I do. Also remember smoking in restaurants, and movie theaters. After the smoking ban in USA, I was in Paris ( France). I thought I was in heaven smoking in restaurants again. Then had their beer.
Who Remembers Smoking Cars?
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spike, that's my part of the world, but I grew up closer in, so I could walk to one of the outer boroughs of Chicago, Edison Park, and then catch the bus to the subway/L if I didn't have a monthly train ticket (in high school on weekends). No smoking on the bus or subway. But for a kid, it was adventure.
My smoking car memories go back to steam locomotives, to date myself for sure. We used to stand on the platform as those devils rattled by dusting embers in their path. I think they were old Baldwin locomotives, big pistons and bells on the top of the boiler. Steam locomotives in general were one apex of mechanical engineering. Even at home, late at night, we could hear them getting up steam headed up the ridge from the station. Sometimes they'd lose traction and have to build up steam all over again. They were dramatic.
ha, and grocery stores.
When I was in Missouri a few years ago they had a smoking section in the Waffle House.
Speaking of smoking traditions and culture, my late wife went to a Paris restaurant during her college years and ordered a meal with several courses, but made the terrible mistake of lighting a cigarette,maybe after the soup course. And the waiter came out and peremptorily ended the meal, on the basis that a smoke was only acceptable after the final course of dessert. Naturally my wife was offended, but when in France ... and all that. She did say, it was nearly impossible to get a bad meal in a French restaurant in France.
Not in the US, as I didn’t ride the train much and wasn’t of age back in the 60’s, but in the UK in the early 80’s.
Or the two day post-bar lung pain?
I’m from Jefferson Park : Elston and Austin. Bunch of my buddies went to St. Juliana.
I always thought Edison Park and Norwood Park looked kind of neat, less suburban but still walkable. As an underclassman, I commuted to college, U of I, first at Navy Pier as a freshman, then at what was then called Congress Circle, the new U of I campus on the west side. I believe smoking cars were still standard, even though that would have been 1964-65. I was horrified when my journalistic idol David Haberstam in an interview, referred to it as a community college, his failure as a reporter, just because he got uplifted to University of Chicago. Well, smell me. Both were actually satellite campuses of U of I, all courses transferable. Haberstam is still a historical journalist and a historian, but it illustrates how people turn snobbish when their luck is kind. And ... I have the greatest respect for community colleges, where my dad made a good second career after retirement.
No shit Brobs! The two day consumptive hack after spending four hours in a smoke filled bar. I remember pubs in London where the smoke only cleared when someone opened the door to come in. Everything stank of cheap cigarettes or RYO so that if you went for a jar the next morning the place smelled like a fecking homeless shelter!
I don't miss the stench of cigarette smoke since they banned it indoors and cigarettes are not humankind's greatest invention ever.
My parcel was last reported at Heathrow on August 8th.
Hope you can make it back to the UK soon.
I would like it if we could meet up once you've returned but I'm up in Derbyshire...
I think the USPS has been under funded and most of its vehicles seem way past their sell by date!
I think it is now officially recognized as "The University of Illinois at Chicago"
The wife and I took the AutoTrain in 2010 from northern Virginia to the Orlando area. There was a smoking section in the bar car, and although there were signs to dictate cigarette smoking only, no one complained about my pipe. That feature is now gone.
My wife and I took a train from Raleigh, N.C., to NYC a few years ago and we were really taken by the pleasant rocking of the car, but mostly by the strange time travel, since most of the rail beds run through neighborhoods established and not much changed from the 1930's and 40's, so it is a sort of time travel, both the mode of transportation and the scenery. Though the dining car isn't what it used to be, I remember the wonderful experience of having lunch on white table clothes and eating food far better than average. The table ware from those earlier times is now collectible. I even remember when dinner at the airport was a dressy occasion.
Somewhere Mark Twain said that nothing improves a plate of ham and eggs like watching the scenery pass as you eat them.
The factory I work at now has placed people in a smoke shack out side they are all over the plant. Now with covid they only allow 3 people in each shack. over 3500 people and they want three to a shack. When i first started here they had a few machines that the "new" people started on that still had ash trays welded to the machines.
I used to work at a glass factory in southeast Missouri where I operated an IS ( individual section) machine that made glassware containers like liquor bottles and various other bottles and jars, large and small. The department I worked was called the Hot End. Go figure, it was hot. Anyway, up until probably 2013-14 it was acceptable to smoke at your machine. Even after that we still smoked on the floor and no one ever really said anything about it, just had to be discreet. The cigarette smell would be gone in a matter of minutes anyway. We had to swab the mold parts on our machines every 15-20 minutes with what is called dope, which is like a graphite oil. The dope smell dominated everything else.
That was a crazy place to work and my life was pretty crazy during those years as well.
That was a crazy place to work and my life was pretty crazy during those years as well.
Loren, University of Illinois at Chicago it is. How Halberstam could have been so misinformed his whole adult life about where he started in school staggers the mind, especially since reporting was a discipline he pursued. I'll never get my mind around that. University of Chicago, where he transferred is a distinguished university, such that its alums sort of look down their noses at the Ivy League, but that still doesn't excuse overlooking the blue collar, foreign student, part-time adult student glories of a university housed since just after World War II at Navy Pier, an actual shipping pier. How could he have missed the gritty admirable qualities of that? I guess in all talented people there are holes in their perception, and that certainly illustrates his. My maternal grandfather, from a little town well west of Chicago, graduated from one of the first law school classes at University of Chicago, so the family received a bit of the luster of that. My younger sister was accepted there but didn't go because it was so expensive. I squeaked in at University of Illinois -- low SAT's but acceptable ACT's -- by the skin of my teeth. A huge crowded baby boomer class with flunk-out biology courses which I handled well, and later had a career in science, despite majoring and minoring in other subjects, as a support guy writing and editing.
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