Okay.

What comes to mind is that back then we didn’t have all the conveniences we have today.

Such as?

Well, for starters, we didn’t have the washer and dryer we have now.  The washing machine was pretty much an on/off operation.  And when it was finished we put the clothes and sheets and such through a wringer to squeeze most of the water out.

Then, to get the stuff completely dry, we put it out on a clothesline.

I know we still use clotheslines occasionally today, but back then it was the only way.

Sounds like work.

Yeah, but it was what we had to work with.  Same as in the kitchen.  We didn’t have a refrigerator.

No?  What did you have?

Ever hear an old-timer call a fridge an icebox?  That’s because that was what we had back then.  Literally.  A box that we’d put ice in to keep the food cool.

A cake of ice above and the food below.  A truck would come around carrying big cakes of ice.

Then the driver would take some tongs and carry the ice to our home.

Another kind of delivery was milk.  Trucks would come around early in the morning.

We’d probably still be sleeping, so the driver would leave the milk bottles in an insulated box to keep it cold.

 

We’d take the bottles in later when we were up.  I think it’s still done some places in a limited way, but back then it was common throughout the neighborhood.

Wasn’t there  a song about milk bottles?

That came  later, during the war.  World War 2.  When  civilians were working in factories for the war effort.  The song  went “Milkman, keep those bottles quiet.”

That’s it.

Yeah.  The premise was that the guy who delivers the glass bottles of milk should try not to rattle the bottles and disturb the workers who had to get their sleep to do a good job in the factories.

Right.

There’s just one more recollection about home delivery in the late Thirties.

What’s that?

Today, where I live, we have gas heat.  When I was a teenager, in the house we bought in Baldwin, we had an oil burner.  But when I was a kid in our rented house we had a coal furnace.

Coal?

Yep.  It was an old iron thing with two doors.

We shoveled the coal into the top door and shoveled the burned cinders out of the bottom door.  And there was a boiler to heat water for the radiators.

Where did the coal come from?

A truck would pull into our driveway and the men would pour it down a chute through a basement window..

Onto the floor?

Well, yeah, but it was into a fenced-off area called a coal bin.

My dad did most of the shoveling, but I took over once in a while.

The burned coal, or cinders, we shoveled into an ashcan.

Come to think of it, that’s a word — ashcan — that I haven’t heard in quite a while.

That was separate from our garbage can.

I guess that covers what I wanted to tell you about our conveniences then compared with what we have now.  Next time I’ll talk more about the community.

Okay.  See you then.