Non smoking section with like an 18 inch wall separating it from the smoking section. My mom almost got into a fistfight at a couple of restaurants for seating us directly next to the smoking section instead of in the opposite corner.
Boozilla@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Yeah, it was weird. Most restaurants had a non-smoking section because allowing people to smoke everywhere was the norm. Leaded gasoline. Little kids playing with real fireworks. The 70s and 80s were a wild ride of irresponsibility.
It wasn’t all bad, though. It was cool being a kid at times. Playing outside almost every day until dinner time with the other kids in the neighborhood.
Bassman1805@lemmy.world 1 week ago
superkret@feddit.org 1 week ago
In most restaurants I saw there was no wall in between.
sawdustprophet@midwest.social 1 week ago
In most restaurants I saw there was no wall in between.
This was my experience as well. I can still see it today in some older restaurants that haven’t been renovated in years, where there’s an area of the dining room with a much higher ceiling.
jaybone@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I have never heard of this. And I’m a smoker and I was alive back then. (Though I was a kid.)
Does the higher ceiling go to the smoking section or the non-smoking section?
acockworkorange@mander.xyz 1 week ago
And it was usually next to the kitchen and the restrooms. Worst tables all around.
BonesOfTheMoon@lemmy.world 1 week ago
As a child of the 70s/80s, although I don’t remember a great deal of the 70s, your parents had no idea where you were until you came home when the streetlights went on, unless you happened to call from a friend’s house to ask if you could sleep over. I remember my friend getting run over by a car which broke her leg because there was no crossing guard on the busy street where the kids had to cross to go to school, and after that they hired one. I lived up the street from the school, and had a cat that went outside, on hot days the front doors were always open and sometimes she’d go nap in the library or show up in my classroom. Then the neighbour who hates animals and had lost his teaching job for exposing himself to students abducted her and dumped her way across town, but someone found her and put an ad in the list and found section of the paper so I got her back.
Echolynx@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
That poor cat went through so much.
BonesOfTheMoon@lemmy.world 1 week ago
She was happy as can be and loved visiting.
MossyFeathers@pawb.social 1 week ago
They had smoking/non-smoking sections into the 90s and early 2000s in Texas. I remember very clearly that my parents would have to ask for seats away from the bar if the restaurant had one, because they almost always allowed smoking. Also hotel rooms being smoking/non-smoking, and you could tell when a hotel was cheap and just swapped the door sign.
hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
Little kids playing with real fireworks.
In the early 2000s as teenagers we’d go play in the town with bags of fireworks on new year lmao
WrenFeathers@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Other way around. There usually were small smoking sections partitioned away from the rest of the restaurant. This was the norm. And it was usually a fraction of the tables compared to the non-smoking sections.
Source: Worked as a server through most of the 80’s-90’s.
protist@mander.xyz 1 week ago
Don’t forget no cell phones. It’s hard to overstate the (I believe negative) impact constant connection and notification has had on every aspect of our lives
BonesOfTheMoon@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Some boomer on Facebook recently posted a meme with a photo of a rotary phone and how those were better days, and I had to laugh because they decidedly weren’t. When we had no answering machine or call waiting, and had to hang around for phone calls that might come, or have the car break down on the side of the road and hope that someone would stop and help you and that they weren’t a serial killer, that was purely awful. We actually had a serial killer couple abducting and killing teenage girls in my city before cell phones existed, and they made tapes of them raping and torturing these girls before they killed them. A cell phone would probably have helped them a lot.
protist@mander.xyz 1 week ago
There also weren’t people broadcasting mass shootings live on Facebook and inspiring copycat shootings, or being indoctrinated into incel culture alone in their bedrooms. There are legitimate pros and legitimate cons to 24/7 connection, this isn’t just some “boomer yells at the sky” thing
toddestan@lemm.ee 1 week ago
That’s why I would say that cell phones are fine. It’s when they turned into smartphones where I would draw the line. I just get the feeling that we’d be a lot better off if mobile phone tech never advanced much further than the mid-2000’s flip phone.
Echolynx@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
It’s decidedly worse for mental health. Despite living in the safest times in living memory, we are biased to think our cities are dangerous and economies are failing because of doomscrolling and the dominance of online news.
BonesOfTheMoon@lemmy.world 1 week ago
It’s just I went to one of the victim’s funerals. I’ll never feel nostalgic for those days as a result.