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In the car with mom

The New Neo Posted on by

Those who grew up before cars had seat belts, please raise your hands.

I certainly did, and what I remember was this: when I was a toddler, I stood on the seat to the right of my mother while she drove. That way I could see everything. It was very heady and a bit frightening. When my mother had to stop the car quickly, she’d shoot out her right arm to keep me from falling forward.

Obviously, this wouldn’t have worked for a shorter stop at faster speed. But we were just tootling around town, going to the grocery store and the like. It rather stuns me to remember the arrangement.

I also recall once getting a ride in the bread truck up and down my block. Nowadays the guy would probably be arrested for it, but he was perfectly nice to me and it was a lot of fun. Yes, bread was delivered in a special truck just for that, as were milk, and meat, and fish, and fruits and vegetables. Really, it wasn’t all that often we had to go to the grocery store for anything. Good thing, too, because it wasn’t open past 5 PM, nor was it open on Sundays.

My recollection is that the bread truck driver stood when he drove, or sat on a little high stool. Is that possible? Could that be correct? I’m not all that old, but this stuff seems archaic, almost as ancient as my mother’s memory of horses drinking at the trough outside her house when she was growing up. That wasn’t in Montana, either; it was in New York City.

Comments

In the car with mom — 102 Comments

  1. I vaguely remember neighborhood delivery trucks with some sort of arrangement like that, where the driver wasn’t really sitting.

  3. Yep…my mother shooting out that right arm just about any time the brakes were applied a bit hard. More fun was riding in the back of the pickup truck, or even better, riding in the open trailer being pulled by the pickup truck. No one blinked an eye. Today, arrest for child abuse, large vehicle citation and fine I suppose.

  5. I heard the story of my older brothers (7 or 8 years old?) getting into the bread truck on base one day and tossing loaves out as it drove down the road. We got into a lot of trouble as kids …. Too much trouble and the Army would kick the family off base, or send them back to the states. They had ways of ensuring compliance.

  7. My mom was in a car accident with a bread truck in the early sixties and my two year old sister was in the back seat sleeping (no seat belt obviously) when a bread truck turned in front of them on a highway ( not city street) and my sister was thrown against the back of the bench seating and my mom went into the windshield and for many many years my mom had little pieces of glass come out of her forehead. My sister remembers none of it.

  8. Cornhead,

    First saw that movie over forty years ago. That scene stuck in my mind for some reason. I wasn’t around when it was made–came on the scene a decade or so later.

    How’re things at Creighton? Still messed up?

  11. I remember lying on that shelf under the rear window. My father was a tailgater so there were some short stops that sent me flying onto my brother who was not happy.
    And no such thing as bicycle helmets. One kid with an overly protective mother was forced to wear a motorcycle helmet much to our amusement. Of course the thing got stashed in the bushes or at someone’s home until it was time for him to return to his home.

  12. Yep, riding in the front with no seat belts. Delivery drivers standing up.
    The one time our Dad allowed my Brother and I to have ice cream cones in the car was the one time we had an accident. We were in the front seat and Dad hit another car, don’t remember the reason. My Brother lost a lot of hair that got stuck in a screw that was on the inside cover for the windscreen.

    How did we ever survive it all. That and the cartoons we watched.

  13. I remember the milk delivery. There were also Amish selling pies etc out of their wagons. Great pies.

  14. People were a lot more likely to die in those days. In 1950 33,000 people died in auto accidents vs a population of 152 million. In 2019 36,000 people died vs a population of 330 million.

    Without factoring in how many more miles are driven nowadays, driving is half as likely to kill in 2019 as in 1950.

    When you factor in miles driven it’s incredibly safer today than in 1950. 7.2 fatalities per 100 million miles in 1950 vs 1.1 in 2019.

    Your mom loves you more than your seatbelt, but physics doesn’t… hitting a windshield at 10 mph can kill a child and mom’s arm isn’t going to do anything about it. If you threw a bowling ball at your mom how well is she going to deflect it or catch it? Now consider that even a young child weighs more than a bowling ball.

    There is nothing that most people do that is more dangerous that driving and until this last year most of us were doing it every day. I’d prefer not to have the laws and let Darwin sort it out, and he would because most people judge these risks very poorly.

  15. Yes! I remember the Helm’s or Hellman’s Bakery truck coming by once a week and they had fresh doughnuts on a pull-out tray that smelled so good! My mom would purchase our bread from them.

    Also we had milk delivered, and then later, we went to the drive-in dairy a couple miles away.

    And definitely no seat belts until I was maybe 9 or 10? I remember being in the pickup truck, standing on the hump on the floor in the back seat, sleeping on the shelf below the back windshield…it’s amazing we didn’t all die grisly deaths!

    I also remember my dad leaving my brother and me in the car while he went in to the liquor store to buy cigarettes…with the motor running and the doors unlocked, windows down, etc.

    Those were the days, huh?? I grew up in Orange County in southern California. Back when there were still lots of orange trees, bean farms, and those “grasshopper” oil rig thingies everywhere. Which I thought were awesome, by the way.

  16. Edit button doesn’t work for me. A 10 mph collision is like falling off an 8 foot high roof. Yeah, you’ll probably survive, if you’re in good shape and not unlucky in what you hit. I bet most of us, if we had to have our small kids at the edge of an 8 foot high drop we’d want some kind of barrier or restraint, especially if we were surrounded by nutjobs continually trying to push them off without warning, and to not have one would seem pretty reckless.

