October 14, 1989
The older material I’ve been showing you the past few weeks appeared in newspapers long prior to 1993, when digital archives became a reality. It hasn’t been available to the public at large since it was printed on newsprint. However, all or most of it was reprinted in the book collection “Beaucoup Arlo & Janis” or it perhaps appeared here on this Web site. I haven’t had time this week, but next week I’m going to dig into my own analog stash and scan some material that hasn’t been seen in decades by anyone but silverfish—as I said I would do. It should be interesting.
72 responses to “Can-Do Attitude”
In the comic, how old are A&J? I’m thinking mid to late 40’s?
Well, they’ve been at it for 35 years, so it’s difficult to pinpoint, but we’ll give it a go. Let’s say they were in their mid-to-late 20s when the strip began. That would place them today somewhere in their 60s. However, given the strange flexibility of comic-strip time, you could say late 40s. I’d go with 50s, though.
Back in the day there was a can recycling machine that spit out coins as you fed it cans. My kids were ecstatic!
The kid needs to know his multiplication tables.
Oh wait, I don’t think they teach that anymore. Mental math is hard.
When I was a kid (along with Betty White) we picked up glass soda bottles out of the ditches and turned them in at the country store for cash.
Our family farm had two miles of highway passing through it and we worked both sides of the road. A fairly profitable gig and kept our ditches clean
It just occurred to me no one threw beer bottles away. Surely if soda was in bottles wouldn’t beer have been too?
Perhaps drivers didn’t drink beer while driving for fear of la gendarmerie, so had no empties to toss.
Not too likely, Texas didn’t outlaw drivers drinking until 1987. At that time (according to the New York Times) there were 26 states that allowed anyone in a vehicle to drink alcoholic beverages. Currently, there are still 10 US states that allow open alcoholic beverages in motor vehicles– seven have no restrictions at all, though all 50 states now outlaw drunk (may be defined differently).
Jackie’s home state would have been the same as Texas during her childhood (Louisianna’s open container law still doesn’t meet federal standards for open-container laws).
A surprising number of states permit drive-through liquor stores. I am sure that not everyone buying that six-pack of Bud at the drive-through is waiting to get home before they partake..
Beer sellers started using cans as early as the 30s, with post WWII seeing a sharp increase in cans and non-reusable bottles. I would suspect that some of the difference depended on the retailer– possibly beer stores preferred non-returnables since they didn’t want to manage refunds. The grocery stores I grew up around didn’t sell beer, so they wouldn’t have paid deposit refunds for beer anyway. Finally, mostly growing up I lived in “dry” counties, so the only beer bottles in the ditch would be from out of town. 🙂
Early 70’s my friends and I tried to redeem brown beer bottles (collected in the El Paso desserts) no one would give us anything for them. We thought we had hit the mother load!
Only occasionally would the store keepers wrinkle up their noses at the sometimes muddy bottles I would collect for coins. And this was back when coins actually bought things!
Memories, the first soda machine that spit out aluminum soda cans instead of glass soda bottles. My friend showing us this radical beast was unhappy, his family bottled soda and much of their income came from bottling patents.
He correctly anticipated that the cans could make glass bottles obsolete. Sadly the sodas bottled in aluminum cans and plastic bottles taste nothing like the ice cold goodness those glass bottles held.
One of the simple pleasure we had growing up was polishing off a glass bottle of Coca-Cola and then looking at the bottom of the bottle to see where the bottle came from. It was a thrill finding a bottle from such far-off place like Waco, Yuma, and Sacramento!
Our bottler would also feature bottle caps with pictures of local professional athletes. Quite the thrill peeling off the cork from the cap to see if you had a star player! They even offered cardboard displays to encourage you to collect the whole set.
My seventeenth summer I worked at a small local airport. We routinely got calls asking seemingly weird questions like, “Which is further, Memphis, Tennessee, or Jacksonville, Florida?” These were from workers in the mills, on break. They would sit in the “smokers,” designated break areas, where they’d drink Co’-Colas and bet on whose bottle came from farthest away. This was long, long before Google. At least we had a map.
You’re right there, Jackie! The only container that doesn’t alter the taste is the good old glass bottle. And the closest thing to the the Coke of my childhood is the Mexican kind that has real sugar and comes in a glass bottle. But now that I’m diabetic, that is right out.
Between my junior and senior years of HS, I took an elective course in summer school. I’m not sure after all these years, but the subject may have been slide rule operation. How’s that for dating oneself?
And speaking of dating, my current girlfriend (we’ll call her Jane) also enrolled in the class and suggested that we collect soft drink bottles and redeem them to pay our tuition fees. What? Spend my mornings in class with her, then spend the afternoons wandering through the countryside together? Well, awright! (Yes, Jane was a cutie.)
