Robert Tew commented that “No matter how much you revisit the past there’s nothing new to see.” That is only true if you are talking about last week, last month or even last year. But it is hardly true for someone who was alive seventy or even eighty years ago. There are many things from the past that would be new to them, for they know very little about a time or era that they were not on earth. There is an amazingly lot to see back then for someone curious enough to want to see it. Here, in this brief writing, you are going to see it as it is brought forth from an old person’s memory and as it is described through his pen. I hope that you will be able to see the images in your mind and try to experience at least a few things as I saw them, felt or in some other way experienced them as a young person in that era, or as I like to describe, “In my day.” Having grown up as a youth in the 1930s and 1940s, I experienced many things that will never be experienced by young people again. Contrary to Robert Tew’s comment above, many of my experiences that you will read about below will, in fact, be new to you.
Don Boudreaux in referring to our ancestors stated that most all of our ancestors lived in poverty and often faced starvation, incurable diseases, infant mortality, and short life expectancies, even as adults. Today, the poorest American families enjoy a roof over their heads, a solid floor under their feet, running water, a flush toilet, and electricity. Those were all unimaginable luxuries, far beyond the dreams of our ancestors, only a few generations ago.
Much of what he said is true, but one thing he should also have mentioned is that they were unaware of the “good times”—our times. They were doing what they knew and for the most part found happiness in the process. The majority of our ancestors lived off the land, working the soil as they raised their own food. They depended on a few animals to help them with the hardest work and the rest of the animals were raised for food. Fresh eggs were plucked right from under their own chickens as they sat on their nests. That was one of my first jobs. They were close families and dependent on one another to survive. My day was a transitional period; the old was still here, and a new era was just starting down its birth canal.
As an 81-year-old man, I believe I qualify to describe it “like it was” in my day. At least what it was like for me, the way I remember it. Most of those things are more clear in my mind than are some things that happened to me just a few days ago. “I remember” is the way we usually start these kind of “flashback” memories, and since I can’t think of a better starting point, that is where I will begin.
I remember when Model A Fords were just as common on the city street as any other vehicle. When many cars still had wooden floor boards and wooden spoked wheels, as did my dad’s old Essex. After a few years, the wood would shrink as it dried out, leaving cracks in the car’s floor sometimes large enough to see through as well as to pee through. When you are a young child riding in such a car, you may have been asked to try to pee through one of those cracks, as I was. That is if there wasn’t another option near by. By another option, I am referring to either a bush or an outside toilet. Cars were pretty much a luxury as there were not very many families that could afford cars in the nineteen thirties. A Zen philosopher quipped, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a broken fan belt and a leaky tire.” In my day, cars generally were all experimental vehicles as well as every part they were made up with. Car tires with inner tubes, and the rims they fit on, were a perpetual problem. If you were taking a trip for ten miles or more, there was a good chance a tire would either go flat, get a leak in it or actually blow out. So, yes, the Zen folks were right, many a walking journey began with a flat tire. It was a common thing to see a person walking along the side of the road rolling a tire that had gone flat, hoping a garage or gas station would be somewhere close by. Or you might see a driver patching an inner tube or pumping one up with a hand pump while trying to make their own repairs. Windshields were flat, plate glass, not laminated and shatter proof, as they are today. Rocks thrown up by passing cars often either chipped them, cracked them or actually broke them. There were not very many paved road. Roads other than main highways, all the minor roads were gravel. There were what we called washboards in the gravel roads in the most inconvenient places. You ask me, “What are washboards?” In my day, there were very few newfangled washing machines. Women mostly washed clothes in a washtub using a washboard. Washboards were a wavy piece of metal fitted over a flat board placed inside the washtub. Clothes were scrubbed up and down by hand on the washboard. So when roads developed bumpy sections, they were also called washboards after those bumpy washboards. At night, when another car was coming toward you, the glare on those early windshields was such that you were often blinded and would have to slow down or pull over ’til the oncoming car passed and went on by.
