A to Z - Z!!!

The FINAL letter of our wonderful countdown!

For my A to Z Challenge theme I will be posting items that are no longer with us or are close to becoming extinct.

These are great items to use if you are trying to set a time period in your story or to stay away from if you want your story to be timeless.

The Zoot suit was popular in the 1940's. They were eventually banned, ostensibly because they used too much cloth, for the duration of WWII.  The suits had long jackets with padded shoulders and wide lapels, with high-waisted, wide legged trousers that were tight cuffed and pegged.  The suits were usually paired with a fedora and a long watch chain that hung down past the knee.




Zayre- Like so many of the stores I grew up with; Ames, Bradlees, Globe, Porteous, and yes Zayre, they are no longer with us.  Zayre was very similar to a KMart.  1956 to 1990.  Although my local Zayre's didn't last until 1990.  I loved Zayre because with my piddly allowance I could afford stuff there.  The first thing I ever bought with my own money was a lime green plastic skateboard. My prized possession of my six year old life.  I lived on the top of a hill. I loved my skateboard.



Zenith  While the company technically exists it was bought by LG Electronics in 1999 and you never see any Zenith branded items anymore.  Zenith was founded in 1918.  Zenith was the inventor of subscription television and the modern remote, they were also the first to develop HDTV in North America.



Thank you so much for joining me on this ride.  I have found a lot of wonderful blogs that I can't wait to follow and see what they are like when not blogging from A to Z.  Congratulations to everyone who finished!  We did it!

A to Z - Y

For my A to Z Challenge theme I will be posting items that are no longer with us or are close to becoming extinct.

These are great items to use if you are trying to set a time period in your story or to stay away from if you want your story to be timeless.

Another tough letter.

Yellow Pages  The Yellow Pages used to be a necessity. They were the only way to look up the businesses in your area and the phone numbers of friends, associates and co-workers. I felt like such a grown up when my phone number was listed.  They were also the booster seat. We didn't have fancy plastic seats with straps if you couldn't reach the table you sat on the phone book.
Now they are a nuisance and when they are delivered they go straight into the recycle bin and I mourn the loss of all those trees for naught.  We do get less and less of them delivered each year and I doubt we will be getting them delivered much longer.  The old fashioned book has been replaced by the internet.

When ever I think of a phone book now I think of this episode of Mythbusters.  Check it out.



Happy writing!

A to Z - X

For my A to Z Challenge theme I will be posting items that are no longer with us or are close to becoming extinct.

These are great items to use if you are trying to set a time period in your story or to stay away from if you want your story to be timeless.

I was stumped by this letter.  Please share any X suggestions you have.

The only thought I had was that X-rays are no longer the only way to look inside the human body. We now have MRI and Cat scans too.  The first MRI was performed in 1977.  While CT or CAT Scans are a type of X-ray; they first began to be installed in 1974.  

Happy Writing!

A to Z - W

For my A to Z Challenge theme I will be posting items that are no longer with us or are close to becoming extinct.

These are great items to use if you are trying to set a time period in your story or to stay away from if you want your story to be timeless.

I'm having so much fun wracking my brain for items that have existed in my life time. I hope you are enjoying these items as much as I am. 

Wall-mounted telephones. Ours had an insanely long cord that was always twisted and even though it was really long I could only pull it far enough to get inside the basement door and close it and stand there on the top step for privacy.  

Woolworth's. I loved this store.  I come from a very small town and this was the only store we had. But even if it wasn't the only one it would still be my favorite.  I loved the cheap prices, the wild items and all the different stock they carried.  It was varied like a CVS or a Walmart and cheap! Our store was old and carried the original sign that said F.W. Woolworth five and dime store. I bought a lot of nail polish and lipstick for a dime. The retail chain was founded in 1879 and went out of business in 1997. Because the company had not trademarked the name in other countries where they expanded, such as the UK, Australia and Germany other companies adopted the name and are or were still running after the original F.W. Woolworth's chains closed.  
Some Woolworth's stores had lunch counters, and on February 1, 1960 in Greensboro NC four black students sat at a segregated lunch counter in Woolworth's and were denied service. This sparked a six month sit in that became a landmark event in the US's civil-rights movement. In 1993 an eight foot section of the lunch counter was moved to the Smithsonian museum. The Woolworth's store site in Greensboro is now the site of a civil- rights museum which opened on the fiftieth anniversary of the sit ins.

