Then And Now

We live a few blocks from FSC (Florida Southern College) in Lakeland, FL. They have bought or built apartment complexes in the surrounding neighborhood to use as off campus housing for students. There are five different complexes within 7/10 of a mile from the campus. FSC operates 4 different shuttles every 20 minutes during the week between these dorms. You hardly ever see a student walking from them to the school. Oh, did I mention they are also on the city bus routes. What a waste.

In the past, airplanes pushed banners ahead of them.



Nowadays, airplanes tow the banners behind them.

Go Ohio!



OM

Omega Man said:

In the past, airplanes pushed banners ahead of them.

View attachment 85653

Nowadays, airplanes tow the banners behind them.

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iirc, the elevators were ahead of the wings on the first airplane.

This is the botched first version of the license plates:

20774 said:

This is the botched first version of the license plates:

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Bingo!

Had room to stretch out then:


Now:

Then: Don't eat gas station egg salad
Now: Don't eat gas station sushi

Then and now...

Then and Now

When I was a kid in this city, garbage men had wheel barrels that could hold three garbage cans. Once a week they would show up and take the wheel barrel to the side of each house and place the garbage cans on their carts and wheel them to the waiting truck, then they would return the empty garbage cans from where they got them.

Today in the same city, garbage is picked up every once every eight days, ten days if there is a holiday weekend. Home owners put out their garbage bags or cans on the boulevards or curbs. City workers then throw the cans on the lawns or sometimes the garbage cans end up on the road.

When I was a kid in this city, milkmen and breadmen delivered their wares in a wagons pulled by a horse. Homes had small opening in the wall by the back doors. This openings had doors on the outside and inside of the house. You'd leave empty bottles and a note for the milkman as to what was needed for that day. Today, go to either the corner store or grocery chain for milk and bread.

When I was a kid in this city, we had ice boxes and the iceman make deliveries with a truck. On hot summer days he would chip off pieces of ice for us kids to suck on to keep cool. Today, we all have refrigerators and icemen have vanished.

When I was a kid, 4, 5 or 6 years old, we'd walk four blocks on Saturday afternoons and spend $0.25 to watch the matinee, complete with weekly newsreels, an ongoing weekly serial of Buck Rogers or something similar. Today, kids that young could never go to the show without an adult, shows cost much than a quarter and newsreels no longer exist at the theatre.

Times sure have change.

I roamed, in Northwest OKC, for miles on the horse we kept in the back yard. She joined the chickens by the chicken house. There, Daddy would throw nickels in the chicken coop area where the meanest rooster in 4 counties lived. There was no way we were going in there to get pecked and chased around that pen while he flew high up over our heads, flapping and moving air and making chicken sounds as he challenged us to come any further. A quarter wouldn't get us in there. Grandma, when she visited would go in there, bravely grab an old hen that didn't lay anymore, go out in the back yard, and twirl that chicken as she held it by the head and then, SNAP, off that HEN would fly and do the dying chicken dance while Grandma HELD ONTO THE HEAD. WE STOOD THERE AMAZED AT HOW GRANDMA WAS SO BRAVE. NOW, chickens and horses have been ZONED OUT. BUT; GRANDMA STILL LIVES IN MY MEMORY and kept alive in my SOUL..............God bless

In 1966…

…in the sixth grade, in one of the most fortuitous events in my life, my mom insisted that I learn to type. And I became very proficient.

In graduate school, 1979, writing my thesis involved hand writing quotes onto 3x5 cards from books and Internet searches (only the librarian could do the searches, I received the results printed out paper) and then I typed them on a typewriter. Since your thesis could not have white-out typographic corrections on the paper that you submitted, I took my typewritten pages to a typist who keyed the text into a then-new IBM Selectric typewriter, which stored the text on a flat, magnetic, removable data card. The beauty of this is that I could make changes or corrections if needed, no problem, just pay the typist to do that. (It was very tedious work, not visual at all. The typist would “arrow down and over” through the data, make the change “blind” and then print out a new page.)

As I went to work in the computer graphic, telecom and automation businesses… it was really surprising how few of the men leading the companies knew how to type!

