Diaper Services, Milk Boxes, and Other Bygone Things

Im too young to remember these.. but I do know that diaper services for cloth diapers are still around.. they just cost a HORRID amount of money.

But , its funny as I was just thinking of starting a thread some what like this...

I saw an advertisement yesterday for house call doctors.

They are a local group of doctors , some older then 50, some fresh out of school, that are trying to bring back the house calls that doctors used to do.

Their details were simple-
If you have insurance, you only pay the co-pay plus 10 for travel to cover the doctors travel time.
If you dont have insurance, you payed a certain amount up front, and could be billed the rest.

I do hope they go far with the idea. I love it.

shewolfnm - I know that house calls were not terribly efficient for doctors, but there was a great advantage. The doctor was able to see the person in his environment...................how he lived, and with whom he lived. I think that a doctor could get a much better sense of a person when he saw him in the place where he lived. The patient was a human being, not simply a chart.

Also, I am not happy when I go to a doctor's office, and there are people coughing and sneezing all around. I would be curious to know how many more infections are spread by having sick people sit, in usually crowded spaces, with other patients.

There is something called "boutique medicine" that I find rather interesting:

http://www.physiciansnews.com/business/204.kalogredis.html

Don't know if I would spring for it though!

Murryhill 5-1212

There are (again) diaper services here (although it was a really booming [franchise] business about 8, 10 years ago).

Milk, fresh rolls etc can be delivered every morning as well - by some specilised services.

Doctors like doing house calls because patients like that and stay with them as patients.

I've noticed that a lot of that which was common in my childhood (and earlier) now comes back as "invention" - not speaking about fashion and music here at all!

Having to call the operator to make a long-distance call, and then having to shout when the connection was made.

Grocers writing the amount of your purchases on a brown bag with a pencil. Then adding the total without the aid of a machine.

Matrons in the children's section of a movie theater for Saturday afternoon shows, which lasted all afternoon.

People going to the movies when they were good and ready. Arriving in the middle, and leaving when they got to the point where they came in.

Girls not being allowed to wear pants to school--even in a blizzard.

The milk delivery in glass bottles. When my siblings and I were growing up, the "milk box", which was a small space where the milkman left the milk also served as an entryway into the house. When we reached the age to be old enough to be home alone, instead of our parents giving us keys, we just crawled through the milkbox to get into the house.

Also, phone service was generally on a party line, and the operator actually listened in to the conversations.

I remember picking up the phone and there would be a conversation going on between two people from who knows where.

Also, when we made phony phone calls, our favorite place to call was "Stork Diaper Service." The guy who answered the phone had an unidentifiable accent and always pronounced diaper as "Dye-apper." We got great joy and mileage out of that one.

Oh, and one more thing. The beginning of our phone number had a name. So even though the first 3 digits were 421, those three numbers were referred to as Gaspee. So it would be Gaspee 2685.

The garbage man. We used to have this hole in our yard with a cover over it. In the hole was a pail with a handle. When you garbage (food you wanted to throw out - you would walk out in the backyard, step on the handle and dump the garbage in it. I hated that job - it stunk and there were maggots all in there - I would nearly throw up. Then once a week, the garbage man would come, lift the pail and toss it into his truck.

Drive in Movies - there are still a few (very few), but hardly any. It was a big to do when you went. You would fill one of those horrible cooler - the ones that made that noise that would cause chills whenever you scraped the top with the bottom, stop at the store and pick out candy and snacks. When you got there, you could play at the playground in front of the screen until the movie started. Then you would pile in the car with the horrible speakers you attached to the window, eat junk and fall asleep before the second movie even started.

They just opened a new drive in movie a few miles on the other side of town. They are striving to make a come back.

Coal deliveries. The truck would dump a mountain of coal in the middle of the sidewalk. The super would get a shovel and a wheel barrow and transer the coal barrow load by barrow load to the furnace in the basement.

Yeah we had one of the last working coal furnaces in Chapel Hill, NC. There was a "bin" in the basement where they dumped the coal through a door from the outside. To feed the furnace you shovelled it in.