  17. she was ahead of her time,

    My sister and I would fight over who would get to sit on that shelf; the package deck. Since I was younger and smaller I would often spend most of a car trip curled up on the floor, in the space between the front and rear seat.

  18. No bread truck, but milk and cottage cheese and sour cream and the like was delivered by the MacDonalds dairy man, and vegetables by the fellow driving a truck thorough from his farm , in the late spring and summer, In Flint Michigan in the early 1960s

  20. neo,

    I remember the garbageman gave my sister and me a ride on the garbage truck once. My dad was a garbageman for awhile and I know my older sister got to tag along with him on the truck sometimes.

    Don’t tell my kids, but I often hopped on slow moving freight cars. I even rode one for about 300 miles. That one spent most of the trip going about 60 mph, but it was going slow when I got on and off. A friend (who would ride the rails with me) and I found a library at our University with all the rail routes in the U.S. This was before the Internet. We planned a few longer trips, but I got a job and was unable to continue with our adventures. He did do a multi-day trip of about 1,000 miles though.

  21. I had a friend whose father drove a diaper truck. Moms kept a bin with a liquid (ammonia?) on the porch. He’d pick up the soiled diapers from the bin and drop off clean and folded used ones.

  22. Frederick has the right of it. I think seat belts are the best safety innovation for cars; I never go without it on. But I think we are really talking about a more innocent time, and also a time where risk was part of life, not something to obsess about and try to totally eliminate.

  24. There was an accident in front of our home last fall. Totaled a pickup truck on a tree. From the scar on the tree, it was head-on, not glancing. One guy had a broken leg and two others were wandering around looking for their cell phones when I got there.
    Sixty years ago, driving down the road effectively sitting on a sofa, they’d have all been dead.
    There’s no virtue in excess risk if there’s no goal.

  25. Freedom entails risk, and thus, demands responsibility.

    — but don’t even get me started on what we used to do as farm kids in South Dakota in the fifties!

  26. In addition to the egg-man, meats-man (bacon to the door!) and the dairy-man deliveries, we had the Charles Chips-man delivering potato chips and pretzels weekly, as we returned our empty cans for full ones.

    Cheap plentiful gasoline, America: thems were the days.

  27. Along those lines, there’s a story my mother told about me, (but which I don’t remember). Though we lived on LI, it was in the same village both my parents grew up in. She was dropping off Christmas cards at the PO, and left me and the dog in the car. That was standard in those days. A Santa came by giving out candy canes, and the dog went berserk. When she got back, I was in tears; he was chasing Santa away.

    Different world. The only ticket Mom ever got was c. 1970, running a brand new stop sign on the road to her parents’ house. A road she’d been driving since WWII. Ticked her off.

  28. Swans still delivers in my area.

    https://www.schwans.com/

    They used to be mostly milk, bread the staples. Now you can get most anything.

    And riding in the car. There was 4 kids and we’d always fight to get the front seat … calling shotgun!

  29. What neat stories. Since we’re confessing the sins and ignorances of our youth… I used to sit occasionally on the inside arm of the passenger door. This was my way of playing at Star Trek, I believe, because that arm reminded me a lot of Captain Kirk’s command chair. (Mom drove an Ambassador and as I recall, the armrests in that boat were wide enough that I could fit on it; not comfortably, but who gives a hang about that when you’re eight?)

    Once, on the way to going to see Close Encounters, I did something without realizing it – pushed the wrong lever with my butt or something – and the door came open right under me while we were doing about 40 down a multilane road. I managed to catch myself before I met the pavement. After that near miss, I stopped playing Star Trek in the car.

  30. I remember houses having a milk chute where you left the empties and the milkman left the fresh bottles. I also remember a man with a sharpening wheel,walking down the street ringing a bell. Everyone would get their knives and scissors out to be sharpened.

  32. Yes, I remember as kids riding in the front seat and having my mother throw her right arm out whenever she had to stop fast. I remember riding in the back of pickup trucks too.

    It’s still not a problem in many other countries. On a mission trip to Honduras a couple of years ago, our Honduran hosts had all of us volunteers pile into the back of an old pickup truck to transport us to the mission site up in the mountains. None of us thought anything of it. In Nicaragua it’s common to see people riding on the roof of the old crowded yellow school busses they use for public transportation.

  33. It’s weird when you’re a kid. You come into a specific time and a specific place, but you don’t know that. For you the world just began and what you see has always been and always will be.

    Charles Chips, Howard Johnson, the Howdy Dowdy Show, and Capt. Kangaroo would never let you down.

  34. Those memories are mine as well. However my favorite was the local baker delivering hot bagels to the house on Sunday morning. I also remember some black men selling watermelons off of a horse drawn cart, and my mother running out of the house to purchase one before they passed by.

  35. I don’t remember bread deliveries, but there was definitely a milkman. We had a square gray box with insulated sides by the door nearest the driveway; we put empties in the box along with a list of what my mother wanted, and the driver left fresh milk, cottage cheese, whatever.

    Definitely no seatbelts until I was much older, and my mother did that flinging-out-the-arm thing. The funny thing is that once I was a mother, I did it too, even though my children were always in car seats or, if old enough, seatbelts, and were usually in the backseat — my flung-out arm would catch the groceries or (unsuccessfully) the dog.

    When we went on long trips as children, my parents would fold down the back seat of the station wagon and put in a mattress on top of a layer of suitcases, and then put the five of us on the mattress. We rolled around back there like puppies, playing and/or wrestling — until one of us inevitably got in trouble, at which point the culprit had to sit in the seat of shame, in front between my mother and father.

