eclarke said:
I am older than you are, I got to cut weeds from the beans with a corn knife and a hoe.When I was old enough to go to the farm for the summer and work we were still shucking corn by hand for $0.00 per hour. The farm was still pretty primitive, hand pumped water, outside facilities, smokehouse, icehouse, coal stove for cooking and a coal furnace and there were still working gas lights in the house..boy was I glad when they sold it..boby would I like to go back!!!..EC
I'm just on the edge of that. We had relatives who still used an 'ice box' and I remember being put to work with an ice pick at family get-togethers. We had a B&W TV and watched Ernie Kovaks on WGN out of Chicago when we could get a signal. I grew up listening to Top-40 on WLS-AM.
We had an oil furnace in Galesburg - the house caught fire because something went wrong with it. There was a hand pump that still worked in the backyard, but we had running water. The neighbors had an outhouse, but they had indoor plumbing, so it was just left over. Don's Drugstore sold penny candy, and you could fill up a small paper bag with the stuff for 10 cents. They pulled my name out of a barrel on "Romper Room" and I won a huge box of stuff from them.
I learned to drive at age 12 on a old 1963 Plymouth Valiant station wagon with a slant-six and three-on-the-tree shifter. I know what a 'Choke' knob on a car is for, and owned a car that had a starter button in the floorboard that you mashed with your foot. I have used a rug beater. And had one used on me. My dad tried to re-sharpen Gillette blue blades to save money and shot 127 roll film as a private detective, which he processed in the basement of our house. He smoked Pall Malls and drank Old Style. He had had polio and wore a 2 1/2 inch built-up heel on one shoe.
My granddad had a huge Polaroid camera and you had to rub some kind of fixer on the prints after you peeled them apart - it came in a tube and I loved the smell of the stuff. He also had an 8mm movie camera with three rotating lenses and a spring-wind drive. He had a Japanese bolt-action rifle his brother brought back from Iwo Jima, his other brother didn't come back from Guadalcanal. Grandpa designed tank parts at Caterpiller Tractor during the war and the government would not let him join up.