Those were the days, my friends

[OutOfTowner]

Originally Posted by GlassCity

This might not fit with the spirit of the thread, but I miss the time before I was 19. I know that'll sound ridiculous to those of you who know how old I am, but still.

That was when summers were summers and I didn't have to work over 60 hours a week in them. Passing a 40 around in the park by school, or pouring vodka into slurpees and just wander around town. Didn't matter what day or what time, you didn't have a single planned activity for days after that. Bars weren't an option so house parties were way more common and meeting people was way easier. You could spend an entire day smoking pot at Garry Point Park, and do the same the next. Go play tennis, or sit at home all day on SSP, or walk 30 minutes to Safeway just to get a bag of chips. Really it was just the sheer amount of time you had that there was no sense of being rushed to enjoy it, the same way you feel like you have to go outside when it's sunny. I don't even miss my high school years at all, but looking back with rose-coloured glasses, parts of them were pretty cool.

Why the fuck would you feel the need to work 60 hours a week?

Grab a bag of chips, a vodka slurpee, smoke a joint, wander around a park and ask yourself "Why am I working 60 hours a week?".

[lio45]

Originally Posted by GlassCity

or sit at home all day on SSP

There's no age for that

Nice post, actually! I can relate. I sometimes miss that sweet short window in a lifetime - mid teens - where you're old enough to be exploring your city, managing your own time and making your own decisions, yet young enough that you still live at your parents and don't have to work or think about any of the grown ups' responsibilities.

I recall that sometimes I would lose track of both which day of the week it was and which day numerically it was. All I'd know was that we were somewhere in the middle of July and that back to school was still far away.

Edit: I suppose total retirement can be the exact same thing... if one wishes.

[esquire]

^ Summers seemed so long back then... when school broke in June it felt like you had forever before you had to think about it again!

[lio45]

Originally Posted by OutOfTowner

Why the fuck would you feel the need to work 60 hours a week?

To be able to have a slight chance of managing to gather enough for a down payment on property in his city by the time he's 120 years old...?

[p_xavier]

Originally Posted by khabibulin

It may have been more civil, but you paid for it! I remember my first flight to Europe was about $800 in 1980. That was for a return ticket from Winnipeg to Amsterdam. I don't even want tp think how much that would be in 2017 dollars. Stayed for 6 months to make it worthwhile! Also flew with KLM on a 747. As far as security, it's a different world now.

Yes, that's why I don't understand the complaints. You can buy business/first class tickets and have the nearly same service as back then. And without any smoking.

[MolsonExport]

Originally Posted by GernB

Reminds me of the beverage rooms at the Butte and Shaughnessy Hotels near where I grew up. Of course, no one really cared if you were underage then, it was easy to get in if you looked like you close to legal. 25 cents a glass for draft with the ALCB lines, cutoff at midnight when your table would order a hundred...

Indeed. My first ventures into the bar scene (at the tender age of 14...that would have been 1983) were in these types of places. Namely, the erstwhile Cousineau's Tavern (off limits to women), and the Brasserie Bellevue (open to women, but basically a tavern), both in Sainte Anne de Bellevue (western end of Montreal Island). They usually didn't ask for ID (even though I looked about 11 when I was 14). When rules started to tighten up, I easily procured fake ID at a nearby shop that would laminate anything for a buck or two. Nobody cared.

There was generally only one beer on tap (Molson Export, or maybe Labatt 50 ["Cinquante!"]. Beer was often sold as cheap as 25 cents for 8oz. You could also buy "quarts" (large bottles of about 700ml, with non-twist caps that had to be opened by the bartender). Molson Export, O'Keefe Ale, Dow, Laurentide, Labatt 50, Brador, and sometimes, Black Label or Molson Old Stock or Labatt Porter were the only options. No fucking Budweiser or Coors light.

If you were hungry, you had a great selection of food items to choose from: Pickled eggs, Pickled pork tongues, bags of Yum-Yum chips, and peanuts. And salt. That's it.

Of course they also sold cigarettes (really helped my budding addiction which took me decades to finally conquer). Players (filtered and unfiltered). DuMaurier Regular and King size. Green Death (Export 'A' greens; filtered and unfiltered). Sweet Caporal. Rothman's. Maybe Cameo or Peter Jackson.

A shitty 14-inch black and white TV for hockey games. Sometimes some old newspapers and magazines. Ubiquitous Molson Export clock on the wall.

The places may have been shit holes, but I had a lot of good times there.

Over the years, almost all of the old-style bars and taverns in the West Island (Montreal) were burned down. Mostly on purpose (Mafia and their minions).

[MolsonExport]

Anyone remember the rollerskating rinks of the 1970s?

[240glt]

^ Roller Heaven in Vernon BC. Closed in the mid 80's but I do remember it

[MolsonExport]

years ago on this site, I had commented about the scene in Ste. Anne de Bellevue back in the 80s:

Originally Posted by MolsonExport

Yeah, New Westminster was a total surprise when I moved to Vancouver...it was much seedier in the early 90s, but I liked it all the same.

