i 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?
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.
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.
I’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 remember them literally everywhere… restaurants, the mall, bowling alley ball returns had them built in, at the tees on golf courses, at the gas pump, at the crosswalk, on top of every public trash can… They were EVERYWHERE.
Until she left home, my wife didn’t realise that normal non-smoking households don’t have to mop their walls.
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.
Ashtrays everywhere. Companies marketing for kids who proudly make massive branded ashtrays, like McDonalds.
I got told to turn my Joe Camel shirt inside out in the 8th grade. I didn’t understand. I was so rad and so was he.
Good lord the times have changed thank goodness.
When 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.
Yep. The 80’s were absolutely horrible if you were bothered by smoke. There’s a reason why a lot of us 80’s kids “had asthma”, which magically disappeared when everything went non-smoking in the 90’s.
Smoking was just so pervasive here in Europe in the 80’s, it’s impossible for people to understand if you didn’t experience it first hand.
Like, even teachers smoked. Not in lessons, but if they were out in the playground supervising, or in the staff room, they’d light up.
My headteacher had a pipe. I think it was about the only thing that kept him going, right up until the cancer got him.
Also in lessons. I had a teacher that would open the outside door of the classroom (leading to a garden) to stand there smoking. Not that it helped because we still got a good whiff of the smoke.
This was around 1995 probably.
disappeared when everything went non-smoking in the 90’s.
Funny, in Russia that transition happened around late 00s.
A-and in 2014 entrance to my (then) uni territory still looked like one big stinking cloud of smoke and a barely visible group of students smoking just outside, some coming, some leaving.