THE BEST OF TIMES

I can't remember the exact conversation I was having the other day but it was with a group of younger archaeologists in my crew. We were discussing how things change over time and not always for the best. Which started me thinking about a whole bunch of things that used to be a certain way when I was a kid....

*I lived in a dead end street, these days they call a dead end street a cul de sac (fancy smancy)

*Bread was delivered to our house daily, we used to leave the money in the meter box and the Tip Top delivery person would actually get out of their truck, walk up our footpath onto our front verandah, open the meter box, take the money and leave the bread.

*The garbos used to get out of their truck (you can sense a theme here can't you), in fact that's not quite true, they were already out of their truck as there used to be a driver and two runners. The runners were often WAFL football players as it was a great way to keep fit in the off season and earn a wage (no huge sport star salaries in those days). They would run across our front lawn, open the side gate, grab our bins, carry them on their shoulders to the truck, empty them, run back across our lawn and place the bins back where they got them from with the lids on

*My dad would leave 2 x King Brown sized bottles of beer on top of our letterbox each Xmas week, every year, for the garbos

*Nobody ever stole that beer

*The Bottle-O guy used to come down our street every 3-6 months or so and collect all of my dads empty King Brown beer bottles, bottles that I had diligently stacked up against the side fence almost every day. Dad loved a King Brown. The Bottle-O guy carted the bottles back to his truck by himself and even gave dad money for the empties

*We used to get money for empty coke, fanta and lemonade bottles. We'd take them to the local deli. I can't remember how much we got for them, probably just a few cents

*A truck used to come down our street every week with bottles of soda pop and deliver them to the houses that could afford to have soda pop delivered. They'd take away the empty ones and wash them and reuse them

*The vegie man would drive his truck full of fruit and vegetables down our street every now and then and all the mums would duck outside and buy something from him. Pretty sure he was an old Italian guy.

*A bag of mixed lollies cost 10 cents and it was a huge bag, mostly because you could get 2 for a cent and sometimes 3 for a cent, except cobbers cos they were always a cent each. The teeth and the bananas were huge, well possibly our mouths were small. Pink musk stick poking out the end of the bag.
(thanks for this memory mum- see comments)

I'm sure there are more but that's all I can think of now, oh and this is the 1970's that I'm mostly talking about.