Geezer Test
 

I made a 16 on this. Give it a try....see if you rate the geezer category. FOR THOSE OF YOU UNDER 30...DON'T WORRY ABOUT THE LOW SCORE YOU WILL GET.....
BUT BE SURE TO READ THE ANSWERS JUST TO SEE HOW LIFE USE TO BE.




History Exam...

If you don't score very well blame it on being too young !! It is a win -
win situation.

This is a History Exam for those who don't mind seeing how much they
really remember about what went on in their life. Get paper and pencil and
number from 1 to 20.
Write the letter of each answer and score at the end.


1. In the 1940's, where were automobile headlight dimmer switches located?
a. On the floor shift knob
b. On the floor board, to the left of the clutch
c. Next to the horn

2. The bottle top of a Royal Crown Cola bottle had holes in it. For what
was it used?
a. Capture lightning bugs
b. To sprinkle clothes before ironing
c. Large salt shaker

3. Why was having milk delivered a problem in northern winters?
a. Cows got cold and wouldn't produce milk
b. Ice on highways forced delivery by dog sled
c. Milkmen left deliveries outside of front doors and milk would freeze,
expanding and pushing up the cardboard bottle top.

4. What was the popular chewing gum named for a game of chance?
a. Blackjack
b. Gin
c. Craps!

5. What method did women use to look as if they were wearing stockings
when none were available due to rationing during W.W.II
a. Suntan
b. Leg painting
c. Wearing slacks

6. What post-war car turned automotive design on its ear because you
couldn't tell whether it was coming or going?
a. Studebaker
b. Nash Metro
c. Tucker

7. Which was a popular candy when you were a kid?
a. Strips of dried peanut butter
b. Chocolate licorice bars
c. Wax coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water inside

8. How was Butch wax used?
a. To stiffen a flat-top haircut so it stood up
b. To make floors shiny and prevent scuffing
c. On the wheels of roller skates to prevent rust

9. Before inline skates, how did you keep your roller skates attached to
your shoes?
a With clamps, tightened by a skate key
b. Woven straps that crossed the foot
c. Long pieces of twine

10. As a kid, what was considered the best way to reach a decision?
a. Consider all the facts
b. Ask Mom
c. Eeny-meeny-miney-mo

11. What was the most dreaded disease in the 1940's?
a. Smallpox
b. AIDS
c. Polio

12. "I'll be down to get you in a ________, Honey"
a. SUV
b. Taxi
c. Streetcar

13. What was the name of Caroline Kennedy's pet pony?
a. Old Blue
b. Paint
c. Macaroni

14. What was a Duck-and-Cover Drill?
a. Part of the game of hide and seek
b What you did when your Mom called you in to do chores
c. Hiding under your desk, and covering your head with your arms in an
A-bomb drill.

15. What was the name of the Indian Princess on the Howdy Doody show?
a. Princess Summerfallwinterspring
b. Princess Sacajawea
c. Princess Moonshadow

16. What did all the really savvy students do when mimeographed tests were
handed out in school?
a. Immediately sniffed the purple ink, as this was believed to get you
high
b. Made paper airplanes to see who could sail theirs out the window
c. Wrote another pupil's name on the top, to avoid their failure

17. Why did your Mom shop in stores that gave Green Stamps with purchases?
a. To keep you out of mischief by licking the backs, which tasted like
bubble gum
b. They could be put in special books and redeemed for various household
items
c. They were given to the kids to be used as stick-on tattoos

18. Praise the Lord, and pass the _________?
a Meatballs
b. Dames
c. Ammunition

19. What was the name of the singing group that made the song "Cabdriver"
a hit?
a. The Ink Spots
b. The Supremes
c. The Esquires

20. Who left his heart in San Francisco?
a. Tony Bennett
b. Xavier Cugat
c. George Gershwin
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
ANSWERS

1. b) On the floor, to the left of the clutch. Hand controls, popular in
Europe, took till the late '60s to catch on.

2. b) To sprinkle clothes before ironing. Who had a steam iron?

3. c) Cold weather caused the milk to freeze and expand, popping the
bottle top.

4. a) Blackjack Gum.

5. b) Special makeup was applied, followed by drawing a seam down the back
of the leg with eyebrow pencil.

6. a) 1946 Studebaker.

7. c) Wax coke bottles containing super-sweet colored water.

8 a) Wax for your flat top (butch) haircut.

9. a) With clamps, tightened by a skate key, which you wore on a
shoestring around your neck.