I think we got 5 cents per bottle, and our fees were like $15 dollars each. So, many bottles were collected, and many pleasant hours were spent collecting them.
One of my few regrets of hitting the road for trucking was discovering the kids got into some of my stuff… and my fancy slide rule from high school had been used in “sword fights” and banged up.
I started college at the dawn of the hand-held calculator. I was enrolled as an Engineer and being afraid that we couldn’t use calculators in class, taught myself how to use a slide rule the summer before Freshman year. Never used one in class, but is was still a nice skill set to have.
I never had to worry about my kids using my slide rule for a sword fight; mine was circular. I don’t think I ever came across another one.
Highly doubtful I could still figure out how to use a slide rule. However, I’m reasonably sure I could still use an E6B Flight Computer. Which is sort of a circular slide rule, I guess.
My first “electronic calculator” was a small portable Texas Instruments SR-10, which TI described as an “electronic slide rule calculator”. (Thus the “SR” in the model number.) I bought it in 1972 from Monkey Ward’s for $99. (That’s $600+ in today’s dollars, believe it or not.) A TI-30XIIS Scientific Calculator, which does many more calculations, can be had for less than $15 today.
In my ’50s college days, mom sent me a wonderful wooden Keuffel & Esser (well, “K&E”, anyway) slip stick. It did the job and was nice looking, too. Never used it after soph year, but I still have it. Later, in grad school, I acquired a circular one in/on a plastic card; intriguing, but unused. For any hairy calculations, I used an electric – not electronic – Monroe machine which could handle about 18 digits. It did a lot of my chi-square work over several years. Had I been doing this in the mid-1980s, I could have simply entered the raw data and pressed a button on a hand-held calculator, but, as this was 20+ years earlier, I first had to make columns of data in my notebook and then plug the respective totals into the chi-square formula.
The reactions being studied were not very rapid, and my “runs” began between 7 and 8 a.m. and lasted until 1 or 2 the next a.m. Thus, the long calculations were done in the wee hours of the morning, and I always slept well if my results were commensurate with earlier results.
Interesting factoids:
Andrew Jackson “Slipstick” Libby was a character in some of Robert A. Heinlein’s stories.
The Cracker Barrel in Gulf Shores, AL, has a giant slip stick hanging on the wall of one of their dining rooms. (The ones used by instructors, including in the class I took.)
Good memories…
I used to know a couple of boys that used to turn in drink bottles for a penny. They happened up on the area where the store had left the gate open in back and there was the return bottles. Seems like the enterprising young boys took 6 bottles each into the store and got a cola each and a penny for candy. Sadly, the next day, the store owner started locking the gate.
I used to collect bottles for gas money when I got too close before payday. I worked at a gas station to boot.
First beer cans had a top shaped similar to a bottle so glass bottle filling machines could be used.
.
Ghost: that $99.00 dollars is closer to $1000 today.
.
When we had a debate in the office (40+YA) I called the Reference Desk at the Library.
My wife was a librarian.(Main Desk) She got a Good Neighbor award from WCCO radio when she retired.
Who besides me used a giant heavy table top computer/calculator that you entered the data into and pulled a heavy lever on side to enter? Every single time you made an entry! Hundreds of times!!!
This first working in a bank in posting department reconciling your entries to balance? Next working for State of Louisiana and then for Federal government?
The other option was a yellow lead pencil to calculate, then verified and reconciled by the one payroll clerk with an electric calculator!!
Echos of Marley! And Bob Crachett!
Before handheld calculators, my parents had a slim little device that did simple adding and subtracting via a mechanical process similar to an abacus. The thing fascinated me and I would sit and play with it for hours.
Memories of bottles and cans. Who could remove soda and beer caps without a church key? Remember all the sharp objects you improvised with?
Who remembers cans before pop tops? Everyone carried openers back then. When did it change?
One could catch a soda cap edge on the edge of a drawer and give the cap a swift downward hit. The jolt removed the cap virtually all the time. Can’t say it did the drawer much good….
The notion of turning in bottles for money also figures in one of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s best songs: “The Ballad of Curtis Lowe”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cTHNNdSR3Y
I’m so old I can remember when beer can pop-tops came off the can when popped, rather than (usually) staying attached as they do now. I think I amazed Jackie by explaining those tabs served a useful purpose in beer bars. Open can; drop tab into can; when can was empty, shake it to rattle the tab inside the can, signaling the server that one needed a full can.
That even has its own anthem: Pop a Top by Alan Jackson (from the genre “Beer Drinkin’ Music”)
We used the beer can tab to slice our “Mexican” limes! Iced, cold, Tecate was cheap and tasty, the small thin skinned lime could be cut with the tab.
