It was fun while it lasted

My favorite thing is a War Department pamphlet warning guys about VD. He had apparently sent it to my mom but censored it and annotated it. There’s a page that says, in part, “Honey I took half of this book out because it’s too ruff.” This is hilarious but also sad as it’s a reflection of the sexism and paternalism common at the time.

Edit: I need to see if I can find an intact copy and see what Dad thought was too much for Mom.

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Damn thing is $50 on ebay. Too bad he tore it up. I found a scan though.

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When I bought my old house in Canada and we ripped out some walls, I found an intact 1948 Ladies Home Journal. It was full of ads showing ecstatic housewives gushing over their clean floors and laundry. (This post-war era advertising designed to glorify the role of housewife, after many women had been working out of the home during the war, and men wanted their jobs back)

There was a hilarious full page ad for some brand of TP, with a black and white photo of a woman looking depressed and distraught, the ad going on about “toilet tissue illness”, which apparently was caused by inferior brands of toilet paper and which supposedly was a closeted issue no one wanted to talk about.

There was also an ad for a deodorant called "“Odorono”, which pops into my mind every time someone here mentions Oloroso. :rofl:

Unfortunately one of my daughters took that magazine to school to display as part of a school project and it never made it home again, despite my dire warnings about not wanting her to lose it.

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My cousin learned the hard way, be careful using the backyard fire pit to clear out other people’s things.

My Aunt passed away, age 80. She always had money tucked away, a few dollars in the lining of her purse, maybe a few dollars in the pocket of each jacket, a few in the old copper coffee can.

My cousin & her daughter decided to deal with the boxes & boxes of 50 years of preschool art, tax returns, receipts, birthday & Christmas cards, & other important papers by having a memorial bon-fire.

Fire was burning. Then it happened-a dollar bill peeking out of the flames. Fire-extinguishing pandemonium ensued.

Turns out my Aunt had hidden money in each of those cards. There is no telling how much money was burned that night.

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When there was a hurricane and subsequent flooding where my daughter lives in southern Baja, my grandson spotted a glass jar full of money (bills not change) in the rushing arroyo. But the water was running too fast for him to grab it.

A friend stashed a bunch of money that had been collected from our community quilt raffle in her freezer until she could get to the bank, as she was going out of town for a week.
She returned to find that the electricity had gone out in her abscence and had to shovel a freezer full of rotted food and slop into garbage bags and took it to the dump. Only on her way home did it hit her- “The money!”

She hightailed it back to the dump, prepared to paw through her bags of muck, but the dozer had already come through and buried it all.

Awful. Just awful…….

Yeah, as I recall, it was close to $1000.

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Christine, this was hilarious! You made my day :slight_smile:

I may borrow your line from here on.

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Feel free! I am anticipating the day when this comes around to bite me and someone shows up at my door say “So and and so wanted you to have this”, lol

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Was he an engineer by any chance? Sounds like the way they would propose. (And before anyone bashes me for that generalization, I am an engineer, my husband is one, my dad was one, my son is one, and I worked with lots of engineers for 30+ years….)

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Ship’s electrician, a similar breed I would guess.

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I’ve got several binders full of marriage certificates and Grandpa’s big folding Kodak and tones of large format negatives. They’ll probably get scanned once I no longer have a house to take care of.

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My Mom died in 1999 and I’m still using that excuse! I write letters to the victims… I mean recipients… with a story about the items. One daughter’s friend collects Wedgewood pottery and I have piles of it. I have given her some and she asked “What about daughter? It’s really hers…” and I said “Nope, it’s mine.”

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Well, I sold all 3 of those IKEA beds w/mattresses yesterday, along with 4 out of the 5 nightstands. Since I vacated my downstairs bedroom a week ago to create my book sorting center (50 years+ of book collecting), I’m back to AirBnB Original Sleeping Arrangement in the sunniest B&B room… :wink:

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Have you read this book? https://www.amazon.com/Stiff-Curious-Lives-Human-Cadavers/dp/0393881725/ref=sr_1_4?crid=QTMV1NVDBYEX&keywords=mary+roach&qid=1646043191&s=books&sprefix=Mary+roach%2Cstripbooks%2C86&sr=1-4

I think you’d enjoy it.

Here’s part of the Amazon blurb about it. “ Beloved, best-selling science writer Mary Roach’s “acutely entertaining, morbidly fascinating” (Susan Adams, Forbes) classic, now with a new epilogue.

For two thousand years, cadavers – some willingly, some unwittingly – have been involved in science’s boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. They’ve tested France’s first guillotines, ridden the NASA Space Shuttle, been crucified in a Parisian laboratory to test the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, and helped solve the mystery of TWA Flight 800. For every new surgical procedure, from heart transplants to gender confirmation surgery, cadavers have helped make history in their quiet way. “Delightful―though never disrespectful” (Les Simpson, Time Out New York), Stiff investigates the strange lives of our bodies postmortem and answers the question: What should we do after we die?”

I haven’t read it. I’ll investigate.

I’m not sure if I’m that interested in what happens to me. One of my oldest friends insisted I don’t want to do that because of what she sees as the horrible treatment of said donations. But she has ritualistic feelings about bodies (as being something sacred) that I don’t have.
Maybe if I read this I’ll be better equipped to discuss it if she brings it up again.

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My dad came home from work one day when I was a kid, looking quite green around the gills. He was a mechaniccal engineer whose company designed everything from milk cartons to having contracts with NASA.

They had been doing crash tests that day for a seat belt design, using cadavers in the seats. And he was a really squeamish guy to start with.

My mother felt the same way. She was terminally ill while I was studying at the UT medical center in San Antonio, in fact, while I was taking cadaver lab. I was spending 40 hours a week with cadavers when she suggested I might donate her body. At the time, it was hard to imagine my mother being one of the cadavers so I did not arrange for it.

However, I was with her when she passed and I can say with no hesitation that her body immediately became no different than a cadaver. It was too late to arrange for a donation so, with regret, her body got a simple pine box, her second choice, which was ultimately a compromise with my grandmother.

Cadaver lab cannot be substituted by anything else, it was the most important part of my education. As someone who has been on both sides of it, in a way, I think it’s a useful and admirable way to complete the cycle. As a teacher, it would be particularly apropos for you to make that final contribution to education :slight_smile:

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Thank you. It’s good to hear that perspective. The friend I referenced is an ICU nurse of over 30 years. I’m sure she has her reasons for feeling as she does. But they aren’t my feelings and she’s not my SO. If I had one, their feelings would be taken into account. Otherwise, not.

If they’ll have me it’s a great solution for me. I do need to look into alternatives in case they won’t. I’m sure you know, but for anyone reading, the exceptions here include that they don’t take anyone who is obese or who dies of an infectious disease.

I’ve joked about wishing they could put me in a garbage bag and wheel me out to the curb for pickup. I want as little money as possible spent on the disposal of my remains and thankfully the options are improving all the time. I’m grateful that I don’t believe I have anyone (like a grandmother) to contravene my wishes.

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My daughter’s dad died at her place in Mexico several years ago. It wasn’t unexpected- he had COPD and couldn’t breathe anymore.

He told her not to bother cremating or burying him- to just tell the coroner to keep the body and do whatever with it, that she couldn’t afford to deal with it.

She actually would have followed his suggestion, but the other siblings thought it an appalling idea and had him cremated.