10. c) Eeny-meeny-miney-mo.

11. c) Polio. In beginning of August, swimming pools were closed, movies
and other public gathering places were closed to try to prevent spread of
the disease.

12. b) Taxi. Better be ready by half-past eight!

13. c) Macaroni.

14. c) Hiding under your desk, and covering your head with your arms in an
A-bomb drill.

15. a) Princess Summerfallwinterspring. She was another puppet.

16. a) Immediately sniffed the purple ink to get a high.

17. b) Put in a special stamp book, they could be traded for household
items at the Green Stamp store.

18. c) Ammunition, and we'll all be free.

19. a) The widely famous 50's group: The Inkspots.

20. a) Tony Bennett, and he sounds just as good today..

SCORING

17- 20 correct: You are older than dirt, and obviously gifted with mental
abilities. Now if you could only find your glasses. Definitely someone who
should share your wisdom!

12 -16 correct: Not quite dirt yet, but you're getting there.

0 -11 correct: You are not old enough to share the wisdom of your
experiences.

:cool:

17, but I swear I'm not THAT old! :redface:

15.

Several of these were still in operation when I was a kid in the late 60s: milk delivery, skate keys, green stamps.

And the first car I remember had the footswitch for high-beams. I think it was a pre-Ralph Nader Corvair, unsafe at any speed.

And when you were a kid you always stood in the passenger seat, because when you're 5 that's the only way you can see where you're going. No silly child car seats or any of that nonsense, and if your parent hit the brake instead of the high-beam switch, well, rides were a major source of entertainment.

17 (but we should be able to divide it by our age to 'normalize' the score!)

I got a 17.

I had milk delivery in the early 70s at my house. We used to fill the milk cooler box with frogs and stuff we would catch. Not as a prank to scare the milkman, just because it made a nice container.

My cousin had a GMC Gremlin in the mid 80s. I helped him replace the foot switch for the lights, because it had rusted through.

My mom used to collect those green stamps when I was a kid. She got a cheap wheelbarrow with them one time.

My kids today, in 2006, do Eeny-meeny-miney-mo to decide between things, unless there are more than two, then they do one-potato two-potato.

We had those wax bottles filled with bug juice when I was a kid, but I wouldn't call them popular.

Also had those metal roller skates that needed the key.

I sniffed plenty of mimeographed paper. Even helped the teacher once after school by cranking out papers on the machine. It had a big handle.

The other ten I got right were things I had heard of or were obvious guesses based on how the questions and answers were phrased.

The metal roller skates became prototypical skateboards once nailed to pieces of 2 by 4s in my neighborhood -- and the cause of more than a few broken arms.

18

I am not as old as many questions on that test, but I do read a lot.

I got a classical guitar (that I still own) and a card table (that my computer is sitting on) with Plaid Stamps.

I never had the roller skates with the key ... mine were the leather strap variety. I didn't rollerskate much ... I really preferred ice skating, and since it was less than a mile walk to the community skating lake, I spent a lot of time there.

10, but most of those were SWAGs.

18.

Missed the Princess puppet question, and the mimeo question. But then again, I wasn't wired that way in school, too straight arrow, when I wasn't daydreaming.

I missed on the one about the car, and the fill in the blank song title.

18. I think Bruce sent this to me awhile back. I am sorry to say that I am in fact old enough to have either experienced all of the above or to have had it related to me in a wistful fashion by parents or grandparents. On the other hand, the Ink Spots are awesome.

18.

Missed the puppet princess and the studebacker, both of which are well before my time. Otherwise, good ol' educated guesses.

We already pretty well see the 'average' score......

Maybe most of us really ARE geezers! :rolleyes:

Brings back a lot of memories and confirms a lot of tales.

:lol2: :lol2:

19. No comment.

No comment about the Corvair?

Fuck.
20.
God, I can smell the "Ben-Gay" creeping up on me.
I was only born in 1971.
Kill me.
Kill me now.

19. But the only reason it wasn't all 20 was I didn't do eeny-meeny-miney-mo to answer The Ink Spots on question #19.

I like winning, even if it is being the geezeriest person here :blush:

(Crimson Ghost peeked. That's a kid thing, you know, cheating ;) )

OK, so what did I win? A cemetery plot? :reaper:

Nope.
Didn't peek.
I wrote my answers, and figured that there was a link to the answers.
Ah, well, sucks to be me.

Heh! You forgot about your evil twin! I got 19, also. I missed the studebaker question.

