Old times not forgotten
Last week I wrote about the primitive form of home medicine and the somewhat casual approach to health care that my family practiced when I was young. A friend mentioned that my description reflected extreme poverty. He was right, of course. A true picture could not have avoided the background shadows. But I thought it worthwhile now to elaborate on that picture, because it was a photograph of a slice of a culture, not an individual shot of just me.
The rural South was still a separate world when I came along. Where I grew up, electrical service did not reach the countryside until well after World War II. The Rural Electrification Administration, REA, one of those feared “socialist” programs of the Depression, was the only way country folk could have access to this service that town folk had considered normal for decades. And while the REA became law in 1935, it took years for power to spread across the land. I first turned on a dim light bulb over my bed in 1948.
Until electricity flooded the countryside with light and power, most rural families did their laundry in washtubs with water heated in a black iron wash pot over an outdoor fire. Laundered clothes were dried by sunlight and ironed with a flat-iron heated either on the wood-fired kitchen stove or at the fireplace, depending on the season. Drinking water was drawn by windlass and bucket from an open well, or sometimes lugged from a spring down the hill, and it sat in an open water bucket either in the kitchen or on a shelf on the back porch. A dipper, usually cheap plain aluminum or enameled metal, either floated on the water or hung beside the bucket. Need a drink? Dip and drink from the dipper, slinging any residue out in the yard. And don’t sink the dipper back in the water; let it float or hang, drying. I knew a couple of families that grew long-necked gourds and made dippers out of them. I envied them.
A few families along the graveled public roads had battery-powered radios. You could identify them by the wire, the “aerial,” running from the house up to a pole in the yard. The batteries were about the size of a shoe box. During the war, they became very difficult to get.
Some of the families in the small town where I went to school had telephones, party line, but only a few well-to-do families out in the sticks did. So you didn’t call a doctor when you were sick or the preacher when you needed spiritual guidance. You went where you had to go or, if you couldn’t, sent a message by a neighbor. Telephones were rare enough that I still remember the first one I ever saw, one of those old-fashioned jobs with the mouthpiece at the top of a black metal stalk and the ear piece, separate, hanging in a yoke by its side. It was on the school principal’s desk, and he cranked a handle mounted on the side of the desk and told the operator who he wanted to call.
We rural folks, I’m sure, didn’t realize we were a dying breed, trying to eke out a living in a form of agriculture already obsolete. Those who owned their own farms could usually make do, although most of them never got rich. There were a few tractors scattered through the neighborhood, but most farming was still being done with mules or horses. The farmers who didn’t own their land would either rent or share-crop, systems guaranteed, even with the best of intentions, to encourage poverty. Yet somehow life went on, even pleasantly. While I wore shabby clothes, I was never particularly embarrassed by that. My classmates, some from the country and some from town, knew me well, and most of us were in school together for 12 years. I would have been mortified if I’d had to accept charity in any form, but I didn’t, so I considered myself the equal of the others.
I tell this not to paint poverty in a glowing light, but to point out some stuff younger people, and even older ones who lived in town, may not be aware of. And because I want to let you know that the sound you hear is me laughing out loud when you tell about the tough old days when you only had three television channels to watch.
This story was originally published February 10, 2018 at 5:39 PM with the headline "Old times not forgotten."