    As casual as that sounds, my father was a bear about keeping the car doors locked when we were inside. This was because when HE was a boy, his father (a car salesman) used to cram as many of my dad’s eight siblings into the backseat of their sedan as he could fit. (They didn’t make minivans or SUVs back then.) Once, as they took a corner, the door popped open and my dad’s little sister fell out into the street. They weren’t going fast and she wasn’t hurt, probably barring some scrapes — but my father never forgot his father’s terror as he pulled over and ran back to his daughter in the road, and therefore, neither have any of his children.

  36. Real old here:

    Gus the vegetable man with his horse and wagon through the alleys
    Coal furnace filled by hand, coal truck , wheelbarrow through gangway, down the chute to the basement. Carry out the ashes during the winter
    Scissors grinders twice a summer, handcart with mounted foot powered grinding wheel.
    Pony man walking through neighborhood rides for kids a quarter each

    all on the southside of Chicago 1940’s to early 50’s

  37. Pony man walking through neighborhood rides for kids a quarter

    We had one of those that we’d dress up in cowboy gear and have our picture made. Still have that photo.

  38. I remember the bread man coming to the door with his tray suspended from straps around his neck. Donuts, powdered sugar were front and center, and we’d beg Mom for them. Dad was more likely to pop for them than Mom.

    “Meadow Gold” milk box on the front porch, but Borden’s cottage cheese was delivered at the back door.

    Fuller Brush man, occasionally a Tinker, and the weird call “Ragman! Ragman!” as a guy, usually black, pulling a cart down the street.

  39. I remember those days. You’re bringing back fond memories, but I wouldn’t want to go back to them — life really is much better now.

  40. The last broadcasts of the Golden Age of Radio were in 1962. We put a man on the Moon seven years later. Basically everyone involved in the space program grew up without television. Now, no one under the age of 30 really knows what it’s like to live without instant access to the internet.

    Mike

  41. al from chgo- Yes! Now I remember that we had a scissors and lawnmower sharpening guy come through our neighborhood in Detroit in the’50s. He was pushing a cart and yelling out something which as a kid I couldn’t understand because of his accent. I had totally forgotten that.

  42. In the early to mid 30s and perhaps for 3-5 years my Dad’s family lived on a former farm on the shores of Starlight Lake in northeast Pennsylvania. He recalled that the transportation to the local school was by horse drawn wagon. Somewhat enclosed to keep the rain off. He said smelling the horse’s farts was the worst thing, that and the cold in the winter. He also spoke with great nostalgia of 5 cent pickles in a barrel in front of a local country store.

    It’s startling to reflect on that reality being less than 90 years ago… hell, it wasn’t until the late 30s and early 40s that electricity was brought to isolated rural areas and indoor plumbing arrived after electrification in those areas.

    In the 50s no one spoke about seat belts. Less safe? Sure and a lot less anxiety about life as well. Frederick mentioned that, “7.2 fatalities per 100 million miles in 1950”. No wonder we didn’t give it a thought. Compare that to the odds in our current Covid-19 scamdemic.

    Yes, today’s 1.1 is seven times better. Neither statistic is worth fretting about… unless you believe that this is all there is with only the deep black awaiting you. In which case, any threat regardless of how remote is of concern because this life is all you will ever have… sad.

  43. Peacefully asleep, lying across the passenger seat, I suddenly woke up when dad grabbed me by the leg. The passenger side door had swung open on the highway and I was a sliding out the door… wheee!

  44. A couple days ago I watched the original “Get Carter” (1971) in which Michael Caine plays a serious London gangster returned to his home town, Newcastle, to get to the bottom of his brother’s suspicious death.

    It’s a great film, though unsettling. However, I bring it up because shows a boarding house and, even though it’s the late 60s, the facilities are a couple of outhouses in the back alley.

  45. Growing up in the 60’s (born in 1956), was a blessing. The freedom we had! And there were lots of us, roving bands, learning social skills on the front lines with no supervision. My father used to drive us around, friends in tow, sitting on the tailgate of the station wagon, maybe 5 of us. Watching the world go by backwards, feet almost touching the road, was wonderful!
    In winter, sleds would be hooked up in a long line and we would go down the snowy road at a pretty high speed (seemingly).
    As a teenager, the risk level was increased: “bumper skitching”, which was waiting hidden at a stop sign on a snowy road, and grabbing onto the bumper of an unsuspecting car to go for a sliding ride, sometimes 4 abrest. The driver must have wondered at the lack of acceleration….
    The peak stupidity was climbing onto the roof of a moving car through the window, grasping the roof rack, and going down the road holding on for dear life. This was done after consuming alcohol or marijuana, of course.
    I’m still alive.
    Takeaway: kids growing up then learned about risk and how to manage it, an essential life skill. Nowadays, helicopter and lawnmower parents are not allowing that normal development to occur. Thus we have “snowflakes” without the means to confront adversity. In my opinion, this is a massive problem which is a core part of what is wrong with our young citizens today…

  46. When the whole family piled into the our car, I always had to sit on the hump in the middle of the rear seat, where the drive shaft tunnel was. I was the youngest and smallest so it was logical. I believe the other seats had lap belts, but the hump didn’t. I think this is the car.
    _______

    Michael Caine said that making Get Carter made him appreciate his good fortune more, as many of the characters were just like people he knew when he grew up.

