I Remember - an instant unexpected prompt

This morning, when I was driving my sister to the bus, she was telling me about the young women she is working with this week at theh Convention Center. In her job she gets moved around as needed from buffet to coffee concession and other stations. At the coffee concession, the young women were talking about how much they love their boyfriends and how good their boyfriends smell. My sister was laughing about it. We both were, being oldies - she is 61, and I am 80.

As often happens in my mostly quiet life, I was thinking about that after I drove home and it reminded me of a smell. I was born in 1945, and this instant momentary memory must be from those first five years when my father was a ironworker and we lived on Warnock Street in South Philadelphia. Dad came home from work one day and through the open door came a rush of cold winter air and he brought with him a cloud of industrial smells - motor oil, metal, flannel and beer, mixed in with the winter smells of the industrial area where we lived. Just south of our neighborhood was Publicker's where they made whiskey and you could smell the mash, in odorous wafts.

I guess it is part of the territory of OLD that these memories from the far distant past flash into your mind. I feel a desire to record them for some reason, mostly I guess because they are GONE things - ghosts of a vanished world.

Our coal bin in the basement on Warnock Street, a dark black dusted enclosure into which periodically a metal shute was inserted through a small front window and a coal truck dumped a clattering cascade of black chuncks of rock. From that small room of rocks, my father would shovel coal into a scuttle and then into the furnace that heated our house.

It doesn't seem to me that I lived that long ago and yet these memories seem as old as though they were stories like Little House on the Prairie, or the Waltons.

While we are in the basement with the coal bin, let's revisit my mother's washer which was a large round white enamel tub with an agitator. The clothes went in, the soap, the water and the agitator beat the dirt out of them. They they were drained and rinsed in another tub, a square metal one; then put through the ringer. Yes, that is the origin of that old expression which you don't actually hear often anymore, "Put through the ringer." My mother fed the clothes into two rollers over yet another large tub and they squeezed the water out. Next the clothes went into a large pan of starch water, got rung out again and then hung out on the line in the backyard to dry. And speaking of smells, the fragrance of the fresh laundry after it was unpegged and put into the laundry basket and brought into the house, the fragrance of fresh air and cleanliness is unforgettable. My mother had a large machine that ironed which she called the mangle. It was two large cloth covered rollers, heated, into which she fed sheets and pillow cases and some of our larger items of clothing. Other, smaller items, had to be ironed on the ironing board - which is a thing you don't see much anymore either because modern synthetic fabrics are wrinkle free. Our old one was wooden.

There was a lot of labor in laundry in my mother's day. There was a lot of labor in EVERYTHING in my mother's day. Her cooking involved her seated at the table peeling and dicing fresh vegetables, shelling peas and preparing various kinds of meats. She took fish from a wooden box and soaked it overnight in waater to get the salt out and made cod fish cakes. She cooked large chunks of meat, then boned them and saved the left overs to put through a hand grinder that clamped onto the edge of the sink drain. Into the funnel at the top went the meat scraps and out the front came long noodles of meat to be formed into chicken or ham croquets or meatballs or hamburgers. Rarely did mom use canned products, and I HATED them. How revolting those canned green beans were - like the corpses of green beans. And most of all I hated canned salmon, a big dinner table quarrel because apparently it was expwnsive and considered a bit of a treat to the depression era folks like my parents, but unutterably disgusting to me with the thin translucent bones still enlmeshed in the pink flesh. The vegetables, by the way, came via the huckster, who drove his horse drawn wagon down the alley behind our brick row homes, calling out to the housewives, who would come and squeeze and smell the produce, make their choices and he would put them in the hanging rocking scale and the money would be handed over.

Also down that alley came the milkman to deliver our glass bottles of milk with the cardboard lids that you could peel back to lick the cream off the top of the milk. The milk went into the ice box, yes, a cabinet into which went a large block of ice which also came to us via a truck that came down the alley. The back doors of the truck were opened and a man bearing huge tongs would wrestle out the block of ice and carry it in and slide it into the ice box. As the ice melted, my mother would have to take out the pan of melt water and empty it into the sink.

Even simple meals like breakfast involved a lot of labor. My mother made oatmeal and cream of rice or cream of wheat for us in a saucepan with boiling milk. Those pots and pans! Those iron kettles and iron skillets, so heavy and so hard to clean.

