Nearly Extinct Household Items

5. Window and Floor Fans

Before everyone had window air-conditioners, and then central air-conditioning, people did one thing in the summer months. They sweat. Summer months, especially July and August, were something that had to be endured. Unless you went to a public place like a movie theater, there was no air-conditioning. If it was 95 and humid outside, your house was even hotter and more uncomfortable. Trying to sleep at night was a real difficulty. The old window fan that rattled away and sucked in slightly less hot air from the outside, during the night, was a staple of all households. Many other rooms had floor fans that you could plug in and circulate

the hot humid air around the room at your feet. Or as a kid you could turn it on and lay on the floor with your face in it, feeling the moving air. With central air-conditioning being almost universal now, homes seldom use window or floor fans. Dads around the world no longer have the joy of cramming the window fan into the window, adjusting it, screwing it into place, and then taking it out come fall.

4. Storm and Screen Windows

And speaking of dad wrestling with windows, he had another biannual job to do, one even more hated than window fans. Putting in and taking out storm windows and screen windows. Again, in this age of air-conditioning and well fitted, double-panned, thermally insulated year-round windows, no one has to switch between storm windows in the winter and screens in the summer. But back then, this was a necessity. Screen windows had to be installed in the summer so you could let the air in without the bugs. Then at the end of the summer, the screen windows had to come out and the storm windows went back in. These storm windows were pathetic compared to modern windows – heavy, single-pane glass monstrosities that were hard to fit into the window slats and once in, rattled in the strong winter winds (and did a poor job keeping out the cold and wind). But like everything else back then, they were all you had. So they had to do. Thankfully, men don’t need to haul these things around and climb ladders to change windows anymore.

3. Wall Telephones

Family wall telephones were in every house back then. There may have also been some pedestal phone sitting on a coffee table or in your sister’s room. But somewhere, usually on the first floor, there was a phone hanging on the wall. Usually it came in the standard color – black. When it rang everyone knew someone was calling. The phone was usually located near some piece of furniture which had a drawer which contained two other disappearing pieces of the family household – the Yellow Pages phone directory, and mom’s little phone message book (that’s right, they had an app. for that even back then – it was called writing down the persons name and phone number in a little A-Z book). The original wall telephones came standard with 4-6 foot cords, so you pretty much had to stand at the phone to talk to whoever it was you were conversing with. Later on they developed 12 and even 18 foot long cords so mom could stretch that receiver over to the stove and keep cooking while she talked. We had one friend who had a mom who stretched their 6-foot cord into an 18-footer. We always joked she invented the extended reach telephone cord. Of course with cell phones, few people even have a phone in the house anymore, and the Yellow Pages may soon be extinct.

2. Playing Cards

Every house had multiple sets of playing cards. Pinochle, bridge, or straight decks, usually all three. The area I grew up in was huge for pinochle, everyone had pinochle decks. You could walk into any corner store, department store, or convenience store and they sold decks of pinochle cards. Not anymore, pinochle decks are hard to find. They just don’t sell, so the stores stopped carrying them.

Playing cards was a social thing everyone seemed to do. Kids would get out cards and play a game of “war.” Mom would have pinochle or bridge parties and all her friends would come over, dressed to the nines, and mom would bring out all her best glassware. Dad might have some buddies over to drink beer and play poker. Card playing was just part of our lives. Sadly, we are not as social as we used to be, friends don’t just pop in to say hello and a card game spontaneously erupts. Moms don’t have regular card parties. If we play cards, it is on our smart phones or computers. Like that book “Bowling Alone,” we still play cards, just not with other people. How sad.

1. Burn Barrels

Of all the old household items I miss from my childhood, this is #1. The backyard burn barrel. It was a rusty old empty 55-gallon drum dad brought home from work or found at a junkyard, or God knows where he got it. In the autumn, my favorite time of the year, you knew winter was coming because the geese were flying south, you were playing football, school had started, and the smell of burning leaves was in the air (oh yeah, mom had the Halloween decorations up too). Everyone had one of these in their backyards to burn their fallen leaves. There were no curbside pick-ups to recycle the leaves back then. You just raked them up, and burned them. My mom loved it. She would stand there with an old broom stick handle, blackened at one end, and stir the smoldering leaves to get more air to them so they would combust better. We would rake up the leaves and walk over and dump arm fulls into the burning barrel. Then my mom would stir it like a witch attending her cauldron. There was just nothing like the smell of burning leaves in the autumn, and there still isn’t to this day. Most municipalities and cities banned the burning of leaves decades ago, so it is something you only found in more rural areas. Machines come around and vacuum up your leaves at the curb. Perhaps more environmentally friendly, but we have lost that wonderful seasonal odor as a result.