re: I remember what it feels and sounds like to pull the knob on a cigarette vending machine

As a kid, I used to love playing on the one in the Bon Marche Piccadilly entrance.

It was an amusement for kids, wasn't it?

Other than the pack a day freaks, yeah probably wasn’t that bad.

How? You put $8 in quarters in the machine?

I bought several. Marlboro lights were the brand of choice. My wife smoked Benson & Hedges menthol 100’s. And we would stay up until after midnight smoking and talking around the dinner table. GOOD TIMES.

No Karate Kid on Plex?






Need 1 and 2 please. And 3, the one with Steve Silver and Bad Brad.

Please, sir, if you have the time.

I was never a degenerate smoker, but I know the exact sound and feel of pulling a 20 cent 12 oz. Chocolate Soldier or Nehi Grape out of a side door drank machine.

Found this one in a storage room in Japan a couple years ago

quote:

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Weren’t 8 tracks only one sided?

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Yes and only some decks had FF, if you had one without FF the only way to hear a song again was to play through. FF was very hard on the tapes and players though and even without using FF the tapes were prone to self destruct due to getting too loose or too tight.

You could always switch to another track while waiting for the same song to come around again.

Even cassette tapes were kind of a bummer to make a song repeat as you had to manually rewind.

This is what made CD's kind of magical back in the day, instant access to any song as many times as you wanted, not to mention the major increase in fidelity.

I’ve only used one of those machines a couple of times. I remember seeing them everywhere when I was a kid, but when I was old enough to smoke they had all but disappeared.

The first time was when I was about 14 in Kansas for the KU basketball camp with a friend. His family had relatives scattered all over the state, so we spent part of the trip making the rounds and visiting them. One stop was a small town where his uncle & grandma lived.

For some reason, we ended up at a VFW type bar with his uncle in the middle of the afternoon. I assume he was in charge of keeping an eye on us while my friend’s mom was away. There were a few old-timers in there not really paying attention, and my friend got the idea that we should try to buy a pack of cigarettes from the vending machine without anyone noticing.

Naturally, we couldn’t get the thing to work. It either jammed or we were doing something wrong. Then his uncle walked over. I was sure we were about to get chewed out. Instead, he worked some kind of magic, and got the machine to cough up our smokes. He handed them to us, and walked away without saying a word.

I still remember sitting on the front porch of his grandmother’s smoking one of those cigarettes on the night of the Atlanta Olympics bombing. I also remember seeing the movie showgirls for the first time on that trip.

The other time was at a bar in wrigleyville after a cubs game drunk off my arse.