I bought my first car just after I turned fifteen, and I remember it only too well (after I had it for a few days I wished that I made a better choice). It was a 1934 Ford Coupe with a rumble seat. The rumble seat could accommodate two people if they weighed less than 200 lbs together. The rumble seat was in the back and outside of the car; a rumble seat was placed where trunks are now. The car doors on that little Ford Coupe were what are referred to as suicide doors as they opened from the front, so if you accidently opened the door while the car was moving down the road, the wind would rip it off or at least bend it back against the car. That durned little Ford would hardly ever start without being pushed. Batteries were not sealed nor high tech as they are today. The charge would last only a short while, then need to be charged again, in my day. The electrical wiring in early cars had the first insulation ever developed, and within a short while, insulation would begin to crack from the heat or the cold, and then the exposed wire would short out or drain the power from the battery. Yes! In my day, cars were a pain in the you-know-what. It wasn’t until after World War II (1945), that they started making halfway decent cars. My Dad’s car, the one he owned while in the 1930s, was a 1929 Essex, and it was a dangerous animal. Dad’s Essex did not have a starter, at least not one that worked, so to start it, he had to crank it. A crank fit into the engine’s crankshaft from the front of the car and with Dad’s muscle power, would turn the engine’s crankshaft over and make the rotor in the distributor turn and cause the spark plugs to spark and ignite any gas remaining in the cylinder heads, and that would hopefully cause the engine to start. A crank was always no more than a prayer. Sometimes the crank would reverse itself with a powerful kick, and if the cranker did not get out of the way in time, it could break his arm. Dad never broke an arm, but he came close, and during those times, we could hear him cursing the thing from a ways off.
When I was a young one, the norm for a place for relief was an outside toilet or outhouse. My grandparents had one, we had one, and most all of my neighbors had them. Outside toilets required at least annual maintenance as the pit would eventually fill up. A new pit was dug, and then the toilet was literally picked up and moved by several men from the full pit and positioned directly over the new and empty pit. The old pit was filled in with dirt and you could always see the spot where a former toilet pit had been.
The vegetation always grew greener and taller over the former area of the old. The building itself was about four or five foot square and described by the number of holes, for one or two persons; therefore, they were either a one or a two holer. The holes were round holes cut in a bench-type seat inside the small toilet building. The few families in our community who did have an inside toilet (new invention and luxury) were considered to be rich by our standards and for the time. The first inside toilet I was ever privileged to use was in an old hotel we lived in after we first moved out west in 1941–2. We lived in the Spokane Falls Hotel for just a few days while Dad found a house for us to move into. The hotel had one inside toilet on each floor. We had to walk to the end of the hall and usually wait in line. The flusher was a chain hanging down from a square tank above the toilet bowl. When you were through, you pulled the chain, and all the water in the tank would rush down a pipe into the toilet bowl and either flush it or flood it. The noise from the water coming down that pipe was loud enough to scare you half to death till you got used to it. We never did live in a house after that that was not plumbed with an inside toilet.
I can remember as a young boy looking across the small cow pasture between our house and where a new house was being built (about a block away) and watching in awe while a big old steam shovel dug a basement for a new house to be built. It would scoop some dirt and dump it in the back of an old Model A truck. The area was so muddy that the truck was always stuck, and so the steam shovel operator would push it out of the mud with its bucket. After it was on relatively dry ground, it could go on its own. Prior to these two early machines, basements were dug with a hand shovel and the dirt was hauled away with a wheelbarrow. I know because I watched them do it that way, as well. Can you imagine the labor intensity of my early years?
The house we lived in while I was a young boy in Detroit Lakes, Becker, Minnesota, was a home owned by Grandpa Emil Oscar Hanson, and I rather doubt that dad could ever afford to pay him rent for it. Dad worked in a dry cleaning shop where he spent most of his day pressing clothes for customers. The house was approximately 12 by 15 feet with a full basement. It had only one room upstairs with a chimney in the middle. The whole house was the size of a modern living room today. A cook stove represented mom’s kitchen on one side of the chimney, and a pot bellied heating stove was on the other side of the chimney. The upstairs represented our living room/space. The kitchen and dining area was also in that living space, as we ate around a small table in that area. On the other side of the chimney was dad and mom’s sleep area. It was hardly what you could call a bedroom. There was no running water in the house until a year before we moved and after Dad had dug a well in the front yard of the house by hand. I remember watching him, and I could see dirt flying out from the hole, but I was afraid to get close enough to see dad. At one point he hit water, and he had to go only a few feet further, put some gravel in the bottom, and then he hired a plumber to come and plumb or pipe it into our house. There is so much water in Minnesota that the water table was relatively high. After that we had a small hand pump on a counter in what we called our kitchen area. Mother never had any kitchen cabinets because she never had the need. Eating utensils, plates etc. were stacked on a small counter. What pots and pans she used for cooking remained on the stove. Prior to dad’s digging the well, we carried all of our household water from a neighbor’s pump approximately a half a block away. My older brother and I and even my sisters carried water to the house. About once a week, we had a bath, and that meant carrying enough buckets of water that distance to fill a copper-bottomed, elongated washtub. We all bathed in the same water; my sisters bathed first while we waited outside. When it was my brother’s and my turn, the water was pretty dirty looking.