Yeah, the perimeter of the West Island would come as a big surprise to some (Malek?). I remember the rougher days of Pointe-Claire Village...5-6 bars, hydro poles right on the street (accidents? you betcha), the working class 'hood...mostly gentrified now. Same with Ste. Anne de Bellevue: a town that is almost completely working class francophone in appearance (Save for John Abbot) but is largely mixed between Anglos/Francos. Ste. Anne was considerably tattered back in the eighties (looked like a Ville Saint-Pierre by the locks), but the boardwalk, and general cleanup has been remarkable (and the mob burned down most of the bars...some rebuilt, some not).
Burned bars in Ste. Anne:
-Larry McQuin Hotel
-Le Boum Bar
-Le Brasserie Bellevue
-Ste. Anne's Pool Hall
-Cousineau’s Tavern
-Quai Sera
-Marco's Pizzeria
-Annie's Pub had at least 2 major fires, but keeps going.
-some chinese restaurant also burned

ville st. pierre is the armpitiest armpit of all armpits

http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/newr...eply&p=6054554

[ssiguy]

....................................................car!!...........................................................

[MolsonExport]

^street hockey?

[kwoldtimer]

Originally Posted by d_jeffrey

Yes, that's why I don't understand the complaints. You can buy business/first class tickets and have the nearly same service as back then. And without any smoking.

That's the way I look at it, but most of the market seems determined to continue flying while paying as little as possible. We've seen how that turns out.

[Doug]

Originally Posted by 240glt

^ Roller Heaven in Vernon BC. Closed in the mid 80's but I do remember it

or The Boardwalk in Kelowna. Could slide the day away at Wild Waters and cross the parking lot for the blinking lights and tunes (Turn Me Loose my Loverboy) at night.

Reminds of other Okanagan tourist traps of the day... Wild N' Wet in Westbank, Flintstones Bedrock City, Old Macdonald's Farm

[240glt]

^ or the Alice in Wonderland between Oyama and Windfield with all those animatronic displays and the big slide...

We drove past the Enchanted Forest on our way through BC a few weeks ago and I joked that we should go in. It's one of the few tourist trappy places left in the area anymore. 3 Valley Gap is a mere shadow of what it used to be

[Razor]

Originally Posted by MolsonExport

Anyone remember the rollerskating rinks of the 1970s?

Ahh yes..Late 70's anyways.

These were on the rink's playlist at the time.. Also yes to road hockey..Seemed like every block had a game going on, and each street challenged each other.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d02k10Bz6ro

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10_QxxDT2KQ

[GlassCity]

Originally Posted by OutOfTowner

Why the fuck would you feel the need to work 60 hours a week?

Grab a bag of chips, a vodka slurpee, smoke a joint, wander around a park and ask yourself "Why am I working 60 hours a week?".

I am a student, and am moving away for my master's degree this year. The degree (but more so living sans the comfort of my parent's house and food) is expensive. My parents would be willing to give me as much as I need there, but I'd feel guilty about working less and having them contribute more of their own resources just so I could drink vodka slurpees and smoke joints more often.

Originally Posted by lio45

To be able to have a slight chance of managing to gather enough for a down payment on property in his city by the time he's 120 years old...?

Haha there's a kernel of truth to this too

[rousseau]

Originally Posted by MolsonExport

Indeed. My first ventures into the bar scene (at the tender age of 14...

Crikey, you sure had a different adolescence from what I had! My friends in high school were all first and second generation immigrants with strict, socially conservative parents, so there wasn't any hardcore partying or bar-hopping going on for us. Now and then we had furtive house parties when someone's parents went back to the old country for a few weeks, but they were always a bit awkward because we were self-consciously aware of our lack of debauchery. We'd just sit around nursing the same can of beer all night while watching MuchMusic.

Good times? Yeah, kind of. I didn't have my first hangover until I went off to university.

[ssiguy]

Originally Posted by MolsonExport

^street hockey?

What else? Those were the days when kids played on the road and not on their IPhones.

Remember when you never locked your bike at school or even your house or car? I never even owned keys to our house until I was 17.

[vid]

I volunteer for a youth centre and I can tell you that lots of kids these days still play outside until the streetlights come on and aren't tied to their phones the whole time (mostly because they can't afford phones, since we live in one of the province's poorest neighbourhoods). We actually just started a partnership with a phone repair shop to get phones without sim cards for them so they can at least call 911 or use WiFi apps to contact family when they're out in case something happens.

My mom is 50 and said that things were always locked up when she was a kid so ssiguy must be pretty old.

[rousseau]

I guess it depends on where you lived. We never locked our doors in our house either growing up, and yeah, we didn't lock our bikes at school. None of us even had locks. And the area set aside for our bikes was always full because the only kids getting a ride to school in a car had legs in casts. It would have been freakishly weird for there to have been a line-up of cars waiting on the street to take kids home.

When did that change? Sometime in the 1990s? Ironically, people nowadays are right on the money about having to pick their kids up in the car due to safety concerns, as with that many cars coming and going around the schoolyard it really is dangerous.