Submitted 1 year ago by BonesOfTheMoon@lemmy.world to [deleted]
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/f576dfa9-2e78-4b27-bea9-4adbd89bc193.jpeg
Yeah, it was weird. Most restaurants had a non-smoking section because allowing people to smoke everywhere was the norm. Leaded gasoline. Little kids playing with real fireworks. The 70s and 80s were a wild ride of irresponsibility.
It wasn’t all bad, though. It was cool being a kid at times. Playing outside almost every day until dinner time with the other kids in the neighborhood.
Little kids playing with real fireworks.
In the early 2000s as teenagers we’d go play in the town with bags of fireworks on new year lmao
Other way around. There usually were small smoking sections partitioned away from the rest of the restaurant. This was the norm. And it was usually a fraction of the tables compared to the non-smoking sections.
Source: Worked as a server through most of the 80’s-90’s.
They had smoking/non-smoking sections into the 90s and early 2000s in Texas. I remember very clearly that my parents would have to ask for seats away from the bar if the restaurant had one, because they almost always allowed smoking. Also hotel rooms being smoking/non-smoking, and you could tell when a hotel was cheap and just swapped the door sign.
As a child of the 70s/80s, although I don’t remember a great deal of the 70s, your parents had no idea where you were until you came home when the streetlights went on, unless you happened to call from a friend’s house to ask if you could sleep over. I remember my friend getting run over by a car which broke her leg because there was no crossing guard on the busy street where the kids had to cross to go to school, and after that they hired one. I lived up the street from the school, and had a cat that went outside, on hot days the front doors were always open and sometimes she’d go nap in the library or show up in my classroom. Then the neighbour who hates animals and had lost his teaching job for exposing himself to students abducted her and dumped her way across town, but someone found her and put an ad in the list and found section of the paper so I got her back.
Non smoking section with like an 18 inch wall separating it from the smoking section. My mom almost got into a fistfight at a couple of restaurants for seating us directly next to the smoking section instead of in the opposite corner.
And it was usually next to the kitchen and the restrooms. Worst tables all around.
In most restaurants I saw there was no wall in between.
Don’t forget no cell phones. It’s hard to overstate the (I believe negative) impact constant connection and notification has had on every aspect of our lives
Some boomer on Facebook recently posted a meme with a photo of a rotary phone and how those were better days, and I had to laugh because they decidedly weren’t. When we had no answering machine or call waiting, and had to hang around for phone calls that might come, or have the car break down on the side of the road and hope that someone would stop and help you and that they weren’t a serial killer, that was purely awful. We actually had a serial killer couple abducting and killing teenage girls in my city before cell phones existed, and they made tapes of them raping and torturing these girls before they killed them. A cell phone would probably have helped them a lot.
Wish I could still buy one of those.
Also once about eight years ago I was in Kentucky doing the bourbon trail. It’s pretty rural aside from the distilleries, and finding somewhere to eat lunch on Sunday was hard as almost everything is closed, we ended up at some place they called a bourbon gastropub, but that meant that the dining room side was the only part fit to eat in, but all that was open was the horrible bar which was made of raw particle board, and there were members of the Klan sitting at it, who had the leather vests with the blood drop cross. There was literally nowhere else to eat so we ordered, but I felt terrified the whole time, and as we were wrapping up one of the Klan lit a cigarette at the bar and just sat there, and nobody said anything. It was quite stunning.
Crazy that these places still exist, but I guess not that surprising.
Justas@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
My neighbour smokes indoors. When she opens the door, I get the smell you are talking about.
BonesOfTheMoon@lemmy.world 1 year ago
My aunt smoked two packs a day, in the house, and when I visited I had to wear clothes I was ready to throw away, had to strip and shower when I got home, and once in the space of an hour she smoked seven cigarettes and finally one of my eyes swelled shut, and she demanded to know why I didn’t say anything. My husband pointed out the walls were yellow with tobacco, she lived in the house she grew up in and all the furniture was the same as when she was a child. When she died it all had to be junked, despite some of it probably being antique.
SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml 1 year ago
The tar might have helped it burn better