   

Washington Mutual   The bank with attitude. The first bank that had fun and pulled in a younger hipper crowd. How they managed to screw up I will never understand.  I was sad to see them go. Washington Mutual Bank's closure and receivership is the largest bank failure in American financial history when it collapsed in 2008.

White out- the gloppy old liquid style.  I love the new easy to use rollers that are instantly dry.

Watch live tv. This used to be the only way to watch tv because there were no dvrs, pause, ff or rewind features. You had to watch commercials. I actually didn't watch them but used them as the time to change laundry, do dishes, something active and useful so I did not sit for the whole hour long show straight. For this reason only I miss the commercials but I do not watch live tv except for sports, and I am not alone in this viewing style.

Wrist bands When I wanted to go to a concert and see a band I had to wait in line to get a wrist band and then I could line up to buy the concert tickets. Sometimes I had to camp out to get tickets to shows when they didn't offer wrist bands.  Now you just get online and order your tickets. A lot less work and stress than the old days.

Whole album- Now in the age of buying a single song before the age of downloading MP3s you can purchase exactly which song you like from any album. Before you could by a single song on a 45s, which had a flip side so you got two songs, but only the songs the record company thought would be a hit would be released on a 45. If there was another song you wanted from the album you had to by the whole album. You also listened to the whole album in the order that the musicians intended it to be played. 

Happy writing!

A to Z - V

For my A to Z Challenge theme I will be posting items that are no longer with us or are close to becoming extinct.

These are great items to use if you are trying to set a time period in your story or to stay away from if you want your story to be timeless.

I'm having so much fun wracking my brain for items that have existed in my life time. I hope you are enjoying these items as much as I am. 

Vio - I had never actually heard of this product and probably with good reason.

Vio

Coke labeled it a"vibrancy drink."  What does that mean?  Vio is carbonated flavored milk.  Which sounds truly gross. In 2009 market tests in locations including New York, shockingly, it failed to find broad appeal.

Viewmaster- As a kid this was so cool. The round disks had photos on them, you put them in the Viewmaster pulled down the little lever and the disk spun and you viewed an image on the disk.  I still see them sometimes at state parks but I don't think they can compete with all the technology kids have. A viewmaster is going to lose to a tablet anytime.

VCRs and video tapes- These bulky tapes and machines have been replaced by disks.
Video Discs- these are the only disks that did not survive. These discs were the size of old records, full length albums.

ValuJet Airlines (1993 - 1997)

Thanks for visiting.
Happy Writing!

A to Z - U

For my A to Z Challenge theme I will be posting items that are no longer with us or are close to becoming extinct.

These are great items to use if you are trying to set a time period in your story or to stay away from if you want your story to be timeless.

I'm having so much fun wracking my brain for items that have existed in my life time. I hope you are enjoying these items as much as I am.  Okay, this statement was true until today.  

I can only come up with one item:

• USAir (1979-1996) which was renamed as US Airways (1996-2015)

If anyone else can come up with an item please post it in your comment.  

On the upside if you were pressed for time today you just got through this post in no time!

Happy Writing!

A to Z - T

For my A to Z Challenge theme I will be posting items that are no longer with us or are close to becoming extinct.

These are great items to use if you are trying to set a time period in your story or to stay away from if you want your story to be timeless.

I'm having so much fun wracking my brain for items that have existed in my life time. I hope you are enjoying these items as much as I am.

As I sit here at night crafting these lists my husband is watching TV and my kids are, hopefully, sleeping. I remember being so impressed with myself as a kid when I could stay up all the way until the TV went off the air. Yes, the TV would go off the air.  They would show a waving american flag and say good night. Then you would get static.

Ticker tape (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticker_tape) was the earliest digital electronic communications medium, transmitting stock price information over telegraph lines, in use between around 1870 through 1970. It consisted of a paper strip that ran through a machine called a stock ticker, which printed abbreviated company names as alphabetic symbols followed by numeric stock transaction price and volume information. The term "ticker" came from the sound made by the machine as it printed.

