And that there are "lies, damned lies, and statistics."JALLEN wrote:Mine wasn't kept there. It was a pink square, maybe slightly rectangular, that was kept in my wallet so I could buy beer. It looked as though it had been typed in one of the ancient Remington manual typewriters. Of course, just about anyone could buy beer with that ID, as long as it said you were more than 21.longtooth wrote:Many of us remember the old paper DLs. How many of yall remember when the DL was just that & not considered ID. It was in the little plastic window holder w/ registration papers held around the sterring collum w/ the little stretchie springs.JALLEN wrote:
The Texas drivers license I turned in 40 years ago was a pathetic little piece of paper not much more impressive than a supermarket receipt, not much to it. I'm looking forward to having a Texas driver's license again soon, though.
This thread drift about dangerous occupations is fascinating but you must know that 66.7% of statistics are misleading, and the rest are flat wrong.
When I got my driver's license, a very long time ago in NY State, it was a typed form, and it was typed on a big fancy typewriter that was set up to type those forms, made by a little company called International Business Machines. If the typist made a mistake, you had two choices, either live with the mistake, or go through a process that was even longer than the original application to correct THEIR error, because, of course, you had to prove it was their error. Those machines were still in use when I became a telephone installer and worked in the new motor vehicle offices pulling cables for phones. It amazed me to see the inattention of the machine operators as they chatted, drank coffee, and ran through the hand written forms stacked next to their machines.
At that time a driver's license was one of the forms of ID acceptable as proof of age and the things kids went through to alter them were amazing, but the things they did that were just out and out goofs were even more so. If you took an Exacto knife and very carefully worked at it you could "lift" off the original typed birth year without badly damaging the "security" paper that was used, and type in another, and kids regularly did it in the wrong type font, or without lining it up, or even used a pen, rendering the resulting fake ID really easily detectable. And they wondered why their carefully crafted IDs didn't work.
I didn't get my license until I was 18, which was the drinking age, but kept getting tossed out of establishments where I had been going for months, which was a little frustrating, until one of the bouncers explained that he recognized me and noted that the date on my license was recent, so therefore I had been getting in illegally until then, so he was throwing me out. There was no appeal to a higher power.
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My grandmother got her first DL in Texas in the 1920s after she and my grandfather returned from China, and she used that DL (without ever getting stopped I think) until my grandfather retired from the US Army in 1949, and they moved to upstate NY to be near me where my yankee carpetbagger parents had taken me after forcibly removing me from my native San Antonio. My grandmother was incensed, and I remember it to this day although I was just a barefoot kid, that the State of NY made her take a driver's test and wouldn't just take her Texas license and issue a NY one. Of course the fact that she had never renewed it in the almost 30 years that she had had it might have had something to do with that, something I didn't understand at the time.