I Remember Them All!
The answers are at the bottom!
1. In the 1940s, where were automobile headlight dimmer switches located?
a. On the floor shift knob.
b. On the floor board, to the left of the clutch.
c. Next t o the horn.
2. The bottle top of a Royal Crown Cola bottle had holes in it. For what was it used?
a. Capture lightning bugs.
b. To sprinkle clothes before ironing.
c. Large salt shaker.
3. Why was having milk delivered a problem in northern winters?
a. Cows got cold and wouldn't produce milk.
b. Ice on highways forced delivery by dog sled.
c. Milkmen left deliveries outside of front doors
and milk would freeze, expanding and pushing up the cardboard bottle top.
4. W hat was the popular chewing gum named for a game of chance?
a. Blackjack
b. Gin
c. Craps
5. What method did women use to look as if they were wearing stockings when none were available due to rationing during WW II.
a. Suntan
b. Leg painting
c. Wearing slacks
6 What postwar car turned automotive design on its ear when you couldn't tell whether it was coming or going?
a. Studebaker
b. Nash Metro
c. Tucker
7. Which was a popular candy when you were a kid?
a. Strips of dried peanut butter.
b. Chocolate licorice bars.
c. Wax coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water inside.
8. How was Butch wax used?
a. To stiffen a flat-top haircut so it stood up.
b. To make floors shiny and prevent scuffing.
c. On the wheels of roller skates to prevent rust.
9. Before inline skates, how did you keep your roller skates attached to your shoes?
a. With clamps, tightened by a skate key.
b. Woven straps that crossed the foot.
c. Long pieces of twine.
10. As a kid, what was considered the best way to reach a decision?
a. Consider all the facts.
b. Ask Mom.
c. Eeny-meeny-miney-mo.
11. What was the most dreaded disease in the 1940s and 1950s?
a. Smallpox
b. AIDS
c. Polio
12. "I'll be down to get you in a ________, Honey"
a. SUV
b. Taxi
c. Streetcar
13. What was the name of Caroline Kennedy's pony?
a. Old Blue
b. Paint
c. Macaroni
14. What was a Duck-and-Cover Drill?
a. Part of the game of hide and seek.
b. What you did when your Mom called you in to do chores
c. Hiding under your desk, and covering your head with your arms in an A-bomb drill.
15. What was the name of the Indian Princess on the Howdy Doody show?
a. Princess Summerfallwinterspring
b. Princess Sacajawea
c. Princess Moonshadow
16. What did all the really savvy students do when dittoed tests were handed out in school?
a. Immediately sniffed the purple ink, as this was believed to get you high.
b. Made paper airplanes to see who could sail theirs out the window.
c. Wrote another pupil's name on the top, to avoid their failure.
17. Why did your Mom shop in stores that gave Green Stamps with purchases?
a. To keep you out of mischief by licking the backs, which tasted like bubble gum.
b. They could be put in special books and redeemed for various household items.
c. They were given to the kids to be used as stick-on tattoos.
18. Praise the Lord, and pass the _________?
a. Meatballs
b. Dames
c. Ammunition
19. What was the name of the singing group that made the song "Cabdriver" a hit?
a. The Ink Spots
b. The Supremes
c. The Esquires
20. Who left his heart in San Francisco ?
a. Tony Bennett
b. Xavier Cugat
c. George Gershwin
ANSWERS
1. (b) On the floor, to the left of the clutch. Hand controls, popular in Europe , took till the late '60's to catch on.
2. (b) To sprinkle clothes before ironing. Who had a steam iron? The stopper would go into the neck of the bottle which was filled with water and shaken over the clothes when Mom did the ironing!
3. (c) Cold weather cause d the milk to freeze and expand, popping the bottle top.
4 . (a) Blackjack Gum. Development of Chicle Gum came with a big breakthrough in 1869 from another
source.
Exiled Mexican former president and general, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna (infamous for his victory over the Alamo defenders) was living in New Jersey. He brought a ton of Mexican chicle with him, in hopes of selling it. He persuaded Thomas Adams of Staten Island, New York to buy it. Adams was a photographer and inventor.
Adams intended to vulcanize the chicle for use as a rubber substitute. But his efforts at vulcanization did not work. However, Adams noticed that
Santa Anna liked to chew the chicle (the Mayans chewed chicle many years previously).