Paper ticker tape became obsolete in the 1960s, as television and computers were increasingly used to transmit financial information. The concept of the stock ticker lives on, however, in the scrolling electronic tickers seen on brokerage walls and on financial television networks.

Ticker tape stock price telegraphs were invented in 1867 by Edward A. Calahan, an employee of the American Telegraph Company.^[1]

Ticker tapes were constantly generated and created a lot of waste which was why they were a great idea to use as streamers for parades.  Even though the ticker tape is no longer with us we still have ticker tape parades, usually using shredded documents in place of the ticker tape.  


The Thing. No this is not the B horror movie, I am talking about the Volkswagen Type 181-sold in the US as Thing. I loved this car. As a teenager it was the most fun car I had ever driven in. You could fold down the windshield, take off the doors,and it was a convertible. I had a lot of fun in this very utilitarian vehicle. It was only sold in the US from 1973–74. It was designed for the German military and was sold to the public in many countries with different names but it had the shortest run in the US. I rarely see these around but when I do I am instantly a teenager driving around the back roads of Vermont sans top, windshields and some times doors.



I cannot continue this walk down memory lane without discussing TWA.  The first boy I had a crush on in high school, his dad was a pilot for TWA. I remember this because he got to take a lot of cool trips and he knew how to scuba dive our freshman year.
Trans World Air- TWA was founded in 1930 and declared bankruptcy in 1992 and was purchased by American Airlines in 2001.
The letter T might not be a good letter to start the name of your airline. Here are a couple more failures. 
Tower air (1983 -2000)  
Trump Shuttle (1989 - 1991) Not everything he touches turns to gold.

Tamagotchis by Bandai. These little electronic pets were all the rage when they came out in 1996. If you did not feed and care for your pet it would die. I was shocked to learn they came out with the new version below in 2004. I remember them being super popular and then gone. Although I was luckily too old for them myself and didn't have kids who wanted them, I heard about them from the parents at work and it was the must have item and then they seemed to just disappear. Maybe all the pets were dead and parents refused to buy new ones.  Better to test your kid on a digital pet than a real one.



Tokens, subway. I haven't lived in NY for a long time but I was saddened to learn that tokens for the subway and bus have been replaced by cards. Yes, the cards are more convenient but there was something so cool about the tokens. C'est la vie.

It is late and the tv will keep showing thousands of things all night. It is time to drag myself away and go to bed.

Happy Writing!

A to Z - S

For my A to Z Challenge theme I will be posting items that are no longer with us or are close to becoming extinct.

These are great items to use if you are trying to set a time period in your story or to stay away from if you want your story to be timeless.

I'm having so much fun wracking my brain for items that have existed in my life time. I hope you are enjoying these items as much as I am.

Service stations. They are now more appropriately called gas stations because the full service is gone. There are no longer station attendants who fill your tank, check your oil and wiper fluid.  If I still lived somewhere with weather I would mourn the loss of these service stations more than I do living in sunny CA where I am never out in the elements and it is never colder than 50 degrees F.

Shorthand was essential for taking records of oral dictation. It used to be an essential part of training for all secretaries and necessary for journalists. Dictation machines, recorders, and of course the computer have made stenography and shorthand unnecessary.  I always wish I knew shorthand because while I was in college we didn't have laptops to take to class.  I had a really cool Brother typewriter that could remember two sentences of type before you printed it on the page so you could correct before printing and having to deal with messy white out. Yes, it used to be a gloppy and messy liquid. 

Saturn-  "A different kind of car company." Saturn emerged in 1985 and disappeared in 2010. Saturn was owned by GM and still has a website that directs you to other GM cars you can purchase.

 Studebaker Phaeton

Studebaker This classic car existed from 1852–1963. Headquartered in South Bend Indiana. They came out with electric vehicles in 1902! Their first gasoline car was built in 1912.

Salesmen, door to door. While they are not gone, we still have Avon, Mary Kay, AmWay and a host of other these tend to be people you meet or know they do not just show up at your door and knock on it trying to sell you a vacuum or a set of encyclopedias. That may be because so many people work and no one is home during the day but the internet also made the need for someone to come to you and tell you about a product unnecessary.

