The Sunday Memory Drawer - The Pioneer Lifestyle

It really wasn't that long ago.  I think back to my childhood days and realize how primitive my household was.  Oh, don't get me wrong.   We had bathrooms in the house and everything.   But, if my family was trying to keep up with the Joneses...well, they didn't.  

I basically take for granted the modern conveniences I enjoy today.   Shower, spa tub, washing machine and dryer in my own apartment, central heat and air conditioning.  But, back when, those would be luxuries for my family.  I am looking at the photo above and imagining my mother doing the same thing complete with Kent cigarette dangling from her mouth.

She would have to be in the tub because...gasp...we didn't have a shower.

There were two bathrooms in our home. One downstairs in my grandparents' part of the house.   The other was ours upstairs.

Neither one had a shower.  

Indeed, the tub downstairs was a bit more modern.   Ours was a large clunky model from perhaps the 30s.  It dominated the whole bathroom.   And when it was "bath night" for somebody, you lost the use of the room for at least an hour.   It took forever to fill it up.   It took a lifetime to drain when you were done.   But, as I can attest, it was absolutely delightful to just sit and soak.

When I would go in there, I had plenty of company.  A small boat or two.  Usually one or two or seven action figures.   I'd recreate an episode of "Sea Hunt."  Sometimes, the soap acted as a raft.   Thank God we were an Ivory household.   It floated.  

Washing was almost a sidebar event when I was in our vessel of a bathtub.   I could waste tons of time in there.  Until the invariable knock on the door....

"Get out of there already.  I have to go."

Plug pulled.

And, speaking of the wash...

This was not my grandmother's washing machine in the basement, but I could have been.  We weren't that advanced in laundry facilities, either.

Grandma had a room in the cellar where this clunker resided next to a sink.  Proximity to the faucet was a must since you need a long rubber hose to get the water from the tap to the washing machine.  You threw your dirty laundry into the tub and it churned away...loudly...for about an hour.   No matter where you were on my neighborhood block, you knew my grandmother was doing her thing on a Friday morning.

Of course, these things didn't necessarily have a rinse cycle.  Instead, you took your soaking laundry and ran it through the roller on the top.   I was allowed to help with this process.   Carefully.

"Don't get your fingers in there."

Duh.

On nice days, the clean laundry was hung out on the clothesline near my grandmother's kitchen window.  During the winter, she hung it on the clothesline in the basement.  This created a great curtain drop for me when I staged my imaginary Tonight Shows down there.  From behind Grandma's bloomers came me...the star of the show.

Upstairs, we had a more modern washing machine.  It might have been bought in the early 60s.   But, you still needed to engineer a primitive hook-up to the sink via a long hose.  This convoluted contraption made the kitchen off-limit whenever laundry was being done.  And, our clothesline was on the second floor.   During stiff winds and unsecure clothespins, it was frequently that I had go to the next yard to pick up an errant t-shirt.

At one point, the washing machine broke down.   For some reason still a mystery to me, we never had it fixed.  My dad simply lugged the dirty stuff over to the laundromat.  I once asked why we didn't simply get it repaired.

"We might as well buy a new one."

Okay.   So why don't we do that?

"We're not made of money."

Yeah, I heard that a lot.

Now our Philco refrigerator looked a lot like this.  And it worked just fine.   Until the handle on the bottom door broke.  To open the refrigerator, you took a screw driver to push on the mechanism lever.  Voila.  It opened.  So, as a result, we had to keep the screw driver on the kitchen table right near the Philco.  If it got misplaced, we'd have a virtual police dragnet in the house to try and find it.

Again, I asked the obvious question.   Why don't we get the original handle fixed?

"And pay some repair guy an arm and a leg???"

Oh.  Again.

All right, you probably have a food processor like I do.  But, back when I was a kid, my grandmother used this mechanical animal to stretch out leftovers for a couple of days.  If you had ham or roast beef and some cooked potatoes, you simply attached this monstrosity to the end of the kitchen table and made hash.  

There was a method to do this and I always helped because I loved my grandmother's hash.  First, you would put a piece of the cooked meat into the top.   You'd churn away at the same time.   Then, a piece of potato.  Churn some more.   A slice of onion.   Churn.   Then back to the meat.  Churn.   Then back to the potato.  Churn.

You can probably make hash in a Cuisinart in about three minutes.   Using the meat grinder, it was at least a half hour of constant churning.  

We didn't know any better.   This is the life my parents and grandparents knew.  
I often wondered about my friends in the neighborhood.  Were they any better off?  But I'd look at their wash on the clotheslines and realize their life inside was pretty much the same.  

Primitive.  Archaic.  A little old fashioned.

But we're all still here to share in the memories of our simple years of youth.

Dinner last night:  Mushroom cheeseburger at Johnny Rocket's.