I still remember being on long car trips with my folks and falling asleep in the back seat to the sound of my Dad flicking the high beams off and on with that floor button. Later when I turned 16, I was given that same old car to drive and I flicked the beams off and on with my left foot just like my Dad had done. Sometimes to this very day if its late at night and I'm very tired, I'll catch myself feeling on the floor board with my left foot to turn the high lights on! Now, that's geezerhood!

Hee hee, yeah, the Twins would naturally get the same geezer-level :blush: I thought everybody knew about the dimmer button on the floor, every car we owned had one, even the 1969 Cutlass which I bought from the momster. Many of those questions were actually pre-boomer history, and I only knew the answers because I was always listening in when the adults were talking. And besides that, progress used to arrive rather slowly back in North Carolina.

My 1980 Datsun 210 had a floor mounted high beam switch, IIRC.

I got 19 rite, but then I was hatched in 57. Kewl year, my first car was a 50 Chrysler Windsor. And yes the 70s are a blur. :fumette: :bong:

15, but I guessed on a few.

I got 16 and I was born in 69. I almost got 17 with the Howdie Doody question, but I was scared of ventriloquist dummies as a kid and avoided that show.

It also was not on the air when you were a child.

It was off by the time I was a kid too, but I had a recording of the theme song.

16. Would have been 17 but I decided not to count the studebaker question as my hubbie told me the answer. I was born in '69, but I am a Jeopardy champion in training and know a lot of trivia, so that's my excuse. :right:

20, but why should I have not. Dirty old man or sexie senior. Hell I'm older than baseball!

18. Missed the Studebaker and the pick you up in a taxi.

"I've got a brand new pair of rollerskates/You got a brand new key..."

I'm pretty old. I can remember when Woody Allen was funny!

And when the late Jaime Cardinal Sin's paycheck was... uh... cause for comment...

14 and proud of it - being born in 1972 in England means this was a test not so much of my age as my ability to pick up on other people's cultural references.

Oh and some guesses of course...

Didn't know this was here. I got a 16. I'm geezeresque. We still had a lot of this in the 60's and my dad and aunts talked a lot about the depression and WWII. Also, I read the time–life "this fabulous century" books over and over.

yeah, that's the ticket.

I know I pretty much suck at pop culture.

I've been continuously amazed at the scores. I reckon the geezer test scores aren't really based on one's age, but how well we retain information. A lot of the questions I got right were not from experience, but from other folks' experiences that they had shared with me as a young man.

I still think the only way you can walk for miles to school UPHILL BOTH WAYS is to live in two separate places and have an evening chauffer. ;)

What if your home and your school are on different hills two miles apart?

you would only walk HALFWAY to school uphill both ways. ;)

yeah!! I only knew 10 (and actually guessed a couple of those) ... I am not an old geezer like the rest of you!! :lol:

When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were when they were growing up; what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning …… uphill BOTH ways .. through year 'round blizzards. Carrying their younger siblings on their backs .....
to their one-room schoolhouse, where they maintained a Straight-A average, despite their full- time, after-school job at the local textile mill .... where they worked for 35 cents an hour just to help keep their family from starving to death!
And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way in hell I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on kids about how hard I had it and how easy they've got it!

But…….

Now that I'm over the ripe old age of thirty, I can't help but look around and notice the youth of today. You've got it so easy! I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a damn Utopia! And I hate to say it but you kids today you don't know how good you've got it!

I mean, when I was a kid we didn't have The Internet. If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the damn library and look it up ourselves, in the card catalog!!

There was no email! We had to actually write somebody a letter ….with a pen! Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox and it would take like a week to get there!

There were no MP3's or Napsters! You wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the damn record store and shoplift it yourself! Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ'd would usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up!

And talk of about hardship? You couldn't just download porn! You had to steal it from your brother or bribe some homeless dude to buy you a copy of "Hustler" at the 7-11! Those were your options!

We didn't have fancy crap like Call Waiting! If you were on the phone and somebody else called they got a busy signal, that's it! And we didn't have fancy Caller ID Boxes either! When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was! It could be your school, your mom, your boss, your bookie, your drug dealer, a collections agent, you just didn't know!!! You had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!

We didn't have any fancy Sony Playstation video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games like "Space Invaders" and "Asteroids" and the graphics sucked!
Your guy was a little square! You actually had to use your imagination!
And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen forever! And you could never win. The game just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until you died! ... Just like LIFE!

When you went to the movie theater there no such thing as stadium seating! All the seats were the same height! If a tall guy or some old broad with a hat sat in front of you and you couldn't see, you were just screwed!