Shag rug. No one misses these wall to wall monstrosities. This was the reason we had to have door to door vacuum salesmen. These rugs were murder on vacuums and you could loose a small pet in the carpet. Looking back on them they came in hideous colors and patterns, I am sure the people who bought them wouldn't agree with me. These rugs definitively set a period for your story, welcome to the 70's. 
 Lovely right?

Sam Goody: Retailer of music and entertainment in the US and UK. Founded in 1956 they went defunct in 2006.  Suncoast Motion Picture Company and Sam Goody were both purchased by Trans World and suffered the same fate as Sam Goody in 2006.

Happy Writing!

A to Z - R

For my A to Z Challenge theme I will be posting items that are no longer with us or are close to becoming extinct.

These are great items to use if you are trying to set a time period in your story or to stay away from if you want your story to be timeless.

Radio Shack The makers of the first home computer the TRS - 80 (To see it in action watch "War Games") is about to exist only in memory, just like that computer.

Roller balls in the computer mouse. Replaced by a red light. 

Rolodex The way we stored important phone numbers before our phones did everything for us.  I am amazed at how many items that I have put on this list that have been replaced by the smart phone.

Rotary dial phones.  There is a funny scene with rotary dial phones in both "Aliens in the Attic" and "In & Out".  If you have not seen "In & Out" you are missing out! It is a must see.
These phones made winning call-in contests unbearable. You would sit and anxiously wait for the dial to spin back into place so you could dial the next number.  

Happy Writing!

A to Z - Q

For my A to Z Challenge theme I will be posting items that are no longer with us or are close to becoming extinct.

These are great items to use if you are trying to set a time period in your story or to stay away from if you want your story to be timeless.

Quill pens - still around, rarely in use.



Q*bert -This was a popular arcade video game released in 1982. The odd character, Q*bert, would "swear" in a speech bubble filled with characters (like you can see on the side of the video game above) when he would encounter an enemy or die.  He is still around, in fact he made an appearance in "Wreck It Ralph" but the video game is not popular like it was in the 80's.

A to Z - P

For my A to Z Challenge theme I will be posting items that are no longer with us or are close to becoming extinct.

These are great items to use if you are trying to set a time period in your story or to stay away from if you want your story to be timeless.

Party lines were phone company telephone lines that were shared among multiple households. In the 1800s they were introduced to serve rural areas and to offer a discount to customers,  In rural areas and during times of war this was often the only option available. These lines offered little privacy and spread a lot of gossip.  If you want to see a movie about party lines I recommend "Pillow Talk" with Doris Day and Rock Hudson.

Some other phone related items that are practically gone: phone books and pay phones.

Pneumatic tubes. As a kid I loved going to the  department stores and to the drive up bank tellers because they had pneumatic tubes. These magical devices that would suck up the little cylinder and transport the paperwork inside to where it needed to go. I loved it when my mom would let me put the cylinder in the tube and it would sucked right out of my hand.

Ford Pinto

SuperStock / getty

The 1971 model was the first released and may be one of the worst cars  due to the fact/belief that the car could literally explode when involved in a rear-end collision.  In 1978 they recalled the cars due to the lawsuits. A later study proved the cars were as safe as others. Which I found surprising because I think Pinto I think exploding gas tank. Some bad press continues forever.

Pan Am- Pan American World Airways with the iconic logo began business in 1927 and declared bankruptcy in 1991.

 Pets.com 

Pets.com was a textbook example of dot-com flame-out, going from IPO to liquidation in nine short months.   All I remember is the puppet on the commercials.

Since I have a plethora of P's here are a few that will get perfunctory mention:

Polaroid Photos

Parachute Pants- so glad these are gone. Hideous!

Punch cards for computers

The Pullman Co.

Getty images

Happy Writing!

A to Z - O

For my A to Z Challenge theme I will be posting items that are no longer with us or are close to becoming extinct.

These are great items to use if you are trying to set a time period in your story or to stay away from if you want your story to be timeless.


Oldsmobile (1897–2004) When I was five my parents sold our family car, an Oldsmobile station wagon. I laid in the back and cried and had to be dragged out of the car.  Looking back at it now I cannot understand why I was so attached to a car.  When I heard that Oldsmobile would be no more I remembered our car with fondness and felt sad for the loss of such an iconic car brand.