The house was heated with a wood burning potbellied wood stove. Dad chopped wood almost on a daily basis, year-round, because mother cooked on a wood burning stove as well. She made almost everything from scratch. I enjoyed watching dad chop wood because he was very good at it, and chunks of wood would go flying from his axe. He got me a little hatchet when I was about five so I could pretend and learn to chop wood nearby. In my biography I write about my introduction to philosophy when a little neighbor boy stole my hatchet. You may refer to that story in my bio-epic. There were five children, and we all slept in the unfinished and very cold basement. We had a double bed, and three of the five kids slept on one end, and two slept on the other end between the others legs. I was the youngest for about five years before Marty, my younger brother, was born. I was the least popular of all the kids because I peed the bed, and the other kids suffered. There was a bedpan just under the bed, but I never even knew when I was doing it.
The potbellied heating stove was just at the top of the stairs where we all dressed while standing all around it. Dad would get up before anyone else and stoke the fire until it got going real hot, then he would call us to get up. Mother would get breakfast ready while the older kids got ready for school. She would make cooked cereal or pancakes, and because we had chickens, we had plenty of eggs, and she would often fry eggs for breakfast too. Mom did have an old wooden icebox, and I believe once or twice a week, during the summer months anyway, the iceman would deliver ice in his old Ford truck. I don’t believe he ever knocked because he had a heavy block of ice on his back, and he couldn’t wait for people to answer their door. The ice went in the top of the icebox and mother’s perishables were in the bottom door. He would come drop the ice in the icebox and was gone.
Mother was an excellent seamstress, and dad would often bring clothes home from the Dry Cleaning shop for her to mend or alter. She had an old treadmill sewing machine. I can remember as a little boy laying on the floor near the machine and being mesmerized by her treading or pumping the treader with her feet as she sewed the clothing. She would warn me not to get my fingers too near the wheel where the belt went around the wheel and caused the needle to go up and down to sew the seam. I was always amazed while watching her finish a seam, and then she would break the thread real quick with her hands to get ready for the next seam as she repositioned the cloth on the machine. I still have a hard time breaking thread with my hands. Once in a while, she would put it to her mouth and break it with her teeth.
We always had a garden; most everyone had gardens in those days. Those days refers to the great depression which started with the 1929 stock market crash. That depression was extended because of the war until at least 1946 when the war effort was over and everything started to return to normal. I remember sitting in the garden with a salt shaker and eating two or three tomatoes one after the other and then having sores in my mouth from the acid afterwards. In those days, fresh fruits and vegetables were not being transported from all over the world as they are in this day. We canned fresh fruit and vegetables as soon as they were harvested or became ripened. After harvest time, all of the fruit or vegetables we ate came from out of a canning jar. Meat was expensive and rationed during the war, so dad often went hunting for rabbit, pheasants or ducks. We ate a lot of liver for supper because it must not have been rationed as other meats; maybe it was just the cheapest. When mother fried liver with onions, I really liked it except when they had a big vein in it. Sometimes the vein would cause me to choke as part of the meat being swallowed was connected to a part still being chewed by that dang vein. That always scared me. Our dinner menu was never varied by much. What Buddy Hackett said was true for us as well…“My family’s menu consisted of two choices: take it or leave it.”
When we moved to Spokane, the war was on, and beef went to the troops. The most common meat in the stores was horse meat. Utahns would probably never eat horse meat; the idea of it would probably make many of them sick. Horse meat was stringy and not nearly as good as beef, but mother would make stew out of it, and that was not too bad. Times were different then, and I am very grateful that I was able to witness those days.