A Test for young people

Got a frantic call from a customer one day - she had locked the keys in herTE52 Corolla SR5 at Wtarloo park. I quickly went over with the "tools of the trade" and "reached through the open sunroof and retrieved her keys"

Acvtually a friend saw it in my discard pile and quickly asked if he could "rescue" it.

They don't want what occasionally happens with parking meter money.

A friend of mine died last month. I knew she had worked for the phone company but I didn't know until she died, before the funeral, that she collected money from the pay phones. Her 25 year old son, who loved her, I'm sure of it, said "She just collected money from the pay phones.". She hadn't said exactly what she did but she said that if she had known she was as smart as other people, she would have tried for something higher level. She thought the people who wore suits were smarter than she was, but eventually learned how incompetent many people are who still have good jobs. She's right. I learned it earlier because I hung out with more people who wore suits or would when they graduated and got a job. She was black and 60 years old and a product of her generation. She owned her own home and had been bought out in order to get her to retire (amybe because there are fewer pay phones??) She died of pancreatic cancer which had nothing to do with her job or her relative lack of money or her medical care, which was good.

Hey, that's not right.

Once, many years ago, before Google and Wiki, I was curious about the family tree of all the bastard stepchildren of John D.'s original Standard Oil, which was one of the reasons we (used to) have anti-trust laws in this country. Pretty fascinating, really, and gives a good view into early-20th-century views about power and government.

Now that 'enough' of all information is online, you can read in a hour what took me an afternoon at the library to find.

-- aem sends...

You are out of date. Yeung and Chan are up there near the top now too for convenience stores and gas-bars - long the domain of the Patels.

Don't blame him- if it was inside all of its life, it should be good for another 40 years. I foolishly stored most of my collection of 'real' phones like that in the outside storage cubby of the apartment I used to live in, and the humidity got to a lot of them and rusted them internally. I hardly ever see real phones at garage sales any more, so I am reduced to mixing pieces and parts together when I need to come up with a running one.

-- aem sends...

Eeeeek! Demons of the Phoenix! The avacodo green phone walks the streets at night, pouncing on helpeless color blind men.

$0.28 cents per gallon gasoline, Cleveland OH, early 1960s. Back then they pumped your gas, polished your windshield, and checked your oil. And BIG candybars or ice-cream bars for nickel. One cup of milk, 2 cents at the school cafeteria, 3 cents for chocolate milk. The bus was 15 cents.

They're easy to make if you have one of those dried meat sticks.

Cute.

I had the electric heater, with built-in footswitch and fan, that my mother bought when I was born, in January '47, to warm the bathroom beyond what the furnace was set to do. It was in perfect condition when it was 55 years old, including the cloth-covered cord. I haven't seen cloth cord last 55 years other than this. (Although I'm not surprised that the switch, fan, and heater itself worked.)

But then I let a carboard container of toilet bowl cleaner sit in the same cabinet under the bathroom sink for too long, and the fumes pitted the chrome on the heater. There was quite a bit of chrome, surrounding the heating elements and as a grill across the front.

I've cleaned up a chrome bumper to where big-seeming pits are only tiny dots. I don't know if I can do that for this heater or not. I was too "depressed" to look at it much. But it's on my list of things to do.

I had kept both the heater and other containers of toilet bowl cleaner, I'm almost positive many of them the crystal stuff in carboard tubes, in the cabinet for over 20 years before this happened. I don't know what the difference really was, except I used the other stuff up quicker. This time I had bought muliple brands and styles and was using up other stuff.

It also corroded the cabinet door hinges, even on the outside of one door. In fact that's how I noticed there was trouble. Nothing else was damaged. (I was able to replace the hinges when neighbors threw away identical cabinets.)

You have to go to hamfests. Try

Not that many but more than a summer's garage sales.

I was at a rare winter one last Wednesday and they had the dynamo used to ring the operator, in a very nice oak cabinet, with a crank. A late, fancier model than most. No phone attached for some reason. Of course if you live in an area that had no phones during that era, you might not find that. :)

And btw, you're talking about a friend of mine who just died. I know it's hard for you to stop, but if you could stop being an ignorant ass for just a little while, even you might like it better.

And your radiator and battery levels and if you asked, your auto transmission fluid. They had special platic pitchers for adding battery fluid, which I guess was often only water. I would think some places it was distilled water, but I guess those were a lot fewer places than I thought at the time. I mean I've never managed to put non-distilled water in a battery, but I suspect after you've done it once, it gets easier.

Since I'm posting, I remember when it was 20 cents normally and I recall thinking it was a little lower than that sometimes. I'm born in '47.

How come they didn't come in Harvest Gold?

-snip-

Don't forget that minimum wage was about 60cents/hr & a 13" Black & White TV would set you back 2 weeks pay.

Ah, the good ole, bad ole days.

Jim

A 5 lb. bag of sugar cost nearly 5 dollars (sugar embargo?).

RC Cola and a Moon Pie was ten cents.

Gas between .25 and .32 cent. Kerosene might have been .16 cent.

mm wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

I'm so sorry your friend passed on. Take care. Marina

Hey! I kinda liked Ma Bell green. They did have a sort of dried-out-mustard-yellow color available. No coppertone, though. And the avacado green wasn't exactly the same shade as the appliances. WE had a very distinctive palate of colors, probably copyrighted, that I never saw exact matches for from any other manufacturer. I miss having color choices on small home appliances and electronics.

-- aem sends...