Things We No Longer See in the Culture

June 4, 2026 by DickH Posted in Uncategorized Leave a Comment

Things We No Longer See in the Culture

By Leo Racicot

I’m enough of an old fuddy-duddy to actually miss some of the daily fixtures of life as we knew them in the culture of the 50s, 60s and beyond. I miss the convenience of the neighborhood mailbox, the neighborhood telephone booth. I realize what with all the new phone inventions, everybody has a phone they carry around with them. But just try finding a mailbox these days, The last time I looked, it turned into an hours-long odyssey to find one. Till recently, I used to be able to just zip down to the Main Post Office on Father Morrisette Boulevard, quick like a bunny, but the way my mobility is these days, the walk takes me over an hour with a need to stop in at City Hall for a muffin and coffee breather before continuing on my way. Oh, for one of the dozens of mailboxes that once dotted the city and suburban landscapes! There are some around but ever since Covid, they have those awful grated slots that larger items won’t clear.

I also miss the comfort and convenience of the milkman, a popular fellow of yesteryear. Each morning, early in the morning, he’d leave a bottle or two (glass bottles) outside the door. This meant fresh cold milk for coffee, for cereal. Nothing like it. When the milk ran out, customers left the empties outside their doors for pickup. I can’t say exactly why but I miss the sight of the freshly-delivered milk on our porch, something primal about that, almost luxurious. The same convenience applied to the home delivery of the daily newspaper. A paperboy (usually this was a boy hired by The Lowell Sun who used his bike or simply walked house-to-house leaving the daily paper on the stoop, in the yard. On collection day (usually at the end of the week, he’d knock on the door for his money. A tip was maybe included in the exchange, a generous one at Christmastime. The coming of the Internet and all the news anyone could ever want simply by clicking a couple of buttons killed the whole home delivery of newspapers. But I kind of miss the sight of the boys (usually boys we knew from the neighborhood) opening the gate, coming into the yard, tossing the rolled-up paper onto the landing. There was something Norman Rockwell about it.

Not all bygone amenities are part of my nostalgia binge; some should remain in the bygone category. Our mother owned what was called a wringer machine, a Maytag, as I recall. This was a metal beast consisting of two rollers (picture two roller pins like the ones cooks use to roll and flatten dough. After the clothes had finished washing, each piece was guided into and through the rollers. This enabled the person to wring out the sopping wet article of clothing, making it easier to dry once it was hung outdoors on a clothesline in the sun. Less work for mothers and other homemakers. Well, less work maybe. Wringers were one step above having to haul clothes down to the river to be beaten on the rocks. Anyway — very dangerous machines. One day, my sister, Diane, got too close to the wringers. Within seconds, her little hand and arm got caught between them. The hungry monsters proceeded to eat her arm up to the elbow. You never heard such a scream. Nana, who’d been doing the laundry, was too shocked to react. Our mother heard Diane’s cries, raced in and unplugged the wringer which stopped it from damaging more of poor Diane’s arm. The police, as well as firemen came, took the wringer apart, released my sister and took her to Saint Joseph’s Hospital. I don’t remember much else but do know Diane’s arm and hand remained mummified in bandages and in a sling for weeks after. When I’ve told younger folks about Maytag wringers, they can hardly believe such a piece of machinery existed.

In the paper category — remember the old very heavy telephone books? Every so often (annually, it seemed) the phone company would leave these behemoths on your doorstep. These consisted of lists of local residents and businesses. The White Pages contained residents and their phone number. The Yellow Pages, business information. They were handy but really heavy. I suppose they were all we knew so we treated them as valuable resources. They did take up a lot of room in the drawer. We kept ours on a shelf underneath the phone table in the hall. Phonebooks were replaced by the Internet and search engines where you can now look someone up in-a-flash. Speaking about phones reminds me of the old rotary phones of my childhood. Talk about heavy! They easily weighed 8 pounds each and had a long, ungainly wire or coiled cord attached which was always getting tangled. A real nuisance but what else did we have? My friend, Joe, and I joke sometimes, looking back at what was called “a party line”. A party line was a phone circuit number shared by multiple families (usually people who lived nearby). It was designed to save customers money. But with the party line, people on the line could be using the phone when you wanted to use it. If this was the case, you had to wait for the line to be free until you could make your call. It was fun eavesdropping on people’s conversations. Even though our mother told us not to do this, would tell us to “hang up!”, the temptation was too great. One time, Joe and I were talking when out-of-nowhere, our other friend, David McKean, actually chimed in with “Hello?? Hello?? Joe, is that you?? Leo, is that you??”We learned later that David wasn’t even on our party line, making his interruption something out of The Twilight Zone.

Paper maps! Before the invention of the GPS, motorists had to make do with paper maps. Usually, these could be obtained at the local gas station, and were for the most part free-of-charge. They were very detailed but in order for them to cover a wide area, they were large and had to be folded multiple times into smaller squares that were stored in the glove compartment or dashboard. I still have a visual of Papa unfolding one at the wheel of his Plymouth then having to get out of the car to study it, having a challenging time folding it up again. Paper maps were awkward but indispensable, especially for long trips. When I began to drive, they were absolutely of no help to me; I have the worst sense of direction. Darned if a big, unwieldy expanse of paper, creased with age, ever came to my rescue. I tore one up in tiny bits and pieces in total frustration trying to find my way to Provincetown the year I turned 29. The glitch with GPS is that the thing can misdirect you. Rico and I were driving to Florida when it sent us down a dark road at the end of which was an equally dark dead-end lake. Best not to take the murderous Alexa at her word every time.

