WATER, SATURDAY NIGHT BATHS, ELECTRICITY

Before I begin this chapter I must apologize to James. He is my first-born grandchild. I know, very well, that his birthday is September 15th. Yet, somehow, when I was saying "Happy Birthday" to those who have September and October birthdays, I missed his date and did not include it with the rest. James, I will never forget to include your birthday on September 15th again. Sorry, James. I love you.

Also, my apologies to Zac. I put his birthday on October 10th and it is actually on October 13th. I will never again forget to list your birthday on October 13th. I love you, too Zac. AND, I have made the corrections at the bottom of that blog chapter so they are there permanently, for everyone to see.

Alas, I have forgotten the year in which some of my grandchildren were born. I would really appreciate an e-mail from the father or mother of all of my grandchildren (and great-grandchild) listing the year of birth of each. Then, I will have a permanent record which I will keep in a very safe place where I will always be able to refer to it. Thank you very much. (My apologies that I did not record the year of each birth as they occurred.) Now, on with the saga.

Apparently, my parents did not have running water in their house until after I was born. That's how Grace remembers it. I'm sure it is accurate because she was almost 10 when I was born. They did have a tap somewhere outside. Probably not too far from the house, but if it was not in the house, it was TOO FAR away. I can't begin to imagine what it must have been like to have babies and diapers (no disposable diapers in those days) without running hot and cold water at your fingertips, not to mention sheets, overalls, towels and everything else that needed to be laundered. Fortunately, after my dad built the "lean-to" on the two original rooms, he brought running water into the house (COLD water only). My parents didn't have a water heater until the early 1960's. That was when my dad built yet another addition onto their house. He built a nice big living room, a big kitchen and a bathroom. Yeah!!! Hot, running water AND a toilet in the house. There was a big bathtub in the bathroom, as well. But, I'm getting ahead of myself.

Yes, after I was born we had cold running water---but no sink. We had wash basins, one large and one smaller. So, how did we brush our teeth? Just like all of you do when you go camping: We filled a cup with water, took our toothbrush and went out on the back porch or into the backyard to brush teeth---every day, winter and summer. Sometimes we had toothpaste and sometimes we just had to use soap---yuck! Fortunately, we never had to use Mom's homemade LYE soap. But even the toothpaste we did have didn't taste as pleasant as what you guys all use. It was very chalky tasting. Anyway, as you can understand, we had to be very careful about letting the water run inasmuch as there was no drain in the house. When we washed hands we generally put some water into one of the basins and washed our hands. We didn't just let the water run. I remember washing my hands in water someone else had already used. After the water had been used two or three times, we picked up the wash basin, carried it out on the back porch and threw the water as far as we could so it didn't land on the path where we walked by the side of the house. No one wanted a muddy path in the summer or an icy path in the winter. Mom was always a stickler about hand washing. I was taught to wash my hands after returning from the outhouse, playing outside, taking care of animals, or touching almost anything and everything. I always washed my hands carefully and frequently and I stilll do. We may not have always had the most sanitary conditions, but we tried. Sometimes I wonder if I have a "hand washing fetish." If I do, I learned it from my mom.

I should add one more thing about hand washing. When I was young, water was extremely scarce in Blanding (I will be telling you more about that at a later time), so during the summer, most of the time we carried the wash basin outside and watered something with it---flowers, trees, the garden, etc. (Finally, sometime in the 1940's my dad installed a kitchen sink. It made everything so much easier. However, in the summer, we still used a wash basin and carried the water out to water something.)

Same thing with bath water. In the summer we generally carried the tub out and dumped the water on something that needed water. You remember that we had no "bathroom" nor did we have a traditional bath tub. So, where did we take our baths? I'm going to tell you. Keep in mind: Whatever we did that required hot water, we had to heat the water on the stove---for baths, laundry, house cleaning, etc., etc.

