Diaper Services, Milk Boxes, and Other Bygone Things

Thanks for this thread. I love hearing about the "good ol' days", and I often wish I was around during those times. Of course people had their problems then, same as now, but I do yearn for a simpler society...

Aye, even in my 18 years on this planet things have become enormously more complex.

I like the motto:
Simple Living, High Thinking.

ginguh, Life was simpler. True. And a lot harder and more demanding physically.

Just think about life at home. No self-cleaning ovens, no dishwashers, no washer-dryers, no remote controls, no air-conditioning, no vacuum cleaners, no self-defrosting freezers. Going back further, there were no refrigerators, no radios, no telephones. These aren't ancient times. My parents didn't have any of this when they were growing up. And just two generations away--my grandparents--didn't have electricity.

I could go on. I remember defrosting freezers. I recall likening the experience to being on the Titanic. There was A LOT of ICE. Banging and hacking with picks and whatever device I could find.

Roberta- I was 19, and a new bride. I had to defrost the refrigerator. The ice was stuck on so hard that I used an ice pick and a hammer to get it off. Not knowing my own strength, I punched a hole in the freezer compartment, and all the freon came gushing out.

........................Needless to say, I never did THAT again!

Wow, Phoenix. With all the defrosting struggles I had, I never poked a hole in anything. My tools of choice--a screwdriver, a strong metal spatula, and a hammer.

Despite the struggle, I'm remembering that when that gigantic sheet of ice came loose (usually from the side), there was some strange pleasure in it. A chunk of ice more than a foot long and more than an inch thick. I'd toss it in the sink. It would be there for a long time. Loved that chunk.

Ah, the good old days.

I always thought my mother had the simplest solution to the defrosting problem. First, for about a week before the Saturday defrosting operation, she would use up as much of the Birdseye Peas and leftover crappie fillets as we could stomach. (There was no throwing out of anything, though I do remember one package wrapped in brown paper getting pitched while Pop's back was turned.).

The few things that were left were wrapped up tightly with whatever ice cubes there were and put in the picnic cooler in the basement or taken next door to the Marsh's house to be put in their fridge. (Another reason why having good relations with neighbors was important then)


Then, on Friday night after dinner, Pop would unplug the thing and prop open the door.

On Saturday morning, she would get up early, slide the big hunks of loosened and melting ice out into a bucket, dump them in the sink and go next door to get our stuff back. Done in a half a hour.


Joe(Hey, I thought there was some ground venison in there. --Oh? Didn't see it.--)Nation

I'm impressed with you family's planning, Joe.

I preferred the fast approach. Boiling pots of water rotated from stove to freezer and back to stove--just to get things moving.

Nah, too much work. All you are trying to do is melt ice. If you just prop the door open and go to the movies the job is practically done for you by the time you get home.

Oh, and my mother also discovered that you could spray oven cleaner on the inside of the stove and leave it there overnight before wiping out the goop easily in the morning. (Okay, so the first time she did it it was a mistake. She sprayed the oven and fell asleep watching tv.) But from then on she always did it that way.

Years later, years, E-Z Off and the other makers started putting that method on their products.

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Did anyone else here use pants pressers? Rectangular contraptions made of interlocking pieces of 1/4 wide steel/aluminium strips that put a crease in your khakis?

Joe(Mom did a lot of ironing)Nation

Joe- I never used them personally, but when we bought our house, we inherited a few of them from the former owner.

As a matter of fact, Hubby started talking about wanting pants pressers not too long ago. Sure enough, he found some on the internet. They're still available!

