Remember When...Ashtrays

Due to the great knee injury of 2011, I was laying down in the backseat of Quinn Wright's car today. I was looking at the doors and I noticed it...a small little compartment in the door that flips open, an ashtray. Remember when every car had one, two, or more ashtrays?

I do. My parents were smokers and so most of the ashtrays in the car were filled with ashes which we would have to dump out from time to time. Today, you cannot find a car with an ashtray, its a lost convenience of the new millennium. Because some person some where decided to make every effort to deny people the right to smoke and has so far been successful.

There also used to be cigarette lighters in the dashboard as well. However, sometime in the mid-90's we started using the lighter as an outlet for our CD players that would be attached to a cassette tape to play over our stereo system in the car. Or we would have adapters so we could charge our cell phones in the car by plugging them into the lighter. These have disappeared as well, but what is interesting is that car manufactures have still built an outlet into the dashboard for our Ipods now. So the outlets live on as a reminder that cars used to be filled with smoke.

Just thought I would throw you back in time...I think Remember When could become a nice weekly segment to this blog.