Today's Memories

This time of year always brings back memories and not all are Christmas memories. Today I came up with these:

Back in the early fifties we still had an iceman that came up the street every day or so. He had a truck filled with huge blocks of ice that were scored with an outline of 25 pound blocks. He would stop, open the back of the truck, chip off a block and then use a huge set of tongs to carry the ice into our house. We kids in the neighborhood would watch out for him and when he went into the house with the block of ice we would raid the back of his truck for the chips of ice that were knocked off to the floor of the truck. As I think about it now, that was very unsanitary, but we kids never thought about that. That said, those blocks of ice were chopped out of the Mississippi River when the river froze over the previous winter and then were stored in nearby caves until summer. How unsanitary was that?

Also in the same time period, there were still milk men that delivered whole milk to houses in quart glass bottles that just had a thin cardboard top on them. In the winter those bottles would freeze slightly, pushing the cream up to and popping the tops off. Mom would scrape the cream off the top to save it for mixing in coffee for our friends.

Back in the seventies I was working at a TV shop in Lake Ozark Missouri. The guy I worked for was a corpulent fellow. When we would be out working on antenna towers he enjoyed sending me up the tower first and then he would climb half way up and start shaking the tower when I was up at the top, giving me a wild ride. One day we went to a resort at the Grand Glaze Bridge at the Lake of the Ozarks where the antenna preamplifier had quit working on their 40 foot-high tower that was at the edge of a 40 foot cliff over the lake. It was a very large antenna because it was located nearly 80 miles from the nearest TV transmitter. I had to hook my safety belt to the tower and then lay almost horizontally backwards (over the water) to reach the preamplifier and change it. My employer of course rattled the tower to add a touch of excitement to the task at hand.