The Mabley Archive: If you think electric cars are new, think again

In 1988, when longtime Glenview resident Jack Mabley brought his column to the Daily Herald, he made a couple of requests: 1. Let him keep his ugly, old green chair. 2. Launch an edition for his hometown. He kept the chair. And now, more than a decade after his passing in 2006, his second request has been granted. This column is from Feb. 17, 1997.

I never tasted a steak before I was married. I'm not sure why. We were not well off, but we weren't dirt poor, either.

Steak was a luxury in the Depression days.

So was chicken, which was usually reserved for Sunday dinner.

This is a column of random thoughts looking back. No continuity ... just good memories.

- Suggest "spin the bottle" to today's kids, and you'll probably get a vacant look.

A quart milk bottle in the center of a circle would be spun. The person it turned to would be kissed.

Harmless fun, but I think if it became popular today the spinner and spinnee might head for a bedroom.

- I attended five public schools, all in what now is called the inner city. None of us even thought of hitting a teacher. First of all, we'd be belted right back. Also, we'd be kicked out of school.

Boys were not sissies. But in those days a teacher was someone in a world apart ... somebody way up on another plateau ... whom you respected and feared.

- My school days were before the teachers' lounges were choking in cigarette smoke. I guess today the air again is as clean as when female teachers wore skirts and dresses.

- Milk came in quart bottles. Cream rose to the top. The prudent cook poured the cream into a separate container. It could be used for coffee, cooking, or if it were rich enough, for whipped cream.

- One reason the older generation sometimes lacks sympathy for today's poor is because so many were extremely poor in the '30s and could not fall back on relief, welfare, or anything except ingenuity and families pulling together. They also stopped having so many kids.

- Kids today are blasé about those blimps that fly over sporting events advertising beer or cameras or insurance or whatever.

They don't know the thrill of seeing the giant Graf Zeppelin or the Akron dirigibles loom majestically on the horizon and hover over the city.

Today's blimps could fit into the gondola of the Graf Zeppelin.

- I give away my age (not that it's a secret) by remembering the original electric cars.

They were boxy, full-sized cars. They were quiet, didn't smell, didn't pollute the air, were as high as today's SUVs, and were inevitably driven by dignified ladies tooling along at 15 mph.

So ... we've come full circle, and manufacturers are beginning to turn out electric powered cars again. But they'll go more than 15 mph.

- I had a flat tire a couple of years ago and was lucky to get a nearby service station to help me.

Before WWII we had a lot of flat tires, and we didn't call the motor club for help.

When a tire went flat or blew, you stopped, jacked up the car, removed the wheel, pried the tire off the rim, took out the tube, got out your patching kit, put the sticky stuff on the leak, applied the patch, inserted the tube back in the tire, wrestled the tire back on the rim, put the wheel on the axle, tightened the nuts, got out the hand pump and pumped and pumped, dreading the sound of a hiss that told you the patch didn't hold.

I can't believe I really did that, but my memory says I did. Spare tires replaced the patching kit, and today flats are rare, and help is near.

- Some things never change. Kids sweep into the house after school and go through the kitchen and dining room and all of mom's pet hiding places like giant suction machines, leaving in their wake nothing but crumbs, cellophane wrappers, and bottle caps and tabs.