  47. A lot of less than safe moments, but the one that stands out is trying to shoot down low-flying planes with the rockets we bought from the Estes model rocket company. This was Miami in the late 60’s, when we were 10 and 11 years old, and there were a lot of private planes flying around. We even built two- and three-stage rockets that could go several thousand feet up. We weren’t hiding anything either — this was in the street in front of our house. Never hit anything, but when I got older I wondered if the FAA ever got a call from a Cessna pilot… (We also had a “frogs in space” program, but that’s another, sadder story.)

  48. I worked for the United Methodist Church disaster response after Hurricane Katrina. Bus load of volunteers from the UP. Of Michigan . Most 70 plus. Use to fight (almost) over who got to ride in the back of the pickup to the worksite.
    We would pull up beside cop in Biloxi and they would all sort of shrink down , the cop would smile and wave a thank you . It was a hoot.

  49. Rides in the back of a pickup truck were like our Disney Land. Then there were rumble seats. We did not have our own car before “the war”. Dad was in the business and drove a company car (used) which changed out from time to time. He had one with a rumble seat for awhile–great fun.

    When Dad went off to WWII he got Mother a Model A with a pick up bed. I don’t know why he chose that, guess it was affordable. There wasn’t room for all of the kids in the front, so the boys rode in the back all of the time. More fun, except when I decided to jump out onto the paved road before it stopped. Fortunately, skin grows back. She didn’t keep it long. You couldn’t get gas or tires anyway. It took a lot of tires in those days.

    On the subject of parental latitude. I got my first BB gun at about 9. I was allowed to take my Uncle’s 22 rifle out alone at 12; and bought my first shot gun at about 15 with earned wages. We were expected to use good sense—or pay the consequences if we didn’t, I guess.

    Riding mules and goats was a different sort of adventure back in the day.

  50. I saw a gig drawn by what looked like a draft horse in the drive-through lane at Bojangles just the other day. Honest.

  51. My GF had a big ass old 1948 flatbed truck that he’d added sides to on three sides. So it was kinda like a giant pickup with no tailgate. I got to ride in the back regularly once I got to be 10 or so, and could be trusted not to be stupid. I think I even got to do it at age 7 or 8, but won’t swear to that. I’m sure my GF drove a little more carefully when I was back there, but I knew to hold on and not fool around. This would have been in the 60s.

    Nowadays that’d probably get reported to child protection.

    As with everything else today, helicopter parents have become the standard, not the oddball, and not even a “respected alternative”. Once I was 12, I was able to ride my bike 3,4, even 5 miles from home (I had sense not to ride on some roads). I routinely rode the bus 20 miles to the public library. Nowadays a 15yo isn’t allowed to play in the front yard. >:-/

    I blame this Covid insanity entirely on that mentality.

    As though the world not only could be “safer”, but that it MUST be safer, whether you want it to be or not.

  52. }}} There is nothing that most people do that is more dangerous that driving and until this last year most of us were doing it every day. I’d prefer not to have the laws and let Darwin sort it out, and he would because most people judge these risks very poorly.

    Frederick:

    True, but there were a lot of other things that killed you easily, too. Even optional ones, like smoking. Remember, you really didn’t have penicillin until after WW2, and even sulfa drugs only came after WW1. Hell, Aspirin, as an actual medication rather than a “home remedy from boiled bark”, is only from around 1880.

    People took life a lot more lightly back then, because they all knew the end could happen any time. Hell, in 1920, child mortality (children under 5) was THIRTY PERCENT. Everyone knew someone who lost someone. You had 4,5 kids just to be sure at least two of them lived to reproduce.

    Contrast, while I do agree that cars are vastly safer today, this is also a reason why they are so much more expensive than they used to be.

    1998 Toyota Corolla vs 2015 Toyota Corolla (Auris) – Crash Test
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xidhx_f-ouU

    Pay attention to the interior of the 1998 during the crash, vs. the interior of the 2015. The passenger box remains mostly intact in the latter. The driver of the 1998 car would not be so lucky.

  53. We lived in the country- nearest neighbor a quarter mile away- so there wasn’t any delivery of milk or bread. For several years before I went to school, there was an elderly man, a Mr. Hatten, who drove around selling stuff out of his car. I don’t know if he took orders. He looked close to retirement.

    There was a time when people in the country didn’t have a car to go to town to shop, but by the time that everyone had a car, there was no longer a need for such services as Mr. Hatten provided. No one came after Mr. Hatten to sell stuff out of a car. He wasn’t a Fuller Brush man- he sold a wide variety of stuff- if I can remember what it was.

    While I grew up in the days before seat belts, I don’t have any wild and crazy car stories about that time. I suspect that caution around automobiles was ingrained in both my parents and in us children by having been in a fatal accident when I was 6. A drunk plowed into the car we were passengers in, killing the driver instantly. One good thing came out of that accident- it bonded the passengers for life. I recently exchanged e-mails with the children of the deceased driver.

  54. I remember the milkman coming around. I also remember the milkchute between the outside wall and the attached garage. That was how my older sister and I got into the house when we got home from school and mom wasn’t home. You had to go through the milkchute with your hands above your head like you were diving into a pool. Once you were in the garage, the door leading into the kitchen was unlocked.

    I also remember the family driving out to CA in 1964 in the station wagon, and Dad and Mom putting the back and way-back seats down so a matress could be placed back there. We likewise frolicked and played and sang songs the whole way. My brother and I slept in the car when we pulled into a motel. They usually only had two beds, so Mom and Dad got one, the two sisters got the second, and my brother and I slept in the car.

