Jan, 20, 2011

What appliances did you have or not have in your home?

We had an outhouse but luckily could use the indoor toilet except when at the ranch where the double seater outhouse was the only place to go. We did not have a phone that you would have to pick up and crank until you got the operator but we did have one where you had to wait to answer it since it would ring once or even twice depending on if it was you or your neighbor that was to answer it. Iy was called a party line since there were two parties on it and if you were not nice you could listen to the neighbors conversations but of course that isn't so different from today when you can listen to several of them at a time as they talk on their cell phones, I guess there was one major difference in that you could hear both sides of the conversation instead of having to make up the one side you can't hear today. We had an ice box but by that time the name refrigerator was starting to catch on since it wasn't anything like an ice box in reality. We had an old Black and White TV which was upgraded to a color one sometime before my teens. We had two old wood burning stoves to cook on out in the shed and we used the electric one in the house. I did use an old wood burning one in the barn to heat up the wash room so we could wash the milking tools. We had old dutch ovens that we cooked with on special occasions in the fireplace in the yard but used pots and pans on the stove. We had a coal burning furnace that didn't get upgraded until I was long gone from the home and married. I did have to haul coal every morning and night into the basement and then fill the stoker and pull the clinkers out of the furnace. Dad usually did that in the mornings while waiting for me to get up but I usually did it at night. We had old kerosene lamps that we would have to trim the wicks on before using when the power would occasionally go out. And we heated water on the stove to cook with if the electric water heater didn't keep up with the demand of seven children. We had an old washing machine that we would ring the clothes out and then hang them on the outdoor clothesline to dry in the summer and indoor clothes lines during the winter. I was in my early teens when we did get an electric washer and dryer set that was really welcomed. We did have an electric freezer that was huge and could hold a full beef and lots of other things like deer meat and chicken that we had killed. It also held ice cream occasionally in the summer after we would sit out under the grape arbor and crank the ice cream maker until it was cold and frozen since we did not have an electric one to do the job of freezing the cream.We also made butter from the cream that I would bring in from doing chores after it was separated from the milk with an old crank style cream separator. Well that's not all of them I am sure but it is all that I can think of right now. Oops we did have an old iron that was heated on the stove for ironing sitting in a cupboard somewhere while we used the electric iron instead.