Stories my mom told of going across the street and getting a bucket of beer for grandpa stick in my mind. The bar was still there when I came along, but I think the bucket deal was a goner by then.
We had milk delivered on the stoop and I can still remember wanting to be first to open the bottle so I could get the little disc of cream just for myself. We also had seltzer delivered in those bottles you see in the old Marx Bros movies. Made our own sodas.
When we moved to SoCal, we also had Al the donut man, drove around in a Step-Van with fresh baked goodies he picked up that morning from the bakery in town.
Meat came from a butcher shop, even in the grocery stores you could watch it being cut. Not extra charge if you wanted a special cut off a side that was hanging. Livers came as liver that was sliced there, not frozen in a little plastic tub. Hamburger was sold as "chuck" or "sirloin" and was ground there in the store. No combining meat from 2700 cows a day into a big vat with "pink slime" and whatever accumulated smegma was on the machine. One could eat it raw when mom opened the package to make some without much fear of getting "E. coli" or the "toemain".
I miss glass bottles for most stuff. Glass will just return to the earth eventually, after being used for many many times if designed correctly. We even have natural glass laying around in the dirt on our place. But we don't have natural polyethylene pebbles here.
Somethings about the olden days I miss................but I still want to keep the fuel injected vehicles that start right up on cold mornings.