Instructions: First swallow, no lime, then squeeze some lime, gentle swirl and enjoy!
Ghost Many a foot was cut on a pop top – a bane on the smallish beach I had to clean
at least once a day because of them.
.
I remember those posting machines – the bookkeeper had her own alcove –
today she would be mandated to wear hearing protection. Remember the incandescent
numbers on the first electric adding machines?
I blew out my flip flop
Stepped on a pop top
Cut my heel, had to cruise on back home
“Margaritaville” – Jimmy Buffett
So, the “new sofa” is a slightly different color than the “old sofa”, isn’t it? Isn’t it?
Or is this going to be like Arlo’s corrective lenses? Or is the reason he no longer wears them is that he traded them in for contact lenses?
Or the missing schooner? Btw, my latest theory is that Arlo named it “The Flying Dutchman”; it slipped its moorings; and it has since drifted all over the Gulf, being seen only occasionally from a distance when hurricanes threaten. Well, that would make it a Ghost” ship, right?
I don’t think it’s drifting around the Gulf, Ghost. Instead it has drifted off into that gray area where cartoonist’s unused gags hang out till they are needed again. It’s the place where Janis’ doppelganger Robin waits patiently for her next appearance, along with Gene and his family and Gus. Gasoline Alley has the Cartoon Retirement Home, but surely there is a giant cartoonist’s Green Room where all the seldom-used but still existing characters and objects wait.
The Sargasso Sea of Cartoon Gags, perhaps? 😀
Who remembers bottle cap crafted items? We didn’t have one but foot/boot scraper door mats?
One of my more bizarre hobbies when younger was collecting and searching for antique bottles and jars. Into my 20s and 30s
I tried to get my mother to reveal original outhouse location of our plantation. She refused but did reveal where a deep 20 foot wide underground brick cistern was located. A test hole brought up intact bottle from 1800s and the archeologists began digging.
We reached near bottom where we found an entire automobile before my grandmother declared the house was sliding into our excavation and made us refill it.
We turned up several intact soda bottles and many liquour bottles. Don’t recall beer bottles? These dated to late 1800s, early 1900s.
Our soda bottles came from early days bottling when bottles had round bottoms like flask jars and smooth sides. A metal flange arm held another glass top onto the bottle.
Vicksburg, MS originated the bottling of Coca Cola and other sodas that were sold and delivered into the surrounding Mississippi Delta area.
Yes, I am older than dirt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnJbkzOPrVE Some adventuresome guys from Middle Alabama.
GREAT stories, Jackie!
I have to say, I am so glad to have discovered this community == my age cohort, judging by the memories! I was beginning to think no one else had used a slide rule for years and years (even once calculators came out, at first they were crazy expensive), or that no one else remembered collecting dirt-encrusted bottles to redeem or the pop-tops that came completely off and were tossed down to be stepped on by the poor barefooted soul to come along next. You’ve all made my day. And that’s saying something, as our little town (in a rural area a good bit south of the Black Hills) had a lightning-caused fire yesterday that gave firefighters quite the tussle just 3 miles from town. Town is small enough that’s 3 miles from everyone’s doorstep. I think it’s under control this morning though the air still smells smokey. Point being: for a little while here, just now, I was back on the dirt roads between the cotton fields of childhood, laying against the roots of an old giant cottonwood rattling its leaves in the wind over my head, a paper sack of dirty bottles in my bike basket, thinking about the comic book and cold Coke I’d buy at the soda fountain when I went to the drugstore after cashing in the bottles at the grocery store. Way better than wildfires and a nasty virus and the current state of the world in general. I might just spend the rest of the day lazing under that cottonwood in memory!
Dawn welcome to the Village, a place of tranquility and harmonius friends. We are glad to have you.
If you’d like another place where small town life, humor, peace and laughter prevail you can join me in Eufaula Friends-A Good Small Town on Facebook. A lot of the Village belong, you don’t have to actually be from our town.
Actually people from Eufaula, Alabama often join accidently and end up staying@
Thanks for the welcome, Jackie, and the invite! I have somehow never taken to Facebook, though I tried several times. I guess I’m missing a key genetic trait or something. 🙂 But I think I’ll be stopping in here fairly regularly.
It’s full of nice people. Many of us have actually met each other, we’re real people joined by a love of a comic strip and Mr. Johnson.
And each other.
That’s beautiful, and a much-needed salve for the times. And, given that I have loved Arlo & Janice for decades now, I feel like I just might fit in. 🙂
This day in history: Katrina slams the coast in 2005.
https://www.bing.com/search?q=hurricane%20katrina&FORM=OTDHYL
I remember Jimmy posting that he was evacuating.