Recently, my wife and I journeyed to our cabin in the desert
above Palm Springs at Twentynine Palms, some 430 miles from Morgan
Hill.
Recently, my wife and I journeyed to our cabin in the desert above Palm Springs at Twentynine Palms, some 430 miles from Morgan Hill.
We do this about every six weeks or two months. This time we discovered an unusual sound coming from the refrigerator. It would go through its cycle then a horrible clatter occurred, like a shelf had fallen.
Oh! Are we going to have to buy a new one, I pondered.
Then my mind digressed as I sat, drinking morning coffee, and watching the desert sun rise.
In the 1930’s and 40’s, some seventy years ago, my home in Enid, Okla. was a “big white house” or so it seemed to me.
Our house was built in 1907 on the east side of town. In the late 1920’s my uncle moved it to the west side. I think he paid $7,000 for it. The house sported a marvelous ante-bellum front porch with great white columns as well as a swing, hanging by chains from the porch ceiling.
Sitting on the porch was a glider (remember the low swing on a stand). As I remember, there were two bedrooms downstairs and three bedrooms upstairs.
Moreover, “the house” surrounded a living room, a gigantic kitchen with an “icebox” purchased from Montgomery-Ward as well as a pantry. On the screened-in back porch sat the washing machine, close to the clotheslines stretching out from the back door.
Unfortunately, my “big white house” contained only one bathroom and that was downstairs.
Thus, the necessity to have a “convenience” pot under one’s bed, if your bedroom was upstairs.
As I remember the 1930s and 1940s, my family’s “big white house,” always seemed to be filled with friends or relatives – from off the farm, rooming as they went to business school; aunts and uncles rooming until times got better; and Grandmother who lived with us until she died at 92.
Yet, as my family survived hard times, our home was always filled with love and many, many people.
On the corner in front of my house was the bus stop and bench for waiting.
A sidewalk separated the grassy and tree covered parking from our front yard.
But my house dominated the street corner where the side street, sauntered in gravel off to the side.
Our driveway, immediately in back of our “big white house,” was gravel and dirt. In fact, beyond the back yard, the garage had a gravel entrance, too.
When I was a child in the 1930s, my bedroom was downstairs and had two windows. One looked out on graveled side street.
The other on our graveled driveway in back. In the side street window on a warm day, my mother placed a foot square cardboard sign, containing four triangles, from each side to the center.
One triangle read, 15 lbs. The next triangle in the square read 25 lbs. The third, 50 lbs. At the bottom triangle of the square appeared Peerless Ice Company, the address and phone number.
Assessing her need, my mother might put the Peerless Ice Company sign in my bedroom window with the 25 lbs. triangle at the top. Or, if really needed, the 50 lbs.
Visualize now this scene. The Peerless Ice Truck crunches to a stop; the driver peers into my bedroom window and sees the sign saying “25 lbs.”
Out of his truck “the iceman cometh.” Thrusting on his back his leather apron, he strides to the back of his truck and selects a 25 pound cube of ice.
With his tongs, he grabs the cube and slings it on his back. Gingerly stepping to our back door, he quickly enters, moves to the “icebox” in the kitchen, opens the door and deposits the ice in the upper receptacle of the “icebox.”
Meanwhile, if spring had moved to hot summer, as “the iceman cometh” and moved to deliver, we kids ran to grab chunks of ice, out of the back of the truck, to suck on.
World War II was a defining period in our nation’s history. It also was a defining moment in science.
After the war, around 1949, my mother purchased a refrigerator from Montgomery-Ward. And with Apologies to Eugene O’Neill, the iceman cometh no more.