Out houses.   I had to use an out house in Italy in 1992 and while port - o - potties are very much like an out house they are not meant to be your main place to relieve yourself as an out house was. Luckily for most of us we have indoor plumbing.

Office, Microsoft 97 Assistant Clippy.  At first blush this was a cute little animated paperclip.  But once you started using the software Clippy would interrupt you with comments like, "It looks like you're writing a letter. Would you like help?"   Clippy became very annoying very quickly. It made assumptions and would pop up and disrupt our work.  I had changed mine to a cute puppy but it was still annoying.



Olestra - If you visited yesterday we discussed the amazingly bad idea of New Coke. Olestra is in the same marketing ball park.  It was touted and promoted in 1996 and then in a few short years it had almost completely disappeared. It is still in some products but very few. Because of the potential side effects, it caused diarrhea and if I remember correctly you were not supposed to let children eat it, Olestra, also known as Olean, would affect the absorption of fat soluble vitamins so additional vitamins needed to be added to the products Olean was in; I also remember my girlfriend complaining about the taste of Olestra products. These may have been the cause of its demise.

Happy writing my friends!

A to Z - N

For my A to Z Challenge theme I will be posting items that are no longer with us or are close to becoming extinct.

These are great items to use if you are trying to set a time period in your story or to stay away from if you want your story to be timeless.


Nickel–cadmium battery (NiCd battery or NiCad battery) is a type of rechargeable battery invented in 1898. Since the 1990's Nicds have been replaced by Nickel metal hydride and Lithium Ion rechargeable batteries with better capacity.  The heavy cadmium metal is worse for the environment and these batteries can only be purchased as replacements in the European Union.


 New Coke one lesson I have learned at work is you don't mess with people's pay or their food.  Coca-cola learned that lesson the hard way. The new, sweeter, version of Coke was introduced April 23, 1985.  There was a public outcry which caused the company to go back to their to the original Coke formula, okay not the 100 year old original because cocaine was understandably removed, only three months after the release of New Coke. Marketing had to add the word Classic coke to all their cans and bottles to assuage consumers.

 Nintendo Virtual Boy  was it's shortest-lived system.  It was on the market for only six months in 1995. I think it was a little to ambitious for the available technology. The Nintendo Virtual Boy was a bulky, red headgear that completely obscured a gamer's vision as he tried to play games rendered in rudimentary 3-D graphics. It was expensive, retailing at $180, and only 14 were ever available in the U.S.

Happy Writing!

A to Z - M

For my A to Z Challenge theme I will be posting items that are no longer with us or are close to becoming extinct.

These are great items to use if you are trying to set a time period in your story or to stay away from if you want your story to be timeless.

Mrs. Husband's name here only. Can you believe that it's only been 41 years since women could have credit cards in their own name? In 1974 the Equal Credit Opportunity Act was passed that made it against the law to discriminate based on race, sex ,marital status, etc. However the passing of the act didn't mean that married women who had been on their husband's credit card could immediately get their own credit card as they had not ever established their own credit history.  My grandmother and mother both had their credit cards and all bills addressed to Mrs. T. Smith. They were Mrs. Husband not Mrs. Anna or Palmina. When my grandfather passed my grandmother could not keep using her credit cards because they were all in a dead persons name but she had no credit history and she was in her 70s. This was a wake up call for my mother who in the late 1980's still had her credit cards as Mrs. Smith.

Manual or roll down windows. Yes, kids there used to be a lever on the car door that was used to manually, that means by hand, roll up and down your car windows. There are still cars out there with them but they are fewer and fewer.

Maps. When we drove in cars we used a fold-able paper map or an atlas, a book of maps, to get around. Now we use our phones or in car navigation systems.

Milkman. US Dept of Agriculture states that in 1950 over half of the milk was delivered to homes by the milkman, by 1963 it was a third and in 2001 it was .4%. 

Myspace It is still there but does anyone still use it?

