs of wheels.”
I absolutely agree. I loved rollerskating as a child, but as I do not have a death wish, I will not be putting on a pair of inline skates ever.
Ooh, another thing that is now gone but utterly beloved by me: the library card catalog. You had to use your actual brain with that thing. I was reminded of it while watching The Big Bang Theory, because Sheldon and Leonard have a cabinet that looks like and probably is a card catalog. I’m going to have to explain to my daughter (she’s three) that scene in The Breakfast Club where Bender is rearranging the cards.
@Margaret in CO – Oh, my beloved Lawn Darts. We actually made up two variations of “Lawn Dart Chicken”… if there was a whole bunch of us, one person would chuck the dart in the air, and the rest of us would huddle together in a mass waiting for it to drop and move only when the dart was about to hit us – and whoever was closest to it when it stuck int the ground won.
Then there was the two-man version, which involved the “chicken” laying down on the ground, letting the other person toss the dart in the air, and then you rolled out of the way at the last possible second before the dart hit you.
Of course, then there was the neighbors’ old rusty metal swingset that we managed to wrench out of the ground and tip over while trying to push the little glider swing over the crossbar (with four kids in it). How any of us lived past the age of 10 is kind of a miracle when I look back at the stuff we played with (and HOW we played with it!).
@Ellen our swingset wasn’t bolted down and the legs were a little uneven. One of our favorite activities was getting the swingset to “walk” across the backyard while swinging! Amazingly enough, the only bone I managed to break in that backyard had nothing to do with the swingset.
I was just having this conversation recently with someone about how exciting it was when we got our first answering machine – and doubly so when we would get our very own phone in our room! Not our own *line* — just the device itself! I remember being thrilled to death that my phone was programmable, as well – I could save in 20 numbers!
And of course the span just before cell phones took off, and everyone had a pager. I can’t even remember the last time I saw a pager anymore. Now, I look at my life, and I realise I haven’t had a landline phone in my home in (8? 9?) years (tho one of the commentors did remind me that we DO have a house line now for the security system – though it’s a VOIP line). I decided it was silly to pay $45/ month for the privilege of letting telemarketers leave me messages on my machine to annoy me when I got home.
I actually read something not long ago about cursive making a comeback – Slate, perhaps? The thrust of it was that though most people DO key in most of their lives, there are still – as noted – many times a keystroke won’t get it done (essay exams, forms in offices, etc), and there is an uptick in a hybrid print/ cursive version like so many of us have gone to over time.
Sadly, I remember buying cigarettes at a machine in the hotel lobby and bitching ‘cos they were so much more expensive at the machine than the drug store – at $2/ pack instead of $1.25.
Or saving my money so I could buy an $8 album.
… This makes it sound like I’m 50.
I’ll be 35 in two weeks.