Fast forward through PCs, modems, interactive word processing and graphics software, Internet access, WWW browsers and widgets, and today you research your thesis on-line, submit your work as an interactive HTML/xML multimedia document and/or a PDF. And I can read it on my phone, from the cloud.

I remember going to a computer graphics seminar in NYC in the late 70s, and the presenter gave everyone a stock tip: buy stock in a little company called Adobe.

Ian

Paul_F said:

When I was a kid in this city, garbage men had wheel barrels that could hold three garbage cans. Once a week they would show up and take the wheel barrel to the side of each house and place the garbage cans on their carts and wheel them to the waiting truck, then they would return the empty garbage cans from where they got them.

(snipped..).

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There is a community nearby that has small 3 wheeled garbage trucks that can turn around in a driveway. Most garages there are behind the house and the garbage cans are hidden next to the garage. So the trucks zip up the drive, they empty the cans into the truck and they move on to the next. When they fill up, their bins are emptied into a conventional trash truck in the street. Often three or four trucks hit a neighborhood at the same time so they move through an area quickly.

I thought that was pretty nice, since I have been known to forget to put the can at the curb on the correct day. Then I remembered that their property tax rate is double mine. Sometimes you get what you pay for.

Then In high school in the 1960's in the Texas Panhandle, many of the farm boys came to school in their pickups with gun racks in their back windows with a shotgun or rifle in the rack. Most of the boys in school (myself included) had a pocketknife in their pocket. Nobody worried about it. Never a problem. Now A young man at our high school is brought to the office and the school placed on lockdown because he was carrying a microphone stand and someone that it might be a gun. Yes, it really did happen. My wife was working at the school cafeteria at the time.

Then- People kept moving and got plenty of exercise mowing the lawn, painting the house, taking the trash to the dump, playing with their children and doing chores that needed to be done- themselves.

Now- Most everything is hired out….exercise is achieved by going to the gym, negotiating clearances at all the drive-thru/drive-ups utilized for the rest of the day and writing checks for the hired out services.



OM

Omega Man said:

Now- Most everything is hired out….exercise is achieved by going to the gym, negotiating clearances at all the drive-thru/drive-ups utilized for the rest of the day and writing checks for the hired out services.



OM

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Only if you are wealthy!!!!!

PGlaves said:

Only if you are wealthy!!!!!

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Only if you can actually get someone to come out to your place and do the work!

Omega Man said:

Then- People kept moving and got plenty of exercise mowing the lawn, painting the house, taking the trash to the dump, playing with their children and doing chores that needed to be done- themselves.

Now- Most everything is hired out….exercise is achieved by going to the gym, negotiating clearances at all the drive-thru/drive-ups utilized for the rest of the day and writing checks for the hired out services.



OM

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What's a "check"?

GREGFEELER said:

What's a "check"?

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Something that shows up in the “now” category because in the “then” category, there wasn’t auto-correct.

OM

Rangers

royce said:

I never had a Ranger assignment, only the school. I graduated from Oklahoma State University as a DMG, was commissioned and given the choice of either Airborne or Ranger school, before I was shipped to Vietnam. Knew what airborne was, but had never heard of Rangers so ... off I went. I survived the training (only issue was swimming, but I managed to make it out of the water). Spent my year in Vietnam with the 173d Airborne Bde at Bong Son (get the irony? I chose Rangers instead of Airborne, but was assigned to a jump outfit?). In hindsignt, I believe the year in the jungle was easier than the three months in Ranger school.

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I lived in Arlington, TX and have seen the Rangers a few times!

RIDERR1150GSADV said:

Then; Kids rode their bicycles to school

Now; 500 SUV's are idling for hours in the school zone waiting..... "It's for the children" and "save the planet" sounds so very hollow.

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In my neighborhood there are several "bike trains" operating where a parent rides a regular route, picking up other kids on their own bicycles on the way to school. We've got decent bicycle infrastructure with paths and bike lanes around the neighborhoods, so kids riding bikes to school here are the norm for the public school. For the private school in my backyard a lot of local kids ride or walk to school, but yes, we have students from all over the town and county attending, so plenty of cars. Here, at least, lots of them are EVs now, so they're pretty quiet.