Grew up in Asia. The less fancy one. Used to go buy my Dad cigarettes from across the street and toss out the filters when I was like 8 lol.
*He’s been smoke free for over 22 years. The amount of disinformation from Big tobacco, at least where I grew up, was insane. He is a very educated man and still… Cigarette was a status symbol, symbol of sophistication, when he was growing up.
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.
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
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. Those girls went through hell, they even raped and ended up accidentally killing her teenage sister.
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/paul-bernardo-and-karla-homolka-case
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
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 with less secondhand smoke.
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.
And it was usually next to the kitchen and the restrooms. Worst tables all around.
No one can win on this one.
Seat the smokers in back and “oh no, I have to sit next to the kitchen and restroom.”
Seat the smokers in front and “oh no, I have to walk through the smoking section to get to or from my seat, or go to the restroom.”
Or at least that’s how Denny’s was setup in our town.
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.
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.
From my experience, it’s always been the 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.
i’m old enough to remember smoking sections on airplanes. Not to be dramatic but, I felt like I was going to die!
I always thought I had bad indoor allergies until i moved out of my parents house. They have chain smoked inside with the windows closed for my whole life. Moving out was the best thing I ever did for my health.
I hate cigarettes now, especially since I quit smoking myself(didnt smoke inside though) I don’t even know why I started in the first place. I’m dumb I guess?