Disappointed with the rubber experiments, Adams boiled a small batch of chicle in his kitchen to create a chewing gum. He gave some to a local store to see if people would buy it. People liked his gum, and before long his business was quite successful
5. (b) Special makeup was applied, followed by drawing a seam down the back of the leg with eyebrow pencil. In the 1940's patches on clothing were a common sight, and it was a good thing to have shiny sleeves on your shirt from many washes and ironings. Women of the day didn't wear pants; that was men's attire. (No matter how cold it got for women in the armed forces they were refused permission to wear pants.) Thus it came as a serious blow when silk stockings could no longer be bought (Silk was used for the making of parachutes). Nylon stockings, advertised as being more durable than silk, had come onto the market but were very expensive. However, nylon was also diverted to the war effort, leaving women's legs bare. Someone, somewhere came up with the idea of liquid silk stockings. Women could buy a powder that when mixed with water and painted on their legs gave the look of silk stockings. Real stockings had seams up the back of them so ladies used an eyebrow pencil to paint on the seam. Leather was restricted during the war so shoes and boots became difficult to buy.
6. (a) 1946 Studebaker.
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7. (c) Wax coke bottles containing super-sweet colored water.
8 (a) Wax for your flat top (butch) haircut. A Crew cut is a type of haircut in which the hair on the top of the head is cut relatively short, graduated in length from the longest hair at the front hairline to the shortest at the back of the crown. The hair on the sides and back of the head is usually tapered short, semi-short or medium. A very short crew cut is sometimes referred to as a butch cut or buzz cut. A long crew cut is referred to as an ivy league crew cut or ivy league. A typical ivy league might be graduated in length on the top of the head from one and a half inches at the front hairline to one half inch at the back of the crown. A typical short crew cut might have a similar proportional graduated difference in the length of the hair on the top of the head. If a short crew cut is three quarters of an inch at the front hairline, the length of the hair at the back of the crown might be one quarter of an inch. A crew cut where the hair on the top of the head is graduated in length from the front hairline to a chosen point on the mid to back part of the crown as a flat plane, of level, upward sloping or downward sloping inclination is known as a flat top crew cut or flattop. Crew cuts, flattop crew cuts, and butch cuts are all traditionally groomed with hair control wax, commonly referred to as butch wax.
9. (a) With clamps, tightened by a skate key, which you wore on a shoestring around your neck.
10. (c) Eeny-meeny-miney-mo. Eeny, meeny, miny, moe, which can be spelled a number of ways, is a children's counting rhyme, used to select a person to be "it" for games and similar purposes. The rhyme has existed in various forms since the 1850s, or perhaps earlier, and is common in many countries. The earliest known published versions in the English language date to 1855, one of which used the words eeny, meeny, moany, mite, and the other, hana, mana, mona, mike. Alternate versions have also appeared in several other European languages.
Many stories exist about the "real" meaning of the first line, although the most commonly accepted theory is that they are just nonsense syllables. Another theory posed by Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas in their book, The Hiram Key, suggests that the words are the first numbers in the counting system of the pre-Celtic Britons. The Lakeland Dialect Society more specifically suggests that this is just one of many versions of Celtic sheep-counting rhymes, but it observes that a large number of 19th century English publications exist in which these counting rhymes were more often used to amuse children than to count sheep
11. (c) Polio. In beginning of August, swimming pools were closed, movies and other public gathering places were closed to try to prevent spread of the disease. Poliomyelitis, often called polio or infantile paralysis, is an acute viral infectious disease spread from person to person, primarily via the fecal-oral route.
In about 1% of cases the virus enters the central nervous system, preferentially infecting and destroying motor neurons, leading to muscle weakness and acute flaccid paralysis. Different types of paralysis may occur, depending on the nerves involved. Spinal polio is the most common form, characterized by asymmetric paralysis that most often involves the legs. Bulbar polio leads to weakness of muscles innervated by cranial nerves. Bulbospinal polio is a combination of bulbar and spinal paralysis
12. (b) Taxi Better be ready by half-past eight! A taxicab, also taxi or cab, is a type of public transport for a single passenger, or small group of passengers, typically for a non-shared ride. A taxicab is a vehicle for hire, with a driver, which conveys passengers between locations of their choice. In most other modes of public transport, the pick-up and drop-off locations are determined by the service provider, not by the passenger, although demand responsive transport and share taxis provide a hybrid bus/taxi mode
13. (c) Macaroni. Caroline Kennedy's pony, Macaroni, was a present from Lyndon Johnson. Macaroni roamed freely around the White House grounds and received thousands of fan letters from the American public. Caroline also had a famous dog named Pushinka, who was given to her by the head of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev.