Childcare was an enormous labor. Diapers had to be rinsed of the fecal matter into the toilet then into the diaper pail. Then down through the laundry cycle of labor and out on the line. Thos diapers were stiff too. They had to be pinned on the baby, not an easy taask and a delicate and dangerous one. Someone could get a nasty stab in a thymb or finger or the baby could get a puncture when you were trying to jab that diaper pin through those cloth diapers. Glass bottles had to be sterilized in a big metal rack dropped into a huge cauldron of boiling water. Babies used a lot of diapers and bottles and bottle nipples in a day so this was an ongoing labor. And they had to be bathed and powdered and dressed and walked about outside for fresh air. My mother was the devoted and proper kind of mother. Babies went out with hats! No baby blinking against the beating sun in my mother's coach; her babies had beautiful sunbonnets, and handknitted and crocheted hats and mittens, sweaters and blankets. Mom didn't knit them all, all the women of her era knitted and crocheted and each baby was born into a women's party of handmade gifts, hand sewn blankets, quilts, sweaters anc booties.

It was a mother's pride to walk her well dressed baby in its pastel finery in a large, safe, roomy baby carriage with a convertible roof.

One thing our mother did have time for, however, was making things. A toy she made for me which I have since made, although not for any child, just to see if I remembered how, was the Quaker oatmeal box baby cradle, cut cardboard made the stand for the bottom; the oatmeal box was covered in fabric. Inside was a sewn little mattress with blanket and pillow. An inexpensive celluloid baby doll went inthe cradle.

All the women of my mother's era were skilled needleworkers and made knitted and crocheted items all the time. One favorite was 'doilies' which went on the backs and arms of chairs and sofa's or on tables . These followed intricate traditional patterns with names like "pineapple" and everyone had them. Also the more ambitious made crocheted table cloths. No women from that time still made lace but lace table cloths for the dining room table were imported from the old countries or inherited from ancestors who in our neighborhood were Italian or Irish. Every summer my Grandmother Lyons took down her Irish lace curtains and washed them by hand and strung them up to dry on needle encrusted wooden stretchers in the dining room. Those doilies they made were exquisite.

Needless to say with this round of endless tasks, a woman of my mother's era had little spare time to herself or to visit with friends. A lot of the visiting happened when walking the baby carriage, or hanging up the laundry, and often in the era before air conditioning, on hot summer nights when the neighbors put out their folding aluminum chairs and sat on the sidewalks, the porches, and the steps and drank highballs or beer and chatted while we kids roller skated on the asphalt street, mostly uncluttered by cars in those days when hardly anyone could afford a car. We played half ball, with a stick (probably left over from a broken broom) and made skooters from wooden crates, a 2 by 4 and old roller skates on the bottom. The front of the crates would be festooned with hammered on bottle caps, and if you were lucky, reflectors. A bar of wood (another cast off from a broken broom or mop) served as handle bars. Of course our fathers made these for us.

For some reason our cheap hollow pink rubber "nipple" balls were cut in half to play with. perhaps so they wouldn't go far when hit. The roller skates were metal wheels on a metal plate with leather straps to go around our shoes. We had skate keys which, if I remember correctly, were used to adjust the length of the metal plate under the shoes. The asphalt of the street was fairly smooth, again, because there were few cars yet, so the skating was pretty smooth. The other favorite pastime I remember was sailing paper boats folded from a newspaper down the gutters when it rained and the gutters became fast moving canals.

Of course my brother (who is a year and a half younger than I am) and I had store bought toys as well. I alsways had a doll in a carrying case with a set or two of clothes and accessories in a little drawer in the case. These were given to me by my Godfather Neal Schmidt, about whom I have often written. I still have one of those dolls from the Philadelphia Effanbee doll company, a 'walker' whose head would turn when you 'walked' her. I don't remember my brother's toys very much. Although the toy he had that was actually my father's toy, was the Christmas train set. It was my father's pride and joy. He built elaborate train platforms at Christmas with tunnels and bridges adn track switches. Those trains were I think Lionel. The whistle, and again, the smell of motor oil, the perfume of the Industrial age. Magical - the villages so different from our brick row house neighborhood - little paste board houses with bottle brush evergreen trees and the little molded metal people waiting at the train station seated on benches, or skiing down the hillsides, sledding, in their painted red sweaters and bright blue trousers.

There was a pond made from a mirror with ice skaters, and lamp posts, and snow on everything. What amazement and joy on Christmas morning when we awoke to see our parlour transformed into this little world of winter beauty, the platform two feet high and surrounded by brick paper. At the back corner was the Christmas tree purchased down 'the Neck' which is what they called Sonehouse Lane, a fascinating historical settlement of early German immigrants who drained the swampy Delaware estuary into canals and little truck farms. They raised pigs, chickens, cows and kept horses to pull the wagons of their produce through the allies. They were driven out by the developers who made the airport.

Happy trails! wrightj45@yahoo.com