Pure maple syrup, produced across the cooler northern regions of the United States and Canada, is losing its sweetness and may go away entirely. In my home state of New Hampshire, researchers have been studying the effect of climate change on syrup’s source, the sugar maple, and have found that warmer temperatures are resulting in shorter and shorter sapping seasons and less sugary sap. If New England—which is 2 to 4 degrees warmer than it was 100 years ago—gains another 6 degrees in average temperature, sugar maples could disappear completely. This would be devastating to not only loose a food source but a whole species of trees. Trees, which counteracts global warming  Growing up we always took a field trip to a maple syrup producer. It was fun to go out scoop up a handful of snow and pour on maple syrup then eat our delicious homemade snow cones. It was also very interesting to learn about the trees, how they were tapped and watch the syrup being produced. I hope that children will be able to continue to take this field trip long into the future.

MCI WorldCom a long distance phone service, because long distance used to cost more than local calls, that started in 1983. They were doing some Enron type accounting and went bankrupt in 2002 and then in 2006 Verizon purchased them.

Montgomery Ward began in 1872 as a catalog, then a retail store in 1926. By the mid 1960s the company's catalog sales began to weaken and it continued it's decline until it's demise in 2001 when it closed all it's stores. This store was akin to Sears and JC Penny.

Happy Writing!

A to Z - L

For my A to Z Challenge theme I will be posting items that are no longer with us or are close to becoming extinct.

These are great items to use if you are trying to set a time period in your story or to stay away from if you want your story to be timeless.

I am not much of a shopper but I love to shop for anything having to do with cooking and odd or unique items.  I was so sad when my local Linens and Things closed down they had weird quirky items and lots of kitchen gadgets. They were very much like Bed Bath and Beyond but for some reason I liked them better. In 2008 they disappeared. In researching this post I was shocked to find they opened up again as an online retailer only in 2009 at www.LNT.com.  


Leisure Suits- the name is an oxymoron. Who thinks of a suit and comfortably lounging around?  They epitomize the 70s in the US.  Look at all that lovely polyester.
 


Staying with the  1970's- Leaded gas began phasing out in the early '70s and was finally banned in the US in 1995.  Lead was added to gas because it boosted the octane levels in fuel and acted as a lubricant in the soft valves seats that were in older engines. The lead was terrible for the environment, our health and caked on the spark plugs so you had to change them more frequently than you do with unleaded gas.

Lionel Corporation model trains. I seem to be stuck around the 1970's. Lionel trains were the model train. My father and uncle fought, as full grown adults, over who got to keep their childhood Lionel train set. In 1967 the company went bankrupt. There is a Lionel LLC now but it is not the same company as the Lionel Corporation that made all the model trains.

 

Lickable stamps- I am sure they still exist but I never see them and I certainly don't miss licking stamps. The convenience of peel and stick is wonderful and will continue to be the most prevalent form of stamps in the US. Okay so all of this is my opinion with no research but I think I am right here so I'm going with it.

Happy Writing!

A to Z - K

For my A to Z Challenge theme I will be posting items that are no longer with us or are close to becoming extinct.

These are great items to use if you are trying to set a time period in your story or to stay away from if you want your story to be timeless.

If, like me, you watch "Love It or List It" you will be very familiar with this obsolete electrical wiring; Knob and tube. Homes in the U.S. built from around 1880 to the 1940s often still have knob and tube electrical wiring. This is where electrical wires anchored by ceramic insulating knobs pass through tubes placed inside holes drilled in the joists of the house. I also grew up in a house with this wiring but it was not something you saw. We knew if a house was old when it had the panel with two buttons, one that stuck out while the other was pushed in, on the wall instead of the flip switch.

Knobs, yes continuing with Knobs, they used to be on your television and they were the only way to change the channel and another for the volume. You had to walk to the television, and rotate the knobs around the thirteen channels you had to choose from. There was also a knob to stabilize your picture which you used once the antenna had been adjusted.

Captain Kangaroo This was my favorite kids show growing up. I got up every morning and watched Captain Kangaroo and his wonderful cast of characters. I even had a Little Golden Book about Captain Kangaroo and the puppy who needed a home. It was Mr. Green Jeans who taught me to stay away from squirrels because they may look cute and fluffy but they have sharp claws and teeth and can be vicious. I would find this out in Central Park when two of them, not the slightest bit afraid of me, took over my backpack to get my grapes.
Captain Kangaroo, played by Bob Keeshan, was on weekday mornings from 1955 through 1984, that my friends is almost 30 years!


Happy Writing!