When I was younger, growing up in wayne, PA, our phone number was MU8-4572. I guess this was the next step towards numerals from the names like Murray Hill.

Button-fly jeans, although they did make a brief comeback a few years ago.

The new drive-ins are pretty cool. They broadcast on a low-power FM signal, so you can listen using your car radio.

Re: Diaper Services, Milk Boxes, and Other Bygone Things

Here's a good one:
Back in the late 1950s, I can remember we had an "ice box". We would have someone come around and put a big ice block into our "fridge". They carried it with ice tongs that looked something like this:

Thirteen-button navy wool pants. They fit so well with the extra ties in the back.

Re: Diaper Services, Milk Boxes, and Other Bygone Things


My step father would drive to the rail switching yard. There they loaded freight cars with ice for refrigeration. Blocks that fell off the conveyor belt were left to melt. He selected a good chunk and took it to our ice box.

Who came to the house?

It was the second one from the corner of Valley Street, right next to the ball field, number 20 Newman Street.

Dr. Boyd came whenever I got the asthma. He came up to the boy's bedroom and put the big black bag on the chair by the window.

The milkman, he wore a white suit, came on Tuesdays and Fridays and if the weather was really cold someone had to remember to get out to the porch and bring the bottles in before they froze and popped their tops.

{We collected those cardboard milk bottle tops. Sometimes we used them in toss games in the schoolyards. We played Flippezze and Bombs Away!.)

The ragman came about once a month. He shouted "Rags, rags!!" out of the window or his old truck and every once in awhile someone would stop him and bring out a bundle or two. He bought by weight and a big bundle would bring 25 or 30 cents.

The paperboys came, one in the morning with the Hartford Courant and the other in the afternoon with the Hartford Times and the Manchester Herald (hey, the afternoon kid was me!)

The insurance man came four times a year. He had a really big book with lots of carefully written numbers and dates on it. I was shown this book on several occasions in order to raise my consciousness of what good handwriting should look like. My mother paid the insurance money in cash and received a small square piece of paper which she put in the insurance money jar which was on the top top shelf in the left hand kitchen cabinet next to the other jars labeled "Vacation" "Emergencies" and "R.I.P." (that's rest in peace and was used to send flowers or cards)

The local priests would come. I liked Father O'Connell, he was funny. He told jokes and everybody laughed. Then my folks would listen to him talk about needing more money to fix up St. James Church. They wouldn't smile. Our Uncle Dinnie (Dennis) who was a Monsignor liked to come for tea. My mother made him sit at the kitchen table explaining that no food was allowed in the living room. He didn't smile either.

The Fuller Brush man would come several times a year. He had a big case of all kinds of things, brushs and cleaners, tools for opening things, waxes, saddle soap and neatsfoot oil. When I was eight I pleaded for a bottle of neatsfoot oil which I KNEW was the best thing to use on a baseball glove because Austin McDowell told me that. My mother refused.
How could she not believe Austin McDowell!! (local baseball hero!!).
Later, when the Fuller Brush man brought our order he included a little sample bottle of neatsfoot oil for me. I became a lifelong Fuller Brush customer from that moment on.

But the best people to come to our house were the neighbors. On Friday nights, the men would come to our living room and watch the fights on our little black and white tv. They would fill the air with smoke and loud talk and, despite whatever the good Monsignor had been told, there would be sausages and pretzels and beer. Daytimes, Mrs. Halloreen sometimes would come by if she needed a cup of milk for her kids' breakfasts. Mrs. Marsh liked to bring over extra cookies from her church's bazaar. Mrs. Miller, who was my Cub Scout Den leader, would ask my mother how to sew a particular part of a dress she was making for her Maryburton. On summer nights the ladies would gather on number twenty's front porch and smoke cigarettes and talk to each other about the kids, the German Measles, vacations, Fuller Brush men and funerals.

From the corner of Valley Street, right next to the ball field, a kid could stand and watch the fireflies of their cigarettes dancing to the music of their voices.

Joe(we played Hide and Seek until we got called home)Nation