When I was a youngster, there were many things that I figured would be around forever, but this was not meant to be.
In the late 1940s, I often saw the junkman driving a horse-drawn wagon. The scissor-grinder would push his cart down the street, and my family often used his services. From time to time, the organ-grinder and his monkey would appear in downtown Oak Park, and the monkey would go through the crowd collecting pennies and then put them in the organ-grinder’s pocket.
For many years, a grandfather clock stood in our front hall. It had a pendulum with weights, and it struck the hours and half hours. I could hear the bong bong wherever I happened to be in the house. Of course, it had to be wound by hand with a key inserted in a hole in the face of the clock. My grandfather was the custodian of the key and the only person who wound the clock.
My grandmother used a foot-powered sewing machine, and both my mother and grandmother used feather dusters, but it appeared to me that a dust cloth would have been better, because the feather dusters only moved the dust around the room.
We kept fly swatters in the kitchen and on the screened-in back porch during the summer, and I kept score of how many flies I could dispatch in a single day.
At Holmes School, each desk was built like a small table, and the slanted top opened on hinges, and it was here that books and supplies were stored. All of the desks were attached to the chair in front and the desks were also attached to the floor. Some of the desks had a hole for an inkwell, but we filled our fountain pens from the inkwell that was on a window sill near the teacher’s desk. Would the boys really have dipped girls’ braids in a desk inkwell?
There were two pool rooms in Oak Park. One was on South Boulevard between Forest and Marion, and the other was on the second floor of the building on the northwest corner of Marion Street and North Boulevard. Yes, I did visit these places a number of times.
When my uncle and I [mostly him] completed building a recreation room in our basement, he bought a used juke box and filled it with 78 rpm records that shattered if they were dropped. Another type of record was the 45 rpm. It was made of plastic and didn’t shatter, but it too has disappeared. Along the same line is the long-gone reel-to-reel recorder.
Whenever I went to Pedersen’s food store on Chicago Avenue, I usually bought five packs of baseball cards for a quarter, and if I felt like eating, I could go to Prince Castle on Harlem for a hamburger and a Coke for 30 cents.
Two men in our family used Burma Shave, and they all used Gillette safety razors and blades. Many of the grooming products were purchased from the Fuller Brush man who made regular visits going door to door. The men in the family used either Vitalis or Wildroot on their hair, but I used Brylcream. Nowadays, this product would be of no use to me.
Finally, I don’t want to forget Brownie cameras, flash bulbs, TV test patterns, 3 cent stamps, 1 cent postcards, metal ice cube trays and Jiffy Pop popcorn.
I am certain that many of you will remember other vanishing items from our youth, but these are the ones that have stayed in my memory.
John Stanger is a lifelong resident of Oak Park, a 1957 graduate of OPRF High School, married with three grown children and five grandchildren, and an English professor at Elmhurst College. Living two miles from where he grew up, he hasn’t gotten far in 71 years.