Remember the ice man?

AZ Jim

AZ Jim

R.I.P. With Us In Spirit Only
Location
SURPRISE, ARIZONA
In 1938 I was a small boy. We had a "Ice Box" and I remember it like yesterday. We had a sign that said ICE and on each corner was an amount 25, 50, 75 pounds. Depending on which corner you had up when you hung it on your door the iceman would bring up your ice and put it in your ice box for you. He always had a leather pad on his shoulder and threw the ice on his shoulder using ice tongs. Mom had to watch the drip pan because as the ice melted it would fill up with water. Those were the days....
 

We had a refrigerator with the big thingy on the top, but I do remember the ice man as some folks still had ice boxes. We moved in town for a couple years and our milk man still used a horse to deliver milk. The milk box sat outside and on freezing day, if the milk froze, the cream on top would pop the paper cap and stick a couple inches out of the bottle, like a Popsicle.
 

Yup. I remember the ice man delivering ice with his wagon pulled by a horse and the ice box and the fridges with the compressors on top. And "modern" kitchen stoves that had legs on them. I also remember having a pump outside the back door, but then we upgraded to a real kitchen sink with a pump there instead. I remember graduating to running water. I also remember graduating to HOT running water! And a chemical toilet instead of the outhouse, then after we got running water, a genuine flush toilet. I also remember shaving bars of Fels Naptha soap into a galvanized tub for soapy water and scrubbing the clothes on a washboard. A red-letter day was when we got electricity, and my mother and I no longer had to clean the kerosene lamps and trim the wicks every morning.

It's not that none of that was around, just that after the war my parents bought a house that was built before the turn of the (20th) century. If there was no running water or electricity in a house before the war, it was a while after the war was over that it could even be made available.

We really thought we were stylin' when we got a phone. It was a 12-party line!
 
Not the ice box, but I do remember coal being delivered to the front of the house. A truck would dump it and a worker would carry it, in bags, over his sholder to our basement storage.
 
Pappy said:
Ken.....we had a coal bin in the cellar and the coal man would deliver a ton of coal as needed. He had a metal chute that went into cellar window and he shoveled the coal into the chute and into the bin.
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Same here, but it had to be dumped in front of the house..
 
Granny had an ice box and I remember being woke up by the clopping horse early in the morning when visiting. We converted from oil to coal during WW2 with a bin in the cellar and a chute thru a cellar window...
 
Sparked another memory. Haven't thought of these in years. We lived on a steep hill that ran about two miles to the top. In the winter the cinder truck, they didn't use salt back then, would slowly come up the hill with this poor guy, in the back, shoveling cinders across the road for traction. He must have froze his arse off.
 
My dad had a small ice cream cart thinky with hot ice in it that you could attach to a bike. One summer he let me use it; I rode up and down the streets very close to my block. Mostly I ended up giving the ice cream away to friends and eating it myself, wasn't a very good money earning gig for me. I was ten at the time, did have that entrepreneurial bug that lasted way into my old age, always had some side (legit) business going. Unfortunately I liked the planning and strategising side more than the implementation of it.
 
Another thought. My younger brother and I used to prowl the alleys in search of discarded bottles. The big bottles brought 5 cents and the smaller ones 3 cents. We used the booty to buy those great penny candies at the little store that every neighborhood had.
 
We didn't have an iceman in my neighborhood. I'd see them in other neighborhoods carrying ice up to the housesbut my neighborhod was considered too poor to sell ice in. Instead, I'd walk a half mile to a small grocer and buy twenty-five pounds. When it was really hot (as it gets in the south) my ice would only weigh about twelve and a half punnda by the tgime I'd get back home. We had a home-made ice box my uncle and my dad devised. Itwouldn't keep the ice very long and i had to go get ice every three days. Then one day dad came bringing a large icebox home in his pickup. Ice would last much longer in that box.My dad started bringing a fifty pound block home in his pickup. That all but ended my ice carrying days.
 
Oh yes I remember the Ice Man from the 30's up to the time I left home to go in the service in 1952. I also remember the ton of coal delivered to our basement when I lived in New Jersey.
 
AprilT said:
My dpedalingad a small ice cream cart thinky with hot ice in it that you could attach to a bike. One summer he let me use it; I rode up and down the streets very close to my block. Mostly I ended up giving the ice cream away to friends and eating it myself, wasn't a very good money earning gig for me. I was ten at the time, did have that entrepreneurial bug that lasted way into my old age, always had some side (legit) business going. Unfortunately I liked the planning and strategising side more than the implementation of it.
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Ditto..

I had butt blisters from pedaling..
 
For some of my childhood we lived by a train track. As hard as they were to get in those days we used to put pennies on the track to watch the train smash 'em. In those days they were pretty much pure copper so they smashed nicely. Hey! Never pretended to be the brightest bulb in the box.
 

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