14. (c) Hiding under your desk, and covering your head with your arms in an A-bomb drill.
Duck and Cover was a suggested method of personal protection against the effects of a nuclear detonation which the United States government taught to generations of United States school children from the late 1940s into the 1980s. This was supposed to protect them in the event of an unexpected nuclear attack which, they were told, could come at any time without warning. Immediately after they saw a flash they had to stop what they were doing and get on the ground under some cover�such as a table, or at least next to a wall�and assume the fetal position, lying face-down and covering their heads with their hands.
15. (a) Princess Summerfallwinterspring. She was another puppet. before the puppet, there was a live princess. Princess Summerfallwinterspring was portrayed by a young actress and was a lot less offensive than Thunderthud. Sadly, the young woman was killed in an automobile accident during one Doody season and her character was quietly dropped from the show. The following fall, however, they decided to reintroduce the Indian maid. Amid much fanfare and right on the air, in front of the peanut gallery, Buffalo Bob breathlessly introduced the new Princess Summerfallwinterspring!
16. (a) Immediately sniffed the purple ink to get a high. Ah, the sweet smells of youth! Remember when being in a classroom meant inhaling the aroma of methanol and isopropanol? What's that, you say? The chemical concoction used to make a "ditto." What a thrill it was to be selected by the teacher to bring the ditto master to "the office." The ditto machine (spirit duplicator) was invented by Wilhelm Ritzerfeld in 1923 and was an integral part of the school experience in the 20th century. By writing or typing on the master, the inscribed image appeared on the back, in reverse. The device used an alcohol-based fluid to dissolve some of the dye on the master, and transferred the image to the “copies.� The Ditto trademark was established by the now-defunct A.B.Dick Company back in 1918. But the word "ditto" will live on for years to come.
17. (b) Put in a special stamp book, they could be traded for household items at the Green Stamp store. 'S&H Green Stamps' (also called Green Shield Stamps) were a form of trading stamps popular in the United States between the 1930s and late 1980s. They formed a rewards program operated by the Sperry and Hutchinson company (S&H), founded in 1896 by Thomas Sperry and Shelly Hutchinson. During the 1960s, the rewards catalog printed by the company was the largest publication in the United States and the company issued three times as many stamps as the U.S. Postal Service.[1] Customers would receive stamps at the checkout counter of supermarkets, department stores, and gas stations among other retailers, which could be redeemed for products in the catalog. S&H Green Stamps had a number of competitors, including Blue Chip Stamps, and Plaid Stamps, the last being a project of A&P Supermarkets.
Sperry & Hutchinson began offering stamps to U.S. retailers in 1896. The retail organizations that distributed the stamps (primarily supermarkets, filling stations, and shops) bought the stamps from S&H and gave them as bonuses to shoppers based on the dollar amount of a purchase. The stamps—issued in denominations of one, ten, and fifty "points"—were perforated with a gummed reverse, and as shoppers accumulated the stamps they moistened the reverse and mounted them in collectors books, which were provided free by S&H. Shoppers could then exchange filled books for premiums, including housewares and other items, from the local Green Stamps store or catalog. Each premium was assigned a value expressed in the number of filled stamp books required to obtain that item.
Some states equated the green stamps to gambling and required merchants to obtain an expensive license. Few did, however, making their popularity vary substantially from one state to the next. The company also traded overseas. In the early 1960s, it launched S&H Pink Stamps in the United Kingdom, having been beaten to their green shield trademark in 1958 by Richard Tompkins' Green Shield Trading Stamp Company.
18. (c) Ammunition, and we'll all be free.
19. (a) The widely famous 50's group: The Inkspots. The Ink Spots were a popular African American vocal group that helped define the musical genre that led to rhythm & blues and rock and roll, and the subgenre doo-wop. They and the Mills Brothers, another black vocal group of the 1930s and 1940s, gained much acceptance in the white community.
20. (a) Tony Bennett, and he sounds just as good today.
SCORING
17- 20 correct: You are older than dirt, and obviously gifted with mental abilities Now if you could only find your glasses. Definitely someone who should share your wisdom!
12 -16 correct: Not quite dirt yet, but you're getting there .
0 -11 correct: You are not old enough to share the wisdom of your experiences