I was born in 1960 and share some of those with my mom born in 1918.
Although it was lots of fun to hear her childhood stories. The rag man with his mule-drawn cart. The ice man that when the kids gathered around was a bit sloppy in cutting the cubes that would perfectly fit the ice box (from memory) so the kids would have some cold ice shavings on a hot summer day. (”Growing up - we never had ice cold drinks!”)
I used to go skinny-dipping in the same creek that my old man did. Of course we had to be careful as there were suburban homes nearby when we did it!
The ice man
She never owned a refrigerator (or a TV).
The rag man with his mule-drawn cart. The ice man that when the kids gathered around was a bit sloppy in cutting the cubes that would perfectly fit the ice box (from memory) so the kids would have some cold ice shavings on a hot summer day. (”Growing up - we never had ice cold drinks!”)
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Born 1943. I remember all the above, only our rag man had a horse and so did the milkman, who also brought and cut the ice.
We did have cold drinks. They came out of a chest freezer-type dispenser filled with ice (often melted into cold water). You put in a nickle and guided the small bottle through a sort of maze to where it could be removed. You tried to get one long enough after the ice went in, that they were chilled, but before the ice melted into cold water, when they were only cool.
I think I was 5 when we finally got a refrigerator (war time shortages). But, we did have an ice box. No one bought bottled drinks for home consumption (ice boxes and then refrigerators were really small). You went across the hard road to the truck weighing station/general store for that. Home-made drinks were iced tea or lemonade with ice in them. You got the ice by using an ice pick from the block in the box (and not using too much) or, after we got a fridge with a tiny ice compartment, from metal ice cube trays that were difficult to release and mostly produced shards.
Clothes washers were belt-driven drums with paddles and a wringer. We all hung clothes up to dry. The vacuum cleaner was a huge horizontal tank that was difficult to move, but we had wood or linoleum floors, so a broom was used. Radios were as big as a 1950s TV, which hardly anyone had. Very few new cars right after the war, too.
The 50s and 60s were a literal golden age to us War Babies.
Coal and wood furnace, iceman, milkman and the Goodie Shop down the street.
The rag man with his mule-drawn cart. The ice man that when the kids gathered around was a bit sloppy in cutting the cubes that would perfectly fit the ice box (from memory) so the kids would have some cold ice shavings on a hot summer day. (”Growing up - we never had ice cold drinks!”)
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The junk man on his mule-drawn cart piled high with stuff. In the summer when the ice man came, it was always an excuse to nag for ice cream so mom would churn it using real cream poured off the tops of the farm fresh milk bottles delivered that morning from the farmer down the road. Our ice box was open enough that it was basically a 4 foot high insulated box with a few shelves in the middle - no need to carve the 5lb blocks of ice to fit.
Our creek was too muddy and polluted from the hurricanes that brought floods to swim in, besides it smelled funny.