My Street

I grew up in a fairly new neighborhood where there lots of kids. There were cars on the road – many were made by small companies that have long since gone out of business. Also, there were still a lot of horses on the road. Most of them pulled delivery wagons. There was the baker, the milkman, and one that you don’t hear ever see anymore and most people don’t even know about was the paper-rags man.

The paper-rags man would come down the street with their wagons with a single horse and the horse would walk very slowly and the man would call out “paper-rags, paper-rags” – but it sounded like “paper-rex”. People would come out with paper and rags and anything else that might have a re-sale value and he would pay a few cents to them and take them home to re-sell.

The milk man came every day. They had a route where he would deliver his milk at the same addresses every morning. Now they go to Safeway and buy it in gallon jugs, but he had full bottles to deliver and would pick up the empty bottles. Milk was delivered every day or every other day. He had his wagon full of milk with a single horse pulling the wagon. He would stop the horse and get out with a wire basket full of milk bottles and he might walk for 3 or 4 houses. When he got to the last house he would whistle and his horse would catch up to him and he would get back on.

The baker also delivered fresh rolls and all kinds of pastry. The bakery wagon always smelled so nice because of the fresh baked goods. Usually the baked goods were ordered ahead of time.

There was a little bit of rivalry between the milk man and the baker in our neighborhood. Every so often when they came to a stretch of road where there weren’t too many customers the baker and milk man would race their horses down the street. I don’t remember who would win but they were just having fun anyway.

The ice man was the other delivery man that made regular rounds. He had 100 pound blocks of ice. The blocks were scored in ½ or ¼’s. So if he was delivering 50 pounds he would break the big block in ½. He would grab the ice with his tongs and put the ice on his shoulder. He wore a leather pad on his shoulder so he wouldn’t get too wet and cold. He would take it into the house. In those days there were ice boxes instead of refrigerators. The ice would go in an upper container. The ice boxes had a pan underneath to catch the water from the ice melting. The pan had to be emptied or you had a flooded floor. While the ice man was in the houses the kids would go to his wagon and pick up the ice chips from breaking the blocks. That was a great thing for the kids to suck on the ice.

There was one wagon that the kids were all happy to see…the waffle wagon. The waffle wagon had glass sides to the upper part of it. You could see the propane flame and they made the waffles right there in front of you. When done they would sprinkle with powdered sugar. They cost 5 cents. The waffles had a sweet taste that after all these many years I have never tasted the equal of. I have had lots of waffles since the early days. Nothing has equaled those waffles.

Once when I was very young a team of horses pulling a wagon were spooked by something and they were running on the road and someone finally grabbed them and were able to calm them down. I was in an empty lot nearby when that happened. The horses were prancing around with the noise of their harnesses and hoofs stomping the ground. I was very frightened. Believe me, I was glad they got them under control. Maybe it was just my imagination, especially because I was so young, I felt that I was in great danger. And, I might have been. This experience stays in my mind even to this day.

The house I lived in with all my brothers and one sister was at the top of a hill. In the winter time when there was enough snow that hill would be covered with a layer of snow and ice. It was a great place for sledding. After supper – in those times dinner was in the middle of the day and supper was the evening meal – we used to get our sleds out and head for the street on the hill. There were so many kids in our neighborhood. We would collect at the top of the hill and each of us would take our sled and get a running start and jump on the sled and slide down to the bottom. When we got to the bottom we would start walking back up the hill for another ride. Our sleds had a piece of rope on them to drag them up with. Sometimes there would be kids that knew each other well enough that they would ride down two on a sled. Or if a boy knew a girl in the neighborhood he would get on the sled and lay face down on the sled and his girl would get on top of him and they would ride down together. There was a girl that lived about two blocks away that would sometimes sled down with me. When I got a little bit older there would be cars going down the hill and some of my buddies would hang on to the bumpers and let the cars pull us down the hill. Sometimes the cars owners would get angry and stop the car, jump out, and chase us. We were young and pretty fast so luckily we never did get caught.

The street in front of our house was made of red bricks. One amazing thing is going back to the old neighborhood after living out here in Washington we discovered that those old brick streets were still intact. Hadn’t been black topped over or even patched up too much. My daughters were really amazed. These memories of the times when I grew up are still fairly vivid in my mind. I am amazed some times at how interesting people are and how ignorant of how things were in those days. People don’t realize the kind of life that they lived through.

My First Love

My family belonged to a Catholic Church and we lived in the diocese of St. Ignatius about a mile from the school and church. My schooling from the 1^st through the 8^th grade was at the Catholic school. We had nuns for teachers. Every morning we were marched from the school to the church for services. We marched from the tune of a piano. In the sixth or seventh grade the piano player was a student about my age. She was a girl with curly blond hair. As she played the piano her head would bob back and forth and her curls would bounce up and down. I was fascinated with her looks.

One day I got up the nerve to talk to her (I was about fifteen) and ask her if I could walk her home from school. She said yes and I took her books and we started to walk. I was in seventh heaven. We talked about this and that. Finally we go to her house. She lived about a mile from the school but in the opposite direction from where we lived. As we walked she asked me, “I’m not taking you out of your way, am I?” I said, “Oh, no. You aren’t taking me out of my way.” When we got to her house I handed her back her books and said goodbye.

As I started to walk home I realized I had to go quite a long way home. It was a mile back to school and another mile back to my house. When I got back to my house, my sister, who was the cook was VERY upset. “Where WERE you?” I have to have potatoes for the meal. It was my job to peel potatoes for our large family – so a LOT of potatoes. I had to hurry up so I took my potato peeler and went as fast as I could. The peeler had an end to dig out the eyes, but this night a lot of the eyes were left.

The next day when school was out the girl with the blonde hair was waiting for me to walk her home. I told her I couldn’t because I have to go home to peel potatoes. It just wasn’t working out and that was the last and only time I walked her home. It turned out that was the end of our relationship – all because of potatoes.

In later years I told my kids that if it wasn’t for those potatoes they might all have blonde curly hair.