I lived in Brooklyn till I was 17 or 18 in an apartment building that was owned by my grandmother. The attached adjacent building to us had a ground level Italian Deli store. I would go in there and order a ham sandwich hero on Italian bread with mustard. The bread was crispy, the ham had an edge of white fat that I would peel off but it flavored the ham, I can still taste it. A long wooding dowel dipped into a gallon jug of mustard would be spread on the on the sandwich. Of course I had to have a soda to go with that hero, they had a large metal cooler with no cover, in it was about foot and a half of water with large chunks of ice floating around. At the bottom looking through the water and ice you would try to identify your drink of choice. Since you've done this numerous times you get to know the colors of various drinks. In the summer months it was refreshing putting your arm under the ice water to fetch your drink. In latter years I added Swiss Cheese to the ingredients, but I still enjoy my Ham Sandwiches, however I occasionally crave the original ham taste.
When I moved from NY to Wisconsin, Delis were one of the main things I missed and now I can barely remember. Subway is not the same thing.
I was always a big fan of western / cowboy TV shows. I looked forward to watching my favorite weekly Cowboy shows on TV, my mom would make a bowl of Jiffy Pop everything was good. Wild Bill Hickok, Lone Ranger, Gabby Hayes Show, later Bonanza, Gunsmoke etc. Photo of more recent cowboys
I remember using telephone books all the time.Photo below is The white pages, But I think I used yellow pages more.
I can't tell you how sorry I am for throwing away the last REAL phone book. It had names and addresses of my friends let alone phone numbers.
When I was young, I loved Drake's devil dogs. Back then They were wrapped in a wax paper Which when you opened it Had the cream overfill on it, Which of course you licked off. My mom would bye them by the box, Which Me and my brother Would polish off in a day sometimes. I still eat them today however Today's Dogs the cream doesn't Squeeze out of the sides of the sandwich, Like they did back then.
I remember we would get milk delivered back then.They were in glass bottles with a cardboard cap. Sometimes the milk would have a layer of cream At the top. When the bottle was near empty I loved drinking directly from the bottle the remainder of the milk. I would never drink from the bottle and put it back in a refrigerator.
A gig was for hunting frogs and eels; Meg was short for Megan; A Bit was used for horses; Ram was what cars did to each other in a wreck and floppy was related to being sloppy. And…when folks learned to type it was on something akin to a Royal manual typewriter complete with carbon paper, ribbon and correctype.
Can you remember typing classes? Hitting the keys over and over and over to learn them? Apparently the reward of learning back then was not the same as the reward offered by a laptop.
In the 1950s they brought milk in little bottles to school in the afternoons for the elementary grades. At some point it was 2 cents for regular and 3 cents for chocolate. It was usually warm by the time it arrived. The chocolate was tolerable warm, but I learned to hate plain milk drinking it warm when they were out of chocolate.