Did you live through a lot of the 20th century, the 70s to 90s prosperity, maybe the big wars of the 40s through the 50s, perhaps even the Great Depression of the 30s?

Many things that amused, added to or affected those times are gone – or almost gone: telegrams, The Red (Russian) Menace and black smoke from factory stacks.

What about the everyday things? Have you rolled up a car window with the handle lately? Or bought a pair of men’s garters or a girdle? A bridge score pad? You might find a movie magazine in an antique store, might not. Dozens and dozens have faded away so gradually, we hardly realized it: typewriters, real fur coats, card catalogues – almost kaput.

A new book, “Going, Going, Gone - Vanishing Americana,” lists no less than 173 items and activities that used to aid everyday life now nearly out of sight.

Paychecks, for instance.

They didn’t become commonplace until 1950. Unfortunately for the banks, their giant success has whiplashed to haunt them. Each check passes through an average of ten hands between the time it’s written and returned to the writer, cancelled. Moving each one through this system now costs 79 cents, which adds up to $45 billion dollars a year.

So banks are trying to persuade customers to let them transfer their money electronically to the payee’s bank and finally back home. When you authorize the bank to pay your mortgage, car payment or utility bill, no checks are drawn. The Social Security Administration now deposits 345 million payments directly into clients’ bank accounts. After a check is deposited, it ceases to move physically, all the transfers are by computer. This has a name, truncation1.

Michael Wolfe, president of Community Resources Bank, says, “Our customers are gradually accepting a printed or computer statement of their accounts rather than cancelled checks.

“They aren’t knocking on the door to ask for this service. It’s a hard sell driven by the banks’ desire to cut costs. But automatic teller machines began as an economy measure, and today they’re popular.”

Now, take an everyday item, handkerchiefs.

For a thousand years, they were a showy accessory for the rich. By the mid-1600s, they had become indispensable to the middle classes and grew more popular through most of the 20th century. In 1924, when Kimberly-Clark introduced Kleenex, it took at a gallop. A survey in 1930 showed that more than 60 percent of the people buying Kleenex used them as disposable handkerchiefs.

Today most people blow their noses into 190 billion of them a year.

“But they’re not dead,” says Ms. Hunt Strait, manager of Orangeburg’s Belks. “We don’t carry abundance any more, but many of our male customers still like to have one in their front coat pocket, so we keep a stock.” Ladies dress hankies are disappearing too.

Ferse’s 5&10, Orangeburg’s old-fashioned indoor bazaar, stocks dozens according to Roy Chandler, store owner.

“Unlike some of the big stores, we also carry a number of the items on this ’condemned list,’ including bridge score pads, balsa wood airplane kits, white gloves and girdles, not to mention rabbit ears for TV sets. Never count out merchandise that’s being replaced too soon.

“One item that seems to have bitten the dust is, guess what? Paper dolls. They lost out to the ever-popular Barbies and we cancelled our orders 10 years ago. When you think of the 150 years of fun they gave little girls, it’s a little sad.”

These disappearances aren’t just inanimate objects, but people too. Remember the milk man? What about a filling station attendant? Very scarce. News boys? Eisenhower and Hoover, Bing Crosby and Bob Hope delivered papers. Between 1980 and 1990, the number dropped off 60 percent. Adults in cars could cover the routes lots faster.

Another Going-Going-Gone is nuns? Nuns! In 1965, 180,000 of them taught, nursed and did other Christian work, or chose the cloistered life. Then, almost overnight, the number of young women who choose the convent began falling off sharply; so many more opportunities had opened for young girls. There are fewer than 100,000 in the convents today, and their average age is 65.

Now for one of the real biggies, cigarettes.

Dick Berry, manager of the Orangeburg Cash and Carry on Five Chop Road, says he’s still selling hundreds of cases, but the overall sale is down about twenty percent from what it was 30 years ago.

Since the late 1920s, studies have connected smoking with high rates of heart and lung disease. These unpleasant realities were ignored by the public until 1964 when Luther Terry, the Surgeon General of the United States, alerted the U.S. to smoking hazards. This is when antismoking crusades really took off. Since then, an estimated 50 million Americans have kicked the habit. In 1964, 64 percent of all adults smoked; in 1990, 25 percent did.

“Newports are still the most popular of all the menthol brands,” Dick says. “Marlboro sales are high too.” Then he exclaims: “What I’d like to see is the government completely banning them,” explaining, “I had a grandfather and a father to die of lung cancer.”

A few more “gones” worth noting are:

You must be logged in to comment.