    You couldn’t do that stuff any more.

  55. This topic reminds me of maybe the first pop song I noticed that wasn’t for children. I kept wondering how eight people fit in the backseat. The video answers the question. They were all puppets!

    Now I’m wondering how the puppets were controlled. Or were they marionettes?
    _____________________________________________

    Seven little girls sitting in the back seat
    Hugging and a-kissing with Fred
    I said “why don’t one of you come up and sit beside me?”
    And this is what the seven girls said

    (All together now, one, two, three)
    (Keep you mind on your drivin’)
    (Keep you hands on the wheel)
    (Keep your snoopy eyes on the road ahead)
    (We’re having fun sitting in the back seat kissing and a-hugging with Fred)

    –Paul Evans, “Seven Little Girls (Sitting in the Back Seat)” (1960)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1cjaheraq8

  56. My parents had back-seat seatbelts installed in their 1965 Chevy station wagon. Very safety-conscious for the times. I guess until then I just lumped it in the back seat of the 1958 Ford. I still miss that Ford – last two-tone car we had.

  57. We had seat belts…I remember because I would see them when I pulled out the backseat to look for change…

  58. I have a couple of pretty old vehicles, the oldest from 1941 (it was my first vehicle as a high-schooler). Older folks here will remember what it’s like to drive one of these – it takes 100% concentration and a good bit of physical effort. I see young’uns driving all over the road, eyes on their texting, so forth. But modern cars are so much safer, so maneuverable, that any neglectful inattention can be corrected in an instant with no consequences, aside from the blood pressure of others. And there are 10’s of thousands of these young idiots buzzing around town. Also remember, when your mom or dad threw their arm out, they were stamping on brakes that were about half as effective as modern ones, and were likely traveling at a much lower rate of speed.

    We used to drive straight through to Florida on vacation and us kids would have the shorty beach chairs set up in the station wagon, looking backwards. If we were tired, we laid out the sleeping backs in the back, with the rear seat down.

  59. Ok, I’ll admit that I did grow up in Montana. And on a cattle ranch 30 miles from the nearest town, at least until my father bought a bigger ranch that was 50 miles from the nearest town. So we grew up with the kids and saddles in the back of the truck, dragging a horse-trailer carrying our animals to go do some work on the summer range. But it was exhilarating and I seem to recall some very nice naps against the inside of an upside-down saddle. And heck, I and half my siblings even got graduate degrees!

  60. huxley:

    We sometimes had six in the backseat. Three boys, three girls – the boys on the seats and the girls on their laps. Recipe for disaster, but fortunately disaster didn’t happen.

    Oh, and the driver was sometimes drunk.

  61. We had a ’66 Dodge Sportsman van. Here is a picture:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_A100#/media/File:Dodge_A100_van_in_orange_(2015).jpg

    The engine was between the front seats and as you can see from the picture, there was nothing protecting you in a frontend crash except your own legs. My brother used to ride on the engine. He would have been a human cannon ball in a crash. I took my driver’s test in that thing. It about 10 years old by then.

    We took the Great Northern Railway to Minneapolis to pick it up. It was only interstate train trip I ever took. Prior to that time, we had a Cessna and all of our long trips were by air.

  62. Raising my hand! I remember riding in the front seat without seat belts with mom’s arm “swatting” you if she braked suddenly. I remember the front seat being a bench rather than today’s bucket seats; so, we could squeeze more in the front. Mom had a station wagon and we, when we were little, would all pile in the back where there were no seats and slide around all the time.

    We did have milk delivery. There was a Charles Chips delivery truck in our neighborhood (a luxury our neighbors could afford, but, we couldn’t). Later, there was the frozen foods guy – some really great stuff!

    But, mostly, I remember – and they are some of my fondest memories – was riding in the back of dad’s pickup. Something that is totally illegal today and might result in dad getting arrested with us going into protective custody. But, back in the day it was a great way to go around town or out to the farm with everyone climbing into the back in the pick-up bed. Dad was very safe about it in that we had to sit down, no standing, no moving about, and we loved it!

  63. I remember the milkman, the Fuller Brush man, and a blind guy who sold brooms and small household items like needles.

  64. We had a bread man, milk man and vegetable man. And a handy man who gave me a sip of beer when I was five. And don’t forget smoking in cars, everybody smoked back then. Every car had an ashtray and a lighter.

  65. No one has mentioned surviving motorcycle riding. From about 1970 to 1990 I put over 200,000 miles on them – about 165K on my 1972 BMW – which I still have. All local riding and not a few trips until the 90’s were helmetless, though I usually did wear one on longer trips. I used to commute from the East Bay to SF over the Bay Bridge – rarely wore a helmet, nor my GF. It was convenient and fun.
    I have very good memories meeting up with cousins for our annual Yosemite gathering. 6-7 of us little kids would sit on the tailgate of my uncle’s pickup as we motored around the park, feet dangling off the rear.
    Yes, anyone who is at least 60 or so remembers the seatbeltless cars and the protective arm.
    You name it – jumping off roofs, shooting .22s, biking all over the place – all before 10-12 years old.
    The times they have achanged, haven’t they!

  66. How’bout the Ice Man?

    ….and, Arden Milk Man, Helms Bakery truck (the whistle?!), Good Humor ice cream man, etc.

    Thanks for the wonderful flashbacks, Neo!!

