Remember when...

[BleeckerSt_Girl]

my mother still gets home milk delivery, it's not a thing of the past.

Yes, we get milk and cream in glass bottles delivered to our back kitchen porch form a local dairy.
Here's a picture of our old galvanized milk box the milkman puts the milk in (still has the original inner insulating layer):

I remember producing purple-blue stencil inked copies of the school newspaper on the school stencil-lithographing machine. You could smell the ink when there were alot of copies made. I was 12 yrs. old. Our school did not have a photocopier. Us, kids were given their test copies in class from this type of machinery.

Went to the oldest primary school in the county where our desks were wooden and the top lifted up where we could put our crayons, notebooks underneath. The mean/hurtful thing you could do was dropping the desk-lid on someone's hand.

I remember all this too! In the late 50's-early 60's. Everyone carved their names in those wooden desks. Those purple ink mimeograph machines that spun round and round! I read somewhere that the ink had either ether or formaldehyde in it, and was bad for you to smell it....but we kids all sniffed the stacks of purple-y paper like mad!

I too remember 10 cent phone booth calls. The Staten Island ferry used to cost a nickel!!
Everyone was outraged when they hiked it to a dime.
I think the subway tokens were 15 cents the first I remember.

And in Greenwich Village when i was a little girl, just like Mimi remembers, the horse drawn Italian vegetable carts all up and down Bleecker St, the fish store with its bathtub full of writhing eels baskets of snails and crabs...and the ragman with his pony cart calling out "Rags! Rags!"
The knife sharpeners with their tiny pushcarts with the spinning grinding stones driven by foot pedal.
I was born too late for the Iceman who delivered ice for everyone's ice box- but my mother told me about that. To this day I sometimes call the fridge the 'ice box', having learned it from my mother.

Golly, I'm really sounding ANCIENT! =8-o