My mom, born in 1918, used to talk about how they loved when the ice truck came. He would carve off blocks of ice to fit in the ice boxes at each home (which he knew by memory). But the kids would crowd around and of course he would make “mistakes” in his cuts and end up with some extra pieces of chipped ice that the kids would gather up.
“It was really the only time on a hot day that you could actually have anything that was REALLY cold. We didn’t waste ice on cold drinks, and the ice box kept things cool - but it was mostly for keeping food cold. Drinks were kept down in the root cellar.”
Her favorite though was the sheeny man (or rag man) who still used a horse to scrounge for old rags, clothing, metal, etc. She loved the horse!
The rag man, great job to have. :^) I had an art teacher in high school who talked about the rag man from his childhood, and how the rags were used to make rag paper, which was what we were using for one of our assignments.
My Dad, born in 1917, used to tell about the excitement when the ice man came around in his horse drawn ice wagon. He called a refrigerator an "ice box" until the day he died in 1988.
Read urban jungle. Hopefully you weren’t in the ne.
My dad told me similar stories. Hence the term ‘’icebox’’.
You’d get a big chunk of ice and put it in a large, usually oak box with a metal lined inside and that was how you kept things cooled.
I doubt anyone in America under the age of fifty has ever heard the word ‘’icebox’’.