  67. “I remember the front seat being a bench rather than today’s bucket seats; so, we could squeeze more in the front.” – charles

    Some years ago now, when we were getting a car to replace one that finally could go no further (our generation was not raised to get a new car every couple of years!), I wanted one with a bench seat just to have a place to lay things (we were empty nesters by then).
    No dealer sold them anymore, because they couldn’t put a crash bag in the middle of the front console.

    We did buy one a few years later, an old Dodge Ram that had belonged my good friend’s dad when he was a general contractor in the sixties. Runs great!

  68. In Britain it was the left arm that shot out – a vivid memory buried until you brought it back.
    Less vivid, but I recall feeding an apple to the coalman’s horse. Not Montana, London – the Beatles might well have already begun recording at Abbey Road.

  69. Not car-related but in the vein of how things used to be:

    1. I remember being maybe 5-6 years old and wandering around the neighborhood back yards, no fences separating, with my friends the same age with no adult supervision.

    2. In the movie Bullitt (1968) there is a climactic shootout scene at the airport. No security checkpoints then, everyone just waltzes in carrying.

  71. Valley Stream LI in the 50s: Krug delivered bread and pastries, as did Dugan’s. Milk deliveries were left in a wooden flip-top container, later replaced by an aluminum one. Diaper services. Occasionally a “grinder” came by who sharpened your tools for a modest price. The ice cream men! Good Humor, Bungalow Bar, American Bar and Mr. Softee. One of the kids in the neighborhood asked the Good Humor man, “how much is a ten cent ice cream.” Loved those Good Humor butterscotch sundaes.
    Now they’re all memories. How sad.

  72. Here in Omaha a blind black man walked all over the city and sold brooms. His name was Rev. Wiles. He road the bus. Very friendly. No one cheated him on bills. My parents bought from him.

    The amazing thing is that everyone knew the guy. And a statue is being built of him.

    Big deal in Omaha about the Creighton basketball coach. Liberal Creighton alums want him fired. I know both the President and the AD. A one game suspension is about right. This is our best team ever and we didn’t need this distraction.

  73. 1960s kid here. Remember bench seats, no seat belts (and no AC), sleeping in the way back on long trips (or at drive-in movies after the kiddie fare was over), and The Parental Arm. Diaper (nappies, for our Commonwealth friends) service was still a thing in the first half of the decade, but disposables put paid to that. No milk or bread trucks by the time I was old enough to notice, but we did have door-delivery of meats for the family freezer. Doctors still made house calls.

    Our neighborhood adjoined a large state university. The university campus at the top of the street, and some undeveloped fields on the other side of the neighborhood, were our playgrounds. We kids went where we wanted to go and always felt safe. Fungible adult authority was still intact, with random grownups implicitly deputized to intervene if they saw something amiss. Most of the dads were WWII or Korea vets.

  74. Speaking of drive-in movies, my oldest sister used me as protection if she had a date with someone she was not keen on kissing. I would be invited to go along to the movies with a promise of popcorn and a Coke and naturally was placed between the two of them while at the drive-in. I was in high cotton, thought she was the greatest big sister and oblivious to my essential role.

  75. Hubert, thanks for the reminder of doctors doing housecalls. We had a great one, Lawrence O’neil. He charge 5 bucks a house call. His obituary said he was the last of the country doctors. Great man.

  76. The milk trucks were made by DIVCO–Detroit Industrial Vehicle Company. They had a swing away seat so you could drive them sitting or standing. I believe most used ice blocks for refrigeration but some may have had ammonia refrigeration.

  77. I definitely remember milkmen delivering milk directly to the house.

    I also remember driving with my grandmother; when she hit the brakes she’d extend her arm to keep me from going through the windshield. I was 14 and outweighed her by probably 20 pounds, so all that was likely to do was to injure her arm.

    One of the scariest memories (in hindsight) was a Boy Scout paper drive during which we rode perched on top of a pile of paper in the back of a pickup truck; any collision would have caused us to go ballistic immediately.

  78. The old man took a couple of friends and me fishing on the South Shore of LI, near Jones Beach. Driving a ’62 Pontiac Bonneville, he hit 112 on the straight toward the water tower. No seatbelts and with the accompanying terror.

  79. My father had a 1953 Oldsmobile “Rocket” 88 with Hydromatic (automatic transmission); 4 door sedan, cloth bench seats front and rear, no seat belts, roll down/up windows, no AC, AM (and FM?) radio with push button ( about 5 ? of them ) station settings and the radio antenna was one of those shiny steel rods atop one of the front quarter panels (not sure when this type of car antenna disappeared from cars).

    We had this until about 1963 or so.

    My father, who very recently gave up driving – he is 98 y.o. – REFUSED to wear a seat belt when he was driving. When someone hits that age, you might as well be talking to a brick; they are set in their ways and that’s it.

    (Just as an aside and really off topic; when my dad was born 1922; Warren G. Harding was president; nobody had ever heard of guys named Hitler or Stalin, and some (many?) Civil War Vets were still alive; nobody had a TV, supermarkets had been in existence only about 5 years but were still very rare; there were no scheduled commercial airplane flights or commercial airports; WWI had only ended about 4 years earlier; WWII was still about 17 years into the future….. etc.
    Not joking; my dad has NO IDEA what a microwave oven is. He has never owned one. How do you explain that microwaves can cook/heat food?? )

    Yep, used to get milk delivery to our door (Queens, NYC). Don’t recall if the milkman “sat”on a high padded chair when driving. Faintly remember he did, I think?

