Some (More) Recollections of Real Old Times

This is another one of my "In the old days, as I can remember. . . " postings.

I got an email from a friend with an anecdote in which an older customer in a store replied to a (perhaps rather smart-ass and certainly smug) young man in the store who is putting down the customer for not being "green" and bringing her own bag to carry home her purchases in.

The woman replies by saying (among other things) that in "her day" we had glass bottles that you'd return to the store and they'd be re-used. (Yeah, soda bottles might carry a deposit so that you'd have an incentive to return the bottle to the store. Some states these days require deposits on various kinds of glass bottles.)

So this prompted some thoughts and recollections on my part. First: There actually is a dairy in the Chicago area that still sells milk in glass bottles, but only big ones. They are sold in stores but I think they (or someone else) offers home delivery of milk like in the old days.

Thinking about home delivery reminds me that when I was a kid, not only was milk delivered to your home but also the butcher and the dry cleaner came to our house! Housewives didn't need to have a car, and my mother didn't. She didn't drive until she finally learned to drive when I was a teenager.

You have to be my age or older to remember street vendors. In my early days in this area (the end of the Sixties and even well into the Seventies), scissors grinders and rag pickers still wove their way through the streets of residential areas. When I was a kid in Scranton, a "gypsy woman" came around with a galvanized wash tub on her head, calling out "Huckleberries!" You'd stick your head out the window and yell back, "How much?"

In Washington DC, when I spent a summer there—this was 1958--they had horse-drawn watermelon wagons in the black section that I had to walk through.

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