Book Board Chat

I enjoy reading old books. I am now reading one written in 1941. It is fun to see the detective looking for a drug store so he can use the phone booth to make an important telephone phone call. (Do Walgreens and CVS have phone booths?) Then there are the automobiles with their manual shifting gears, throttle and choke knobs, running boards, etc. The cars all had noisy engines. Today's car are so quiet that one can't hear the idle engine when parked or stopped. Most of the noise from today's cars is the road noise of the tires on the road surface.

When I got my driver's license back in the late 1950s, if you used a car that had an automatic transmission there would be a restriction on your driver's license limiting you to use with auto transmission vehicles. Now almost all cars have auto transmissions. Back then, most people would stop at a traffic light and have one foot on the clutch pedal and one over the accelerator, nothing on the brake pedal unless on a hill. The brake lights would not be on. Now all brake lights are on at all the cars stopped at a traffic light. I sometimes shift into "N" or "Park" and take my foot off the brake pedal at a traffic light. I wonder if the person behind my it thinking, "Say, that guys brake lights aren't working."