    In summer the “ice cream man” appeared every day; early evening; the “Good Humor” man as well as Mr. Softee. The Softee guy served ice cream from inside his truck; the Good Humor Man had to get out of his truck to get to the ice cream.
    In those days never occurred to anyone that the “ice cream man” could be a predator.

  80. A couple other memories from the 60’s that are history . . .
    – before the interstates getting car sick on the long twisties in our ubiquitous blue/white ’57 Ford Station Wagon
    – the vertical and top-opening soft drink machines at service (not gas) stations, always dispensing bottled drinks (a luxury for us)
    – fending off neighborhood dogs with a well-timed kick
    – by 10 years old, doing lawn jobs and paper routes
    – early ’60s baseball cards, which I still have
    – not knowing what a bike lock was until the mid-60’s
    – and a sadder note, I do remember it seems more broken men with missing limbs sitting downtown begging. I guess they were WWI vets, as most, I think, were men much older than my own father, a WWII vet.

  81. Born at the end of WWII, we had an incredible ride growing up in a county seat town of 5,000 people, big enough to have a lot of stores yet small enough that kids six year old and older had the run of the town and most everyone knew who you were and you were accountable for your actions and the honor of your family. Seven years old walking the mile to the local lake to go fishing, ten years old riding bicycles with a .22 across the handle bars to go shot rabbits.

    Going on Boy Scout trips with the back of pickups loaded with tents, gear and kids and we loved it. The way we drove when we passed our driver’s tests we were lucky we never got injured too bad when we had our first year of driving wrecks, I had a close call driving without a seat belt, being thrown up and then smacked down on the top of the windshield in my little Austin Healy Sprite, not wearing a seat belt, when I rear ended the car in front of me. I ended up with my glasses breaking and cutting my left eyelid almost open, 16 stitches across the lid and no eye injury, a broken nose and black eyes for a few weeks. Those old cars were very dangerous and we were not the best drivers our first few years in the good old days.

    More 50s – 60s stuff I remember . . . .

    We loved playing War games, most of our dad’s were vets with old military clothing, my dad was a major and I took the brass and few medals off of his old uniform hanging in the attic to put on my kaki shirt from the Army Surplus store, same with my buddies including some whose dads were pilots in WWII. We took all of that stuff for granted and of the four of us who were not the real popular guys but were kind of cool nerds, we were hunting and fishing buddies, did car stuff in high school and all grew up to do some military time. My four years as an Spc-5 (same as a buck sgt. in intelligence stuff) a buddy was and a Spc-5 in Nam in finance, one who did a lot of Air Borne and then was a Warrant office flying coptors and number four who was a Ranger Capt. in Nam with the First Cav Div, no one hurt, most all of my high school class graduating in 1963 who were fit did their military service and non of us injured while lots saw some duty in Nam.

  82. Lots of good memories of those 40s, 50, and 60s when then U.S. was a far different place.

    My earliest memories are of the 30s. We lived i n a tiny Colorado mountain village. To drive to the “valley,” as it was called (meaning anywhere on the plains east of the foothills – Loveland, Longmont, and Denve) A trip to Denver was a big affair and usually meant staying overnight in a hotel there. The vehicle we used was a beat up Chevy pickup truck because the trip was always to buy electrical supplies for our grandparents’ electrical contracting business. Mom and dad rode in the front seat while we three boys rode joyfully in the back. We looked like Okies headed for California. If the weather was bad, we boys had a tarp to shelter under. On the way home we had to nestle in among all the boxes and coils of wire, etc. that filled the pickup. Hardship? Hardly. We thought of the trips as grand adventures.

    My paternal grand parents owned a small farm north of Greeley, Colorado. The REA didn’t yet exist. With no electricity. everything was done by hand, except they had an old tractor which served them fairly well, though my grandfather still kept a team of hordes that he used occasionally for plowing and harrowing. Kerosene lamps for ight, bedtime was not very late. Up before dawn, the work began (milking the cows, feeding the livestock, pumping water, getting equipment ready for the day of work ahead, etc.) and continued all day long. The outhouse was a three holer and about fifty yards from the house. A trip out there on a cold winter’s night was no fun.

    My grandparents and parents had an incredible work ethic and lived with what many today would call hardship. Yet, they never complained as they forged their way through WWI, the Spanish flu, the Dust Bowl, the Depression, WWII, and more. I am in awe of them and relish all the happy memories I have of them.

  83. The glories of being a free-range American child in the 50s/60s!

    I don’t believe there was a better time and place to be a kid in human history.

  85. I don’t believe there was a better time and place to be a kid in human history.

    I walked 8 blocks back and forth to kindergarten with no adult supervision, just with my pal who lived two doors down. There were “safety boys” at street corners within a couple blocks of the school, and a crossing guard at the big main street we had to cross. Otherwise we were on our own, and just fine. We were also on our own after school until dark, playing softball and touch football in the street, and generally running around unsupervised.

    We had a station wagon where the back area could be flattened out by folding down the seats. As kids we sat back there and played board games on long trips.

    No doubt seat belts are a worthwhile innovation, but not letting kids roam free has done inestimable damage, no doubt contributing to the snowflakes for young adults we are plagued with today.

  86. …but not letting kids roam free has done inestimable damage, no doubt contributing to the snowflakes for young adults we are plagued with today.

    Jimmy:

    I fear so, good sir.

  87. M Williams:

    ‘on my 1972 BMW – which I still have”

    Respect.

