BonesOfTheMoonLike a pediatrician rounding on cystic fibrosis children in the hospital and smoking at their bedside. That's what the early 1980s were like.
originaluciferi remember ashtrays on the arm of every airplane seat!
I was born in the early 90s and remember making fun of the idea that a non-smoking section separated from active smokers in the IHOP by a thin barrier that didn’t even reach the ceiling could do anything.
Boy, leaded gasoline really fucked up whole generations, didn’t it? Oh… We are still dealing with the fallout from that, aren’t we?
halcyoncmdrI’m still convinced that lead poisoning was the catalyst for the fall of the Roman empire. And they weren’t even breathing tainted air constantly.
We still use lead pipes for water infrastructure in many areas of the country for fucks sake.
Fun fact: ancient and medieval societies had so much fucking lead around because lead is commonly found in silver ore (galena), usually around 100X more plentiful than the silver and it melts at a lower temperature. So the quest for silver produced huge amounts of lead as a byproduct and people found uses for it like roofs, water pipes and, uh, sweeteners? Jesus Christ, Rome.
I was born in the early 90s and remember making fun of the idea that a non-smoking section separated from active smokers in the IHOP by a thin barrier that didn’t even reach the ceiling could do anything.
Barrier? Most restaurants barely divided the two with an aisle.
Tim Hortons had the smoking box, I’d give a lot to find a photo of it. Basically it was one of the last holdouts.
Minneapolis airport had a smoking room in one of the concourses. It had glass walls and was as gross as you could imagine. I held my breath everytime I walked past
Holy crap that’s a memory unlocked, transferring in Minneapolis and holding my breath as you walk past the smoking area
A smoking area in a restaurant was about as useful as setting up a pissing area in a pool…
You got that backwards. Smoking section was the default state. The non-smoking section was the special.
Dumping water in a piss pool then?
MsSprouts [she/her]I wonder how much that affected the life expectancy of those kids
Quite a lot. Most mothers smoked while pregnant and gave their kids asthma as a result, and ADHD too. That’s why you see more of that.
My mom quit smoking before pregnancy, and dad never smoked. Still neurodivergent. I've not personally heard of a causal link there before.
Smoking in Pregnancy and Child ADHD
There is a well-documented association between maternal smoking during pregnancy and offspring attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The degree to which this reflects causal intrauterine effects or is due to unmeasured confounding is not clear. ...
FozzyOsbourneADHD too. That’s why you see more of that.
Citation needed!
Smoking in Pregnancy and Child ADHD
There is a well-documented association between maternal smoking during pregnancy and offspring attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The degree to which this reflects causal intrauterine effects or is due to unmeasured confounding is not clear. ...
Invalid URL?
We’re talking about the US here, right?
Yeah, Japan still is like a giant ashtray last time I checked.
PsychadelligoatTbh my wife and I smelled rotten eggs more often, at least in cities
I think because their busses use biodiesel?
Weird, the only times I’ve smelled biodiesel it’s mostly smelled like french fries
Not sure if it makes a difference, but biodiesel can be made of quite a few different materials. Could depend on what the fuel was actually made from.
I support biodiesel made from the bodies of oil company executives.
isolatedscotchrotten eggs smell usually comes from the sewage system
It isn’t anymore. I checked yesterday. They still have cigarette vending machines and smoking floors in hotels, but most floors were nonsmoking, beer vending machines were more plentiful than cigarette ones, and no smoking announcements and signs were everywhere
Glad to know things are changing. In the late aughts my experience was a lot of closet sized bars where people hotboxed everyone in there (or whatever the tobacco equivalent is).
I am talking about where I grew up in Canada.
Dr. BobI remember bars so blue with smoke you couldn’t see across the room.
I know one of those bars. When my city banned indoor smoking back in the mid-aughts, that bar still reeked of cigarettes for years. It was just coming out of the walls
I worked for an Internet startup in the mid '90s that was so desperate for venture capital funding we were sucking up to RJR Nabisco (who were rolling in so much cigarette money that they actually started a venture capital division just to do something with the cash). One day some of their executives showed up and they spent the entire day chain-smoking in our conference room (our building was a non-smoking building). The smoke was so thick everywhere you couldn’t even see to the end of the hallway. I made a point of coughing loudly and my bosses sent me home before the end of the day. In the end we got nothing from them.
It’s a warm memory because most of those bastards have probably died a miserable death by now.
My parents didn’t smoke but that’s literally how I knew the babysitter was gone and my parents were home from a night out.
