>>>>>>>> kids' parents in my neighborhood saying "He's going to go by Johnny's" meaning "go to"
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>Grandma, is that you?
>>>>>>
>>>>>><g> Sound familiar? I never heard anyone say that after I left the old neighborhood, but in Cleveland in the 50s it was so common that changing that pattern was a really priority in English class, since many of the kids had picked it up from parents.
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>Yeah, along with "Frigidaire" instead of refridgerator and "Fords" instead of "Ford" (not sure how much of that was a Detroit thing vs a Polish thing).
>>>>
>>>>My grandparents called it "the ice-box:" until the day they died <s> "pocket-book", "house-coat", "charge-a-plate" are pretty much out of usage now. We were more English than the queen but even my mother always referred to a head-scarf as a "babushka".
>>>>
>>>>My grandfather always referred to a car as "the machine" ( he saw his first one when he was 20 years old ).
>>>
>>>What is charge-a-plate?
>>
>>Predecessor of the credit card - issued by department stores. Pretty common in the 50s and 60s. They were metal with raised lettering and used with kind of a carbon-paper thing. First gas cards I saw were the same way.
>
>Man, you are old ;-)
My father was an inventor for Standard Oil of Ohio (Sohio). He wasn't officially an engineer, but had all kinds of Case, MIT and Renselear (sp?) grads working for him. He always got to head up the cool projects for new technologies. Back in the 50s they were opening a series of truck stops and wanted good vending machinable food. To heat the food they investigated a thing called "radar ranges". We had one of the first ones in our basement for dad to experiment with. It cooked with something called "microwaves" and was about the size of our refrigerator. <g> I remember being fascinated by the idea that you couldn't use metal in it and I was told it cooked stuff "from the inside out". The food tasted terrible.
Another of his projects was coin-operated gasoline pumps - this when self-service and credit cards were unheard of. They worked fine but Ohio fire-marshall regulations were adamantly opposed.
Charles Hankey
Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.
- Thomas Hardy
Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm-- but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.
-- T. S. Eliot
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.
- Ben Franklin
Pardon him, Theodotus. He is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.
