Things That Were Once True

"Help Wanted" ads were classified by gender

You could smoke at work or anywhere else you damn pleased.

You could buy guns by mail from Herter's.

Seatbelts were only found in airplanes.

The only organized sport for kids was Little League. For everything else, it was "go out and play."

At classy parties, the hosts had little silver cups holding cigarettes for the guests.

If you got pulled over for drinking and driving, the cops might tell you to "slow down and take it easy."

There were things that the Nazis and the Commies did that America did not do: Pre-dawn arrests, detention without charges, detention without trial, detention in secret prisons and interrogations by torture.

One person, on a blue collar salary, could afford to raise a family, buy a house and drive late model cars.

Most cars were late-model cars because they all pretty much fell apart before you had 100,000 miles on them.

Fat kids were a rarity.

If you went to a different state, the only places that were the same were Howard Johnson's and Holiday Inn. "Travel" meant eating in places you never heard of before.

Taking an airline flight was an adventure to be anticipated and savored, not an ordeal to be dreaded and endured.

There was no such thing as a "bike helmet."

A kid who was wearing braces had had polio.

You couldn't make it past second grade without having had measles, mumps and chicken pox.

Almost every daddy on the street and many of the mommys had been in the military.

Most of the homes had guns. Nobody locked them up. Kids didn't take the unlocked guns and go shoot up their schools. Oh, they thought about it, as in "I met her at the door/ with a Colt forty-four/ and she ain't gonna teach no more", but nobody did it.