Sure, we had cable television, but back then that was only like 15 channels and there was no onscreen menu and no remote control! You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! You were screwed when it came to channel surfing! You had to get off your ass and walk over to the TV to change the channel and there was no Cartoon Network either! You could only get cartoons on Saturday Morning. Do you hear what I'm saying!?! We had to wait ALL WEEK for cartoons, you spoiled little bastards!

And we didn't have microwaves, if we wanted to heat something up .. we had to use the stove or go build a frigging fire. imagine that! If we wanted popcorn, we had to use that stupid JiffyPop thing and shake it over the stove forever like an idiot. That's exactly what I'm talking about! You kids today have got it too easy. You're spoiled.
You guys wouldn't have lasted five minutes back in 1980.
:lol:

Standing ovation!

awesome, xoB :lol:

That reminded me of something from my wee small days, though. We didn't even have a phone line to ourselves. It was a party line. And the woman we shared it with (who lived about 2 doors down, IIRC -- but I was young) would get calls at ALL HOURS of the night. And whenever you wanted to use the phone, she would be on it. And she'd get all huffy when you asked her to let you use it.

Wow. Thanks for the weird deja vu moment, dude.

Cool! I forgot that we had a party line when I was a kid too.

We were lucky, because the people we shared it with were never on the phone. I only remember a handful of times that I picked up the phone when someone else was using it.

My parent held on to that party line for as long as they could. The other parties on their party line went and got their own private lines, and my parents ended up paying the lower party line rate while having a private line. They did this for years, until some change in phone regulations allowed the phone company to drop them from that plan.

I would have had a 20, but I simply skipped over 13 somehow; didn't answer it at all. True geezerness. I agree that the questions pretty much tested knowlege about the '60s.

You meant to say "the PEOPLE in their 60'S" :lol: A lot of those questions were about life in the late 1940 and early '50s.

We lost the party line when they went to dial phones but that may be because it was a small town. :)

MaggieL! Wow! Long time no post!

You just missed her here :D

OK bruce, post#36, did you pen that and how did I get a version of it ascribed to mickey rooney, of all people, in my email from my dad last month?

I had a party line whern I lived in VT in the late 70's early 80's. We also only had to dial the last 4 digits of the phone # if we were calling within the same prefix.

Unless you go to school with m.c. escher.

Point well taken...execpt that the only thing specifically pre-1950 was the leg painting . I think of myself as having "grown up in the '60s", alhough I was born in 1952.

By the time I was in a public school they no longer taught "duck and cover"...what had been a "air-raid drill" was now called a "retention drill", and while the procedure card still had the Homeland Security^h^h^h^h^h Civil Defense logo on it, it was clearly generalized to be useful for weather emergencies as well.

I suspect "duck and cover" was expected to be useful for a *nuclear*("Atomic", A-bomb, fission bomb) attack; the standard position for *thermonuclear* ("Hydrogen", H-Bomb, fusion bomb) attack was "head between legs/kiss ass goodby".

Tim Leary always said growing up in the 1960's was like being raised in an insane asylum. Anybody remeber the movie "Pleasantville"?

I love that movie. Own it too.

I started school in 1950. Strangely enough, I do not remember any of the duck-and-cover drills from my school days, and only know about them because from the beginning they were mocked in the media as absurdly inadequate to deal with any real emergencies. If we had them, I would have remembered because I always thought it was great fun to pretend that a hurricane was coming and we had to get under the dining room table and stay away from windows when such weather was approaching. I DO remember fallout shelters for the backyard being sold, however, and how well into the 1960's the civil defense sirens were tested at noon and signs directing you to the (supposed) shelters were posted in large buildings. The attitude in this country nowdays about protecting the public is nonexistent. While Switzerland and China have completed massive projects to greatly increase their chances of survival, America outside the Mormon church would not even have a clue what to do or where to go. But fear not, this Administration has well provided for the protection of Dick Cheney, Congress and their families, and the nitwit in the White House who will probably be on vacation anyway should something befall us.

Living in D.C., the one thing that struck me about the attacks of 9/11 is that our government is impotent in an emergency. There were lots of sirens and lots of activity that day in DC, but nothing of any value was done (except by the Arlington County fire department and area hospitals.)

New Orleans simply reiterated that lesson.

I now have little more than disdain for my government's ability to do anything worthwhile in an emergency. Just assume there is no government when there is an emergency, and take care of yourself. You will be better off. How full is your pantry?

