"Carded"--not heard before 1968 in NYC

[Gerald Cohen]

    Mark Odegard  writes (5/24/01) that "carded" arose in 1971 or
shortly afterward in connection with lowering the voting and then
drinking age to 18. This jibes with my never having heard the term
while I lived in NYC (until 1968).
     My parents owned a combination grocery store and small restaurant
with a bar
in mid-town Manhattan. At least occasionally young men would come to
the bar and asked to be served liquor, and if there was any doubt
about their being 21, the bartender would ask for proof of age. In
all the time that I heard my parents tell about those incidents and
in all the time I spent working or eating in the store, I never heard
the terms "carded" or "proofed." It was simply asking for proof of
age or some variant of this.

---Gerald Cohen

>Date:         Thu, 24 May 2001
>From: Mark Odegard <markodegard at HOTMAIL.COM>
>Subject:      Re: Carded vs Proofed
>To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>
>The 26th Amendment (18-year-old vote) was ratified in 1971. Shortly
>thereafter, there was a general lowering of the drinking age to 18 (which
>has since been undone). This was when something like half the country was
>under 25 if I recall correctly; we were exporting huge numbers of teenagers
>to stop bullets in 'Nam.
>
>I first heard 'to card', 'carding' about the time most states experimented
>with letting 18-year-olds drink.
>
>As I think about it, an under-18 is harder to tell from an under-21, if only
>because of they way they dress. At 21, you can graduated from college,
>working, starting a family; at 18, you're still a party-animal wannabe.
>
>This is about the time we needed the verb 'card'. ...