While we had our big stove with the "witch roasting" size oven, we did have the seven gallon reservoir that was always hot when there was a fire in the stove. We always had to remember that when we took water out of the reservoir we had to refill it so it would be hot for the next person. In addition, we heated a lot of water on top of the stove---in pots, pans and large teakettles, plus tubs, dish pans and so on. Do any of you out there know what a #3 galvanized wash tub is? I do! I do! That was our bath tub. While I was a child, the #3 tub was great. There was plenty of room for a little kid to get a bath. Oh, by the way---sometimes we had to share bath water---don't you love that idea? I was lucky. Because I was the youngest and littlest, I usually got first shot at the tub, then my brother, George, got to have his bath. I don't remember more than two people using the same bath water. If that sounds "gross," I can tell you: If that's all you know and have had no experiences with which to compare it, you don't worry about it. That's just how things were.

Now, consider this: We all grew up and still had to use the #3 tub as adults (it was the biggest tub we had). Some people had oblong shaped tubs but ours were round. After we were through with our bath, we washed out the tub (with the water in which you had bathed), carried the tub outside and watered something with it, then hung the tub on a hook on the outside of the house. I should mention---generally, we got dressed before we took the tub outside.

If you're wondering how adults could get a bath in such a small tub, I'll tell you. We usually put the tub on the floor in the kitchen (only once in a while did we put it in the living room). We had to time our baths just right not to interfere with meals, cooking, doing dishes and whatever else took place in the kitchen. One good thing: Saturday night was generally set aside for baths. When we got a bath, everyone else had to go somewhere else for the duration of the bath. We kids usually took fairly short baths so it didn't tie up the kitchen very long, and Daddy didn't take very long, either. Mom always tied up the kitchen for a couple of hours. No, she couldn't lie back and enjoy a bubble bath or anything wonderful like that but she had problems that were almost beyond imagination. I won't go into that now, but don't let me forget to tell you. It took me a lot of years to appreciate what she had to go through almost her entire married life.

But, back to the story. My mom couldn't walk much and we had no vehicle. It was almost impossible for her to go to Sunday School AND Sacrament Meeting (that was back in the days when Priesthood Meeting was at 9:00 to 10:00 a.m., Sunday School was at 10:30 to 12:00 a.m. and Sacrament Meeting lasted two hours and was later in the afternoon or evening, depending on the time of year) so mom got her bath while the rest of us were at Sunday School. Sometimes she wasn't through by the time we came home from Sunday School.

Hey, I got sidetracked! Now I'll describe how adults get baths in a #3 tub. First, I washed my hair be leaning over the tub. We always had a pan of warm water to pour over our hair for the final rinse. Oh, I'm going to side track again for a minute. When I was small, I had really white, blond hair. Grace wanted mom to rinse my hair with lemon juice to keep it blond (yes, lemon juice is a bleach) but we couldn't afford the lemons so my hair became light brown, then darker until it was a dark, medium brown. Now it's white again (I don't use lemon juice). It just goes to show you that many things come full circle. We didn't have conditioners, but we always had vinegar---which, as it turns out, is a pretty good rinse for hair. My hair was always shiny, soft, healthy and beautiful---so what if I did smell like a salad? Now, back to the story. After my hair was clean, I sat down in the tub with my legs hanging over the outside of the tub. I soaped and rinsed, then I stood up and stepped into the tub and washed my feet and legs---and I was done. Of course, we only took one bath a week, whether we needed it or not.

However, by the time I was 13 or so, I realized that I wasn't entirely happy with only one bath a week but Mom wouldn't give up the kitchen for a full-blown bath more than once a week, so I took a wash basin with warm water, a wash cloth, soap and a towel into my bedroom (remember, my bedroom had no heat in winter) and I would take a "spit" or "sponge" bath---whatever you want to call it. You CAN manage to be clean and "nice to be near" even with the restrictions I had. In my mother's defense, she did let me have two real baths a week when I was 15 (Saturday AND Wednesday night). I continued to supplement with my little sponge baths. I did only wash my hair once a week. Saturday night, everyone in the family got a bath, except Mom.

There will be more stories about water later but now I want to tell you about electricity. Hey, I have to mention electricity because it's in the title of this chapter.

