I remember when we had an ice box. Not a refrigerator but a white wooden cabinet with a big block of ice in the top .There was a drip pan underneath to hold the water run off as the ice melted.
A separate door closed the ice off from the compartment below where the milk, eggs and butter were kept cool.
The ice truck arriving on our street was a big occasion for all the children. The big burly, well muscled iceman would chip off slivers of ice for us as we waited patiently in the street barefoot with the hot pavement stinging but not burning our feet which were toughened by many summers going barefoot.
Then the iceman would take his black tongs and hoist up a huge block of ice and take it into the kitchen of the house he was servicing, place it in the ice box and then continue his rounds and the excitement of the day was over.
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13 comments:
I remember that ice box too. What I remember is the sign my mother would put in the window to let the iceman know we needed ice.
And what would happen if you neglected to empty that pan!! You would have a flood!!
So true Millie. A flood indeed.
Happy memories from simplier times.
We had an ice man when I was a baby. I shall have to blog about it because it lead to a funny story.
Anyway, we had one. Also a scrub board and a toaster that you had to let the sides down on.
Yep Maya's Granny
We had those too
"Also a scrub board and a toaster that you had to let the sides down on."
Can't wait to read your "ice box blog"
What about the milk man? We had on in Lexington.
Best of all, the "Good Humor Man" who rang his way onto our block and was greeted with the cries of joy and the nickles of all the kids?
Roger
Roger
Oh yes. The milkman. In fact we had a milk man here in Atlanta up until about 1980 who brought milk in GLASS bottles. He would leave it in a cooler on the front porch.It was a local dairy.Mathis Diary. And Mathis also sponsored field trips for elementry age children. They got to see the milk being processed and bottled and also SPECIAL TREAT the braver children got to try their hand at milking "Rosebud" the pet cow
But the Good Humor Man was the best treat around.
Goollly!! Miss Chancy. Them are some dandy posts! If you wrote a book I'd be the first in line to buy it. This is not a joke, either.
Personally, I appreciate the nostalgia more than the reality of blocks of ice and hods of coal. But I do miss the simplicity of those days. Someone recently observed that far from making our lives easier, technology has complicated them beyond all expectations. How true is that?!
Have a wonderful and much cooler weekend, Chancy dear.
Wasn't around for the ice box, but sure remember the Good Humor Man...loved hearing those bells....still do; although it's just not the same.
We also had a fruit-and-vegetable man, twice a week. But the one I really miss is the seltzer man. You can buy those old bottles (they were always "recycled"...he picked up the empties whenever he delivered the fulls) in nostalgia shops now, but you can't buy the guy to deliver the seltzer!
What an interesting memory - interesting because of the level of detail you've given. Makes me nostalgic for days I've never known (I grew up in the '50's). ML of Full Fathom.
We had an ice man, but no milk man. One of us kids carried a bucket up the lane to Grandma's to get milk. If it had rained, recently, we might get to wade through the water standing in Grandma's basement to get to the large enameled-steel bowls of milk. The bowls sat on one board, propped upon two large crocks, and were covered by another board that kept the flies out.
City kids stood on hot pavement, but we had dirt streets and lanes (although we did have a short run of concrete sidewalk in our little town). The coolest place in town was the general store--dark and cool.
Cop Car
If I think back real hard I can remember a similiar situation with the milkman and all of us kids clammering after the truck. Sometimes I wish I could better remember the early early days.
There was one mention of the coal hod. It was inside the house. But Remember the sloping doors outside that opened out to let the coal truck stick in the chute so the coal ran into the coal bin in the basement next to the furnace? "How many tons today, lady? Optomist - we bought 1/2 ton at a time. Those were the doors immortalized in "..slide down my cellar door... and we'll be jolly friends forevermore." Where are those friends now? I remember them! Coal Strikes - great! Schools closed!
I remember the world came to us: The ice man, the coal man, the milk man. Later, when my children were growing up (we lived in Ft. Lauderdale) - we had the diaper lady (twice a week), the inside-the-house bug man (monthly), the outside-the-house bug man (monthly), the hedge trimmer(twice a year), the hedge doctor(once a year), the grass cutter(every 2 weeks), the grass doctor(twice a year), the tree trimmer(once a year - just prior to hurricane season), the tree doctor(once a year), the pool man(weekly), and still the milk man (who came in and put the milk into the refrigerator 6 days a week) and a pie/dessert man who made regular deliveries (weekly). Then we moved to the Lake Huron shore, in the Huron National Forest, had none of these services AND didn't become RICH. I thought we would be without all those services to pay for. ... Anyone know what happened?
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