Just go to Europe to relive that part of the 90s
jqubedI went to the UK and France in 2004. Got to go back to France last year; I was going to say it’s like the U.S. in the 1990s but it seems like they’ve banned indoor smoking in most buildings so it is better than that. There are still a lot more people smoking in outdoor sections than I’ve experienced in the U.S. for about 20 years, though. I’ve gotten so used to smoking being rare in the U.S. that it felt weird to see (relatively) so much in France.
Smoking indoors is banned basically everywhere thankfully, but yeah, there are still way too many smokers here.
The 90s were nothing compared to the 80s for smoking.
dohpaz42When I was maybe 3 (maybe 4 - it’s a little fuzzy), I remember safety pinning a towel around the collar of my shirt so I could be like Superman (we had recently seen it in the theater). The towel also had frayed ends, and ended up in the ashtray along side my mom’s cigarette. I remember my mom panicking trying to get those safety pins off when the towel caught fire. We never were allowed to safety pin towels to our clothes again after that. 😂
Also I love how my kids know the cigarette lighter in the car as a place to plug in a car charger and nothing else.
Cigarette lighter? You mean the finger print eraser and “lesson enforcer”? It was always empty when I grew up, seems like every child needed to learn that it was still hot even after the glow had vanished :)
The bic type lighter where everywhere, including in the coin shelf in cars
I still have a bic lighter, and I quit smoke 10 years ago. Never know when it’ll come in handy.
I also remember when there were cigarette vending machines in restaurants. $1.25/pack and no age verification. 😉
I still have a bic lighter, and I quit smoke 10 years ago. Never know when it’ll come in handy.
We got one from a gas station for lighting birthday candles. I just got a firepit and went to use it to start a fire and realized I’ve never used one before and had to try a lot of times to actually get it to light.
They’re pretty shit for lighting anything that’s not cigarettes or similar. They burn the fuck out of your finger if held any orientation but vertical which makes lighting a campfire annoying. Gotta light the kindling in your hand then place it under the wood once lit.
I thought the cigarette lighter in the car was a rubber stamp and I’d get the icon marked on my hand.
Yes, I burned myself.
Fun fact: instead of cupholders, 1970s cars would proudly advertise the number of ashtrays they had equipped the car with, usually 1 within reach of every seat. This number was equally important as horsepower or price on marketing materials.
I remember this!
Someday when beverages are a thing of the past, people will be aghast that cars ever advertised their drink holders.
Yes, someday we will all ingest nothing but crumbly dry blocks of nutrient fuel, and scoff at those who used to slurp up liquids like a meat mosquito.
Someday when beverages are a thing of the past, people will be aghast that cars ever advertised their drink holders.
But then where will I put my water bottle?
The flip side is that now that cars have zero ashtrays, most smokers just throw the butts out the window.
The same people doing that now would have been doing it then also. It’s so easy to put an ashtray in your car, or just an old soda can, and people used to care a lot less about “littering”.
I have a Trabant, a car from East Germany that was made pretty much as cheap as possible. Still has ash trays front and back.
I have a 2015 car. Imagine my surprise to find that it has front and rear ashtrays. I hadn’t seen an ashtray in a car since probably the early nineties. I remember for a while after the ashtrays stopped being standard that you could order a “smoker’s package” to get them, but I thought that option had long since gone away.
So the grocery store in my little town growing up was the last hold out. They had ash trays in their buggies until they legally couldn’t, then kept the buggies for years after.
People were smoking in the corner store at used to work in way past the day it became illegal, including the lady that owned it and the employees…
I worked at a place for a little while in a town that had no ordinance. We absolutely smoked behind the counter.
What’s a buggy in this context, a cart?
Correct.
And back in the 80s, a cart was something you pushed at the grocery store, not something you smoked. And a buggy was a hardware cart that you’d deploy to go shopping, and then when you were done you’d roll it back and get your quarter back.
1984 was a strange time, linguistically speaking.
Yep. I actually didn’t know there was another name for it until I was in my 20s.
Ashtrays on carts, that’s a new one to me who grew up in the very smoky 80s.
I think it was probably very location dependent. I know the Skaggs where my mom worked did, plus the little affiliated grocery store in my town. But I don’t remember them at Kroger or Piggly Wiggly (back when that was a thing there).
When I was a kid the old people in my family all chain smoked when we went out to eat. I hated eating with them because of that. I seriously thought my aunt was 15 years older than my mom because of her chain smoking and alcoholism aged her. Found out after she died she was only 3 years older.
What I remember most is coming back from concerts reeking of cigarettes and having to immediately throw my clothes in the wash and take a shower. Going to shows got so much more enjoyable after they banned indoor smoking at clubs.