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.
