Unbelievably sharp 4x5 Kodachromes taken in 1942:

click image to view the collection in pdf format

Ads you'll never see again:

TV Memory Lane

Click HERE and enjoy a special slideshow of memories from when Television was a sweet experience. The show will open in a separate window.

Letter of the Month:

Hi Guys, Our family's cousin campout is this weekend in El Paso, Wisconsin and our theme this year is "Back to the Fifties". We happened upon your website looking for 50's recipes. Question: Do you know where or why the dice hanging from rearview mirrors originated? We're having a sock hop for our Saturday night entertainment and will be decorating our dance tent with old 45's and foam dice, and we got to talking about where/why folks hung dice in their cars???

Rock on, Rhoda Foley El Paso, Wisconsin

THANKS so much!!

Daddy-O! wrote: Hope this helps.

The tradition of placing dice in a vehicle may have begun during World War II. Pilots would place dice on their instrument panel with sevens showing to bring them good luck on their missions. After the war, cars begin hanging plastic dice from the rear view mirrors. But, as the story goes, the plastic dice often melted, and were eventually replaced with flocked material... and so the Lucky Fuzzy Dice was born. Fuzzy dice first appeared during the late 1940s and early 1950s, with the birth of the American hot-rod culture. Young returned servicemen with money to burn and hotted-up older cars would participate in illegal street races. It was this "dicing with death" and play on words that inspired the creation of dashboard dice. - R.C.

Will You Remember?

• Remember? You Thrill Me

• Remember? I Double-Dog-Dare Ya!

• This is very cool! Picture postcards from the past in every state & every county.

• Close your eyes and remember.

• How old do you think the person who sent this is? Answer at bottom of page that opens.
  

TO THE KIDS WHO SURVIVED
the 40's, 50's, and 60's

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us.

They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing and didn't get tested for diabetes.

Then after that trauma, our baby cribs were covered with bright colored lead-based paints.

We didn't see psychologists weekly, we didn't have therapists teaching us how to meditate and instead of pills to prevent hyperactivity, we just had Mom yelling, "Go outside and use up some of your energy!"

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking.

As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags. Riding in the back of a pick up on a warm day was always a special treat.

We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle.

We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this.

We ate cupcakes, bread and butter and drank soda pop with sugar in it, but we weren't overweight because WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.

No one was able to reach us all day. And we were O.K.

We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.

We did not have Playstation, Nintendo's, X-box, no video games at all, no 99 channels on cable, no video tape movies, no surround sound, no cell phones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms..........WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents.

We made up games with sticks and tennis balls and ate worms and although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes, nor did the worms live in us forever.

We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just walked in and talked to them!

Little league had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!!

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!

*These 2 were suggested by Paul Jennison:
   We had plenty of guns in the house
(with no trigger locks).
    We knew how to use them and we knew better than to even touch them without out parents permission.

This generation has produced some of the best
risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever!

The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.

We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned HOW TO DEAL WITH IT ALL!

And YOU are one of them!

CONGRATULATIONS!

Please pass this on to others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated our lives for our own good.

Kind of makes you want to run through the house with scissors, doesn't it?

Beautiful Old Gas Stations
These are wonderful......especially the green-trimmed Texaco "filling station" that sold "coal oil" (for oil-burning lamps) from the square green-painted tank that was pumped by hand, of course. Some are abandoned, some are restored and many are still in use.

Someone did an awesome job putting this together and with sound to boot. At the very end of the video you'll hear the song ' Thunder Road ' sung by the star of the movie for which it was the theme! Not uncommon except this is the one and only song ever recorded, for publication, sung by Robert Mitchum!

Cars we drove in the 50's and 60's

This is very cool! CLICK HERE, put your birthdate in, and find out all kinds of things related to your birthday

Things of the Past

We were cleaning out my grandmother's house and we found an old Royal Crown Cola bottle. In the bottle top was a stopper with a bunch of holes in it. I knew immediately what it was, but my daughter had no idea. She thought they had tried to make it a salt shaker or something. I knew it as the bottle that sat on the end of the ironing board to "sprinkle" clothes with because we didn't have steam irons. Man, I am old.

Memory Links

• Fifties Memories
  
  
• Jimmy Weldon

How Many Do You Remember??

1. Head lights dimmer switches on the floor
2. Ignition switches on the dashboard
3. Heaters mounted on the inside of the fire wall
4. Real ice boxes [Ask your Mom about that]
5. Pant leg clips for bicycles without chain guards.
6. Soldering irons you heat on a gas burner.
7. Using hand signals for cars without turn signals.

Older Than Dirt Quiz

Count all the ones that you remember- not the ones you were told about!
(Ratings at the bottom)

1. Blackjack chewing gum
2. Wax Coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water
3. Candy cigarettes
4. Soda pop machines that dispensed bottle
5. Coffee shops with tableside jukeboxes
6. Home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers
7. Party lines
8. Newsreels before the movie
9. P.F. Flyers
10. Butch wax
11. Telephone numbers with a word prefix (Olive -6933)
12. Peashooters
13. Howdy Doody
14. 45 RPM records
15. S&H Green Stamps
16. Hi-fi's
17. Metal ice trays with lever
18. Mimeograph paper
19. Blue flashbulb
20. Packards
21. Roller skate keys
22. Cork popguns
23. Drive-ins
24. Studebakers
25. Wash tub wringers

If you remembered 0-5 = You're still young
If you remembered 6-10 = You are getting older
If you remembered 11-15 = Don't tell your age,
If you remembered 16-25 = You're older than dirt!

This one hurts...

Eddie Haskell, The Beaver, and Wally.

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