(He will buy no-iron Dockers the next time. )

Mom cooked on a wood burning stove for many years, regardless of the temperature in the house. She was so proficient, I couldn't tell the difference in her food when we went gas.

i grew up in the port of hamburg where my dad was a superintendant for an export-import warehouse company .
electricity was not supplied by the grid but on-site by a monster of a steam-engine housed in an engine house .
after school i liked nothing better than to vistit the engineer and the fireman in the engine house to watch that big flywheel turning and the engineer watching the dials and gauges to keep the power flowing .

since the engine did not usually operate at night , there was a huge vault underneath the building with rows of lead-acid batteries to store power for night-time use .
i can still smell that sulpheric-acid wafting up from the storage room -
it quickly opened the sinuses if you had a cold .

around 1940 power was supplied by the grid and the steam-engine was dismantled .
btw the engine had come out of an english steamship about 1900 - the engine still bore the original brass plate of the manfacturer .
sadly , no pictures from that time .
hbg

What kind of thinking goes on , when you're "high"?

the best kind, real "interconnected with the fabric of the cosmos" kind of thinking

the problem is the remembering

Wow, way to twist my meaning . Just FYI I've never been "high" on drugs in my life, and never plan to be.

ANYWAY,

Where I'm living now (third world country), we don't have all that crap like self defrosting freezers, etc. It's actually much more simple here, without all the technological "advancements" back in the US that have made our lives all the more complicated.

Since I've been living here it's felt like a real relief. I'm an industrious person. I like DOING things. I hate all this crap that does everything for you.

anyway, i'm starting to sound like a hippy here, so i'll stop.

my point though is that modern technology and so called "progress" has made our lives even more complicated with all things that are supposed to do things for us.
not that i think modern technology is evil and we should ban it, or anything like that, . no, what's done is done. Now we just gotta make the best of it.

but a lot of it is quite unneccessary....

Absolutely right. I think every time I see a new car ad "What will still be working on that car when it is ten years old?

There is a new one now with a - I can't believe they never did this before - a driver's side cupholder that heats or cools liquids.

Right. Ten years from now the mechanic is going to saying what? $3000. to fix the cup holder?

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And has there ever been a more delicate essential tool than the computer? How many of us have come to depend on these keyboards and flatscreens and then have them inexplictcably refuse to operate? It took me more than an hour the other night to get my scanner to do ONE picture. (I had to reload the software and download a patch from HP to get the thing to go. AND it had worked perfectly well not three days before that.)

And one more thing: my parents saved about three thousand photographs taken throughout their lives. In order to assemble that many they had to shoot 12 or 23 or 36 frame film one shot at a time. You had to take care not to take a bad picture and ruin even one shot. Then they had to take the film to a processor to be developed.

It was such a big deal to get pictures back. Most of the time several would be rejected and tossed, keeping only the best. They were married over fifty years and there were lots of pictures taken and tossed, but, and here's my point: between my wife and I, we took more pictures on our last vacation then my parents did their whole married life.

Are the pictures any better?

Joe(beats the hell out of me)Nation

Joe- You raise an interesting point. Years ago, there was something not quite moral about throwing a picture out. Each picture was precious. Now, people take so many damn pictures, that clog up their hard drives. If they print them, there are lots and lots of albums. Is it REALLY necessary to have the grandchild in 36 adorable poses, made on the same day? Or should a snapshot be a slice of time, preserved forever? What is the point when on has taken just too many pictures?

And then there is the self-styled "photographer", who, armed with a digital camera and a photo program, fancies him/herself another Ansel Adams. I went through my "cracks in the sidewalk" phase, until I realized that no matter how many pictures that I took, there would not be any that could even be remotely considered professional quality. But I press on, hoping that one day I will take the "perfect" shot, whatever the hell that is!

Anybody recall the Winston cigarette ad, in which Wilma and Betty mow the front grass, while Fred Flintstone and Barney hide out back to enjoy a smoke?

remember the big theatre organs ?
well , last night we were transported back in time about 50 years .
we went to the last concert of the season of the kingston theatre organ society .
they had brought in SIMON GLEDHILL , one of the great british cinema organists who entertained us for two-and-a-half hours on a BALDWIN that the society restored with much "labour of love" over many years .
it had been found aboned in a chicken coop !
hbg





while it is an original , it has been updated with two web-cameras that capture the organi's hand and foot movements and project them on a large back-screen - quite impressive . since we were sitting in the frontrow , we could follow his every movement directly .

Somewhere east of here it's already May 6th.

Happy Birthday (on May 6th) to hamburger!

have to check birth-certificate to see what time i was born !
perhaps it's already time to pop the cork !
hbg