    I’ve still got my ’77 [redacted] and don’t see a reason to sell it.

  88. I don’t remember home bread-delivery, but I remember fresh-baked bread in the grocery store every day. Mrs. Baird’s Bread, delivered all over Texas. Now I have to squint and read the Best By date. Annoys the heck out of me.

  89. In my remarks last week about the peering at and over the dash at the trees as we drove down Mack, I apparently got the year of the Dart wrong.

    Found this on YouTube. It’s white too, but a four door, not a Coupe, and the interior is red rather than “Aqua” and cream; but one gets the idea of the cars and the era.

    I had a strange impulse some years ago to buy one in California just for the hell of it and give it to my Dad. They wanted under 11 k for it. Or maybe it was about 18k. Anyway it’s gone now and only lives publicly on Pinterest.

    Dodge Dart in Canadian auto show

    They have the Theme from Summer Place playing, and not the Kirby guys doing Baubles bangles … yada yada …

  90. This so brings back my own mom! Except I grew up in Alaska and the windows were always rolled up while she chain smoked Lark cigarettes and belted out Streisand songs. She and I drove the entire Alcan (Seattle to Anchorage) in a battered Dodge Dart. Of course no seat belts. We once got stopped for several hours as a herd of caribou surrounded us. Mom thought it was great! She kept singing and smoking. How I miss her. She died at 90 of old age, never got cancer.

  91. This so brings back my own mom! Except I grew up in Alaska and the windows were always rolled up while she chain smoked Lark cigarettes and belted out Streisand songs. She and I drove the entire Alcan (Seattle to Anchorage) in a battered Dodge. Of course no seat belts. We once got stopped for several hours as a herd of caribou surrounded us. Mom thought it was great! She kept singing and smoking. How I miss her. She died at 90 of old age, never got cancer.

  92. We were lucky to have a small grocery about a half mile from our house. With only one car which Dad drove to work, we walked for groceries. When I was old enough to shop alone, probably 5 or 6, I felt so grown up telling the clerk to “charge it”. No credit card, no name given. She knew everyone in the neighborhood. I’d proudly walk home with my 49 cent pound of ground chuck.

  93. In the 1990s I saw an old guy on TV who remembered being taken to visit a very old woman in a nursing home when he was a kid, probably about 1930 or so. This woman’s father, as a teenager, had fought in the American revolution. This country has really only been in existence about 3 (long, but not extraordinarily so) lifetimes. History’s not as long as it seems.

  94. My Dad drove a milk delivery truck for Dellwood Dairy. Yes, standing up.

    And, when making short stops while driving the family car, he would shoot his right arm into the REAR seat area to prevent my brother and I from flying over the back of the front seat. Nowadays, the way front car seats are constructed, that’s plain impossible.

    Heck, even as a young adult driver (yes, before I had a car of a sufficiently late model to have seatbelts with shoulder restraints), it was a reflex action for me to shoot my arm out to the right at even the anticipation of a short stop when I had anyone with me.

  95. One more car memory of a different sort – this was 1965.
    My dad -typical I think of his generation – loved cars and once he could afford (by 1965) he traded in every couple of years.
    I remember going to the Lincoln/Merc dealership with him probably 4 or 5 times over many weeks as he patiently wore down the salesman. The result was a factory order – with the options/colors that my Dad wanted, at a price they finally agreed upon.
    Another month or so we had a Merc Monterey with one of those sliding vertical back windows and, of course, a V8.

  96. These are such great stories, and I could write my own with some judicious cut-and-paste from those above.

    AesopSpouse had one grandfather who drove a dairy truck for Adohr Dairy in LA after the depression (I framed one of his canvas delivery bags for a Christmas gift one year); he had to leave the family farm in Illinois to find work, a not unusual situation.
    I think the “grown-up kids” sold his 2-bedroom bungalow for a couple of million dollars when the grandfather (a long-time widower) passed away 20 years ago.

    “The glories of being a free-range American child in the 50s/60s!
    I don’t believe there was a better time and place to be a kid in human history.” – huxley

    Indeed.
    We lived in the best of times — free range BUT with most of the modern conveniences.
    Now we’re moving toward worse times, but I won’t say we are in the worst of times.
    Yet.

  98. You aren’t wrong about the stand up bread trucks. These were a thing in the 40s and 50s . I remember getting into one when they came around. They had a set of wooden drawers behind the driver with different bakery items. I can remember the smell that came out when the driver slid one of those drawers open.

  99. Pingback:Strange Daze

  100. Woke up early thinking about this thread.

    For myself it was a natural progression. Got a bike young and rode it to school. No helmet obviously.

    Then a bigger bike with basket to carry books or whatever a few years later. By then we were all over town.

    Then at 12 dad bought me a Honda 50. If I had 25 cents for gas (which would last a week) I was off and running to other cities.

    Then at 14 took drivers ed class and got my license. Mom bought me 52 Chevy. We painted it black on black with paint brush. Mexican blankets for seat covers. It was ruff but I had wheels! Many trips to beach to go surfing with friends. Just pull the blanket down and sleep in the car. She paid $50 for that car. I drove it a year and sold it for $35.

    Those were the days.

  101. oh and a empty coke bottle was your friend. You could cash it in at the store and get some pocket change!

  102. huxley:

    Yay, “o or O” is not “0” nor are “()” an O. You guessed or ciphered the solution to the problem.

    To those who flippantly imagine murder or immolation of individuals (those entities who have names), well, you may wish to philosophize about the state of your soul.

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