Looking back over the years and some many things have come and gone from the life I knew! Throw Back Thursday is the perfect time to show those readers of this blog that are younger than 55. Personally I’ve had or used every one of these vintage items which only goes to prove I’m a woman of a certain age.
I have such vivid memories of these metal wire pants stretchers. My father’s work pant were put on them right out of the washer and when they dried they didn’t need to be ironed.
Pants Stretcher
Rubber pants went together with cloth diapers and have the way of them too. Pampers came along and combined the absorbancy of cotton and the water-proofing that the rubber pants provided and eliminated the stinky diaper pail too!
Rubber Pants
We had pencil boxes, rulers, protractors, erasers, library paste AND Mucilage, aka LePage’s Glue.
Mucilage
Wherever did the tradition of bronzing baby shoes go to? My baby shoes were bronzed and I bronzed my son’s first baby shoes, now I see them at Flea Markets. I think parents should start doing this again, they’re really cute.
Bronzed Baby Shoes
If you had straight hair growing up like I did, then at some point you probably convinced your mother to give you a perm, a Toni, to be exact. It NEVER came out the way they showed it on television. I always had frizzy hair for months and it smelled too.
Shirley Temple Curls
Neil Sedaka sang about them, many of us wrote in them daily, kept them hidden in our underwear drawer, filled with teenage angst. Mine was pale blue, what color was yours?
Secrets
Now there are rows and rows of hair products in every drugstore, discount store and supermarket. Way back in the dark ages of the 50’s there weren’t quite so many BUT there was Dippity-Do and a couple of colors too!
Sticky Icky Dippity-Do
Summer Glasses
We had iced tea in these cool looking glasses and we only used them in the summer.
Speaking of glasess, I received a set of these glasses in their own wire carrier as a wedding gift in 1968. We all had fancy Highball glasses.
- Wedding Present
Before computers, tablets, and iPads, all of my friends and myself carried 3 ring notebooks to school. You could fill it with a hundred sheets of paper and divide the paper into sections marked with plastic tabbed dividers. There was a mechanical snap lock that you would press hard to snap open the the 3 rings and remove a piece or two of paper. Sometimes you weren’t careful and one of the holes tore through. Gummed Reinforcements to the rescue.
Mucilage “Gummies”
Bill Ding and his band of clowns are the security patrol for this blog site. He is a favorite toy from the 50*s. By the way sometimes a blog is just an ego-maniacal stream of conscience.
Pbenjay's Blog 
I believe my diary was red as in your picture with a lock and key.
I can say I recognize all items, but I did not have a diary. I think they were in vogue before my time because none of my friends had them! I especially loved the colored aluminum tumblers???? Because I can’t call them glasses; they’re not made of glass !
I couldn’t think of the word tumbler which is exactly what they are called but I think I was writing this at 1am!
Those 3 ring binder hole reinforcements were pure genius! Hell, half the sheets in every one of my binders had at least one. Without them, I might have failed most of my classes because all my notes would be spread all over school campus.
They are also a definite “then vs now” product. Even if computers were never invented and played no role in kid’s lives (and they shouldn’t!), it’s unlikely “reinforcements” would get invented today, or at least become as popular as they were.
We live in an era where just throwing things away (even valuable things like “knowledge”) is the norm. Saving, repairing, getting maximum value out of things are all concepts that have been tossed in the cultural landfill. Everything -and everybody- is disposable, intended to be thrown away and instantly forgotten in favour of the next “kewl” thing.
That’s why all these tech-toys are so popular. They allow you to chase every meaningless trend, every trivial non-event and every cultural “squirrel” for the 6 months the device itself isn’t obsolete….or the 1 year they’re designed to function for. Then you can simply throw it, and all it contained, away like the meaningless shit it was and replace it with more of the same.
In other “unrelated” news: Everyone is broke and on happy pills that aren’t working anymore.