For years I have been thinking that I remember when my folks got electricity to their home, but as I analyze everything in my mind, I guess they had basic electricity before I was born or soon after. I'm sure the reason I thought I remembered when they obtained electric power was because it was so limited.

The Power Plant was uptown next to the Post Office. The name of the man who took care of the Power Plant was Lynn Lyman. (For those of you who know Janae, Lynn Lyman was Janae's husband's grandfather.) Lynn lived half a block from the Power Plant. That's important because he had to spend a lot of time rushing over there to get things going every time the power went down. (If you think you have a lot of power glitches where you live, I'm sure it's "nothing" compared to our situation in Blanding in the 1930's.) Anyway, we had a light hanging from a cord in the middle of the living room ceiling. We had a green shade over the bulb. There was another one in the middle of the ceiling in my Mom and Dad's bedroom. Daddy was able to get a "double plug," (for want of a better description) one side had a socket for the light bulb and the other one was an outlet to plug in an electric cord. We screwed in the bulb tighter to turn the light on and loosened the bulb to turn the light off. We plugged an electric cord into the outlet side of it and strung the cord through the door into the kitchen and hung the end of the cord on a hook and screwed a bulb into that socket so we'd have a light in the kitchen. We also had to twist the globe in the kitchen tighter to turn it on and loosen it to turn it off. So, we had electricity---but not really. Here's the deal! Lynn Lyman turned the power plant on at 6:00 p.m. in the evening and it ran until 10:30 p.m. At 10:15 p.m. Lynn would blink the lights so we knew we had 15 minutes to finish whatever we were doing. At 10:30 p.m. the power was off until 6:00 p.m. the next evening. There was one exception. The power was turned on Monday mornings until noon so the ladies could do their laundry. (There were very primitive electric washing machines available and somehow, my folks got one---Thank Heaven!). We had to get started early so we'd be sure to be finished by noon. (You know the old saying: Monday, wash; Tuesday, iron, etc., etc.)

You may be wondering how we could get the ironing done on Tuesday if there was no electricity. We had irons we heated on the stove. We had three of them. Two big ones and one smaller one. We had a handle that fit all three sizes. When the irons were hot we put the handle on one of them and ironed until the iron was too cool to use; we put it back on the stove to reheat, took another one and ironed until it was too cool, put it back on the stove and ironed with the third one. By the time the third one was too cool, the first one was hot again. So---how about that? We didn't need electricity. The down side was: The stove had to be hot and in the summer it meant sweltering in the heat to do the ironing. EVERYTHING had to be ironed in those days. Wash and wear hadn't been invented and knits were not an option.

You may wonder what we did for light when the electricity was off. We had a coal-oil lamp. My mother had a Saturday night ritual. She would take the glass chimney off the lamp and polish it (the chimney had a tendency to get smoky); she'd bring in the can of coal-oil, set the lamp on the step between the living room and kitchen; she'd kneel down on the kitchen floor (it was lower than the living room); she'd take the lamp apart, trim the wick and fill the lamp bowl with coal-oil; put the lamp back together again and we were ready for another week of lamp light in lieu of electric light.

Eventually, we got electricity full time---sort of. We had lots of outages but things were improving. It was many years before Mom put the coal-oil lamp away for good. Later, we even got an electric iron. It had no controls on it, so we plugged it in until it got hot. When it was too hot we unplugged it and ironed until it got too cool, then we plugged it in again. It was quite primitive but we thought it was real progress.

I'm trying to find some pictures of some of the things we used, or perhaps someone can do some sketches for me so you can get an idea of the things I'm trying to describe. It will be really cool if I can do that. We'll see.

One more thing: Danielle, happy "Sweet Sixteenth Birthday" on November 13th. I believe you are the only November grandchild. Keep doing what you're doing.

That's it for now. There's lots more to come. Next time I think I will try to introduce you to my Dad. I know none of my grandchildren knew him (I include Kylie when I say grandchildren) and I don't think my kids REALLY knew him. Russ has expressed an interest in learning about him. I will be happy to tell you. When I'm through, I know you'll love him as I do.

I love you all.