For years, I missed manual typewriters. I’d begun my creative writing on one. way back when I was banging out my first efforts. Then they disappeared, replaced first by electric typewriters (noisy as hell) then by word processors, computers and lightweight, soundless keyboards. For years, I clung to a romantic notion of them, a return to a simpler time when writers like Hemingway, Faulkner, Capote typed their masterpieces on Royals and Smith-Coronas. But a quick dip back into the manual typewriter pond soon had me remembering how much work they were to operate. First off, you had to be Charles Atlas to pound the stiff, clunky keys. I never studied typing in high school so – made lots of mistakes. These could only be corrected by stopping what you were doing, erasing the error with either White Out or — an invention that came along called Correction Paper. This was a small square of white paper. You placed it between the mistake and the type-writer ribbon, typed the correct letter or punctuation mark, hit the key and voila, the mistake was gone. This could turn into a nuisance, especially when you were tired, having to take careful aim that the correction paper was directly over the mark you wanted to erase. Otherwise, you’d make even more mistakes that had to be expunged. I sat in my bedroom one entire night pounding out my first essay attempt, Rachelann –a Remembrance — and kept making mistake after mistake after mistake until the sun came up. As it rose, I still hadn’t finished the work and had invented a slew of new Anglo-Saxon curse words.

There are times when Joe and I find ourselves waxing nostalgic for the magic of carbon paper. Long gone from the culture, carbon paper was an ink-treated piece of sheer paper which, when placed between two plain sheets of paper would “copy” what you were writing or typing. I doubt kids of the 21st century know what this was. Truth told, it could be messy — at times, it smeared the original document to the point of illegibility. It could be a son-of-a-gun getting the blue dye off your hands or out from under your fingernails. Still, we miss the wonder of this new (now old, forgotten) invention that made students’ and teachers’ lives easier. The digital age made carbon paper obsolete. As it did the microfilm and microfiche machines we knew as kids, a clever(for a time anyway) means of preserving entire books/magazines/newspapers on a piece of plastic film or strip. They could be trouble; especially microfilm which had a habit of getting stuck in the viewer or unspooling at the most inconvenient times. Again –something of the past that’s gone with the wind.

I used to love the pneumatic tubes that both Pollard Memorial Library and the Boston Public Library had. This was a system of cylindrical tubes designed to send patron requests from the Circulation Desk up to remote sections of the stacks (where back then patrons weren’t allowed to go). The way pneumatics worked was this — the patron filled out a slip with the bibliographic info needed for upstairs staff to retrieve the item. A jet of air would shoot the tube up into the stacks. The item would be found and brought back down to the patron). I always got a kick out of seeing the tube jettison up into the stratosphere. something like a mini-rocket being launched at Cape Canaveral. At Pollard, for many years, patrons weren’t allowed to enter the grated metal stacks. The library employed pages to fetch your materials for you, I fondly remember Peter and Ray who held such positions when I was in high school and college. Such helpful guys. Peter also drove the library’s Bookmobile which went out into the community catering to the elderly and shut-ins. I hear Pollard has brought back this wonderful service. I fear the pneumatic system has been consigned to the dinosaur pile, never to be brought back.

Joe suggested I include here a word about subway tokens. In the 60s and 70s, commuters accessed the subway stations by feeding a token into a turnstile. These tokens had to be purchased prior to entering the subway area. They were cheap enough and were easier, I think, than the Charlie card system used in Boston today. I can’t tell you the number of trains I’ve missed while grappling with the Charlie Card purchase machines. Oy vey. The T had what it called “Dime Time”, weekdays from, say, 10 to 2. All trains — ten cents — no matter how far you were going!

Speaking of cheap fares — when we were growing up, the downtown Lowell movie houses, The R.K.O. Keith and The Strand, offered a double feature for cheap. For a mere fifty cents, you could see two movies. Also included in the show was a newsreel that presented current affairs, sports, mini-documentaries, a cartoon (or a few cartoons), At the snack bar, popcorn, hot dogs, soda could be had for nickels and dimes. Best of all, movies would run continuously throughout the day and night. The ushers wouldn’t throw you out when your movie was over. I once stayed and watched Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee from 10 in the morning till 7 at night. Nowadays, a trip to the movies empties your bank account, or seems like it does. Alas, with the new deluxe home entertainment systems, streaming services and multiple cable channels, people aren’t going out much for a movie. Modern technology is causing movie theaters to become extinct.

One last mention before I end this commentary. When did elevator operators depart the culture? These were department store and professional building employees, usually men, who’d usher customers into the elevator carriage. The doors were equipped with grated gates. The gates, made of steel, brass or iron, were used to protect riders from harm, from getting their clothes caught in the elevator doors, for protection while the car was in motion. I liked watching the operator open and close the accordion-like gate. He was usually dressed in a fancy elevator operator outfit similar to the kind movie theater ushers wore. This gave a certain fancy formality to riding in elevators. By the 1970s or so, elevator operators disappeared from the culture. Automated button-operated elevators were invented allowing customers to operate their own ascent/descent. The oddest job I ever had was when I was hired by The Bon Marche Department Store downtown as an elevator operator when I was 15 years old. The job required me to wear a sports jacket, slacks, dress shirt and necktie. I never quite understood the reason for my hire. By that time, automated push-button elevators had replaced the caged kind. To be honest, I felt like an idiot standing there, gussied up as if for Easter Sunday, pushing 5 buttons over and over as customers called out their floor. The store had only four floors and a basement and though I had a job and was making money, there was really no need for me to press buttons customers could press themselves, some of them actually insisting they do that themselves, poking lighthearted fun at the obvious superfluousness of my presence in the elevator. One man actually laughed, saying, “But what are you for, young man??” I had to agree…

Special thanks to Joe Markiewicz for his helpful suggestions.

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