I don't recall the emergency drills other than fire drills. I spent a lot of my tad days in Catholic scool, so maybe that explains it . I reckon we just thought Mother Mary would handle it.... Not to mention St. Chris. But he got fired, didn't he? hmmmm...

Email, not ascribed to anyone. I'm too old to be writing about the 80s.
Yes, dial 4 digits in your own exchange, which in my case was the whole town. They didn't get a touch tone system until the late 90s. Although you could use a faux touch tone phone, data transmission was kaput. :smack:

One of the most fascinating things I've ever seen was in 1989 - an old telephone switch still in operation. At the time I worked in telecommunications and was working with various baby bells to upgrade their equipment. Every phone number came into the old switch building and terminated at a set of relays. The room was full of these relay sets. The old dial phones would activate these relays and a mechanical connection would be made. The room was loud with clicking relays.

These massive switch rooms previously replaced massive rooms of operators, who would help you make your call by actually plugging wires into jacks. The switches were a huge advance back in the day: "direct dial". People actually had to be educated in direct dialling and how NOT to use the operator.

Now, these switch rooms are replaced by silent computers which can make these connections at the speed of light. An entire room of switches replaced by, roughly, a desktop system.

All those hundreds of thousands of operators jobs are lost, but we are better off without them because it doesn't cost $20 to call Omaha for 5 minutes.

Think of the energy savings as well. I wonder what we do now that'll be seen as so obviously inefficient. Of course those relays were EMP resistant...

I suspect that's a perception that's reinforced by time spent in (or watching through the lens of media that originates in) urban centers, an ecological niche that cultivates a population that depends on the government to do everything for them and screams in abject victimhood when it doesn't.

I don't think it's a fair assessment of the US population as a whole. Folks I know in other areas are much more self-reliant.

I was born in '64. we did a LOT of tornado drills in the 70's.

That's so cool! Somehow my dad finagled a tour of the local teleco for my siblings and me back in the early '80s. We went into a switching room just like the one you describe. I was amazed that there was one switching machine that corresponded to each telephone line in my home town. The guy led us over to the mechanical switching machine for our phone number, but of course it was idle since we weren't at home placing a call.

I went on so many tours of places like that when I was a kid. A sardine packing factory in Maine was a real treat to see. They have little old ladies that pack those fish into the cans like that. Raw. Then they bake the can, and apply the lable.

Companies used to give tours back then. Now privacy issues and liability concerns mean that you can't get tours of anything. The few places that offer tours are really just trips to the gift shop.

Nope, my perception is based on a sister who has lived in Switzerland for 10 years and who is required by law to keep a fully stocked shelter in her basement. Then there is my cousin who is married to a Chinese national and travels back and forth frequently due to her job teaching at William and Mary College. Both countries started long ago on a system of public defense that is mind-boggling to American mentalities. The Swiss even have all those tunnels through the Alps set up to act as giant fallout shelters if necessary. This stems from being a country located inbetween historic adversaries who might launch attacks on each other over the top of Swiss heads. Sounds like foresight against the obvious to me, not dependence on the government. As for China, they have all the slave labor they need and even built the largest dam in the world by ordering women and children carrying woven baskets of dirt to do what we do with union workers on bulldozers for 1000 times the price. China got the very logical idea that either the US or Russia was going to end up attacking them one of these days, so when they started rebuilding all their cities they made sure the proper facilities were added underground. Chinese do not ask the government to take care of them, they have no choice in the matter.

So you are quite mistaken on this count. And may I ask, if the government is NOT required to take care of the population in this area, how do you think it will get done? For one thing, how would you suggest that private industry handle it? Sell timeshares?

despite my near complete lack of musical aptitude (although I can remember lyrics to songs after only hearing them once or twice, I only need to learn to carry a tune) I always wanted to start a group that only played fifties and sixties cover tunes and call it "Duck and Cover."

I just thought it was too obscure for most people. That and my afforementioned total lack of talent.
:(

Tonchi:

I have heard, and this may be one of those viscous rumors/urban legends that all those fallout shelters etc. we had in the US during the cold war (such as gymnasiums and school basements) weren't intended to help anyone survive the blast or firestorm, but rather created a tidy way of dealing with the inevitable, unmanagable population of rotting corpses. "Be calm and follow the signs pointing to your nearest mass grave."

That way when the folks in the really deep holes came out to salvage what they could, they wouldn't face the overwhelming pile of decay, it would be neatly below ground already.

It could have been just the P.O.V. of my hippy science teacher.