Wednesday, December 17, 2014

The Way You Wish it Wasn't



I’ve been hanging around for 86 years, and I’ve seen a lot of new inventions in those years.  I have been wondering which may have been the greatest invention of all time. I’m not sure, but I bet toilet paper caught on pretty quick. Who invented toilet paper? No, they didn’t teach that in school, they taught you who invented the cotton gin. Who cares who invented the cotton pickin cotton gin. I don’t think I’ve had any use for that piece of knowledge in my entire life. What a waste of my school time. Even if I were on Double Jeopardy, they wouldn’t ask that one. 

I don’t know when it was invented, but the bread toaster was a great one in our household. We never had toast. My mother would make a pan of biscuits from scratch each morning. Mixes were not in existence yet. She also had to build a fire in the stove to bake them in. The first toaster we had was not automatic. It had a panel on each side that you dropped down so you could flip the toast and burn/toast the other side. Someone had to man the toaster because you had to guess when it was done. I wonder how many slices of bread went up in smoke in those days. 
Speaking of bread, my mother always made our bread, and one day we bought a loaf of bread from the store. We were bowled over because the bread was already sliced. What will they think of next! We constantly hear the expression ‘the greatest thing since sliced bread’. I still think we should say ‘The greatest thing since toilet paper’.

We even had electricity in our house. Many people didn’t have it yet in our area. We lived without it for a few years. It was like camping forever. Who wants to camp forever?

The day our new refrigerator was delivered was a day of celebration. People kept their food in ice boxes. People continued to call the refrigerator an ice box for years. I think some still do.

Our first washing machine had a gas motor. You pulled on a cord to start the motor. It was something else for us kids to fight over. It went like this. I get to pull the cord. It’s my time, you pulled it the last time. Did not. Did so. We didn’t have many toys in those days. On wash day everyone gathered around the washing machine, and watched the agitator go back and forth. As I recall, we had to bolt the washing machine to the floor because it danced all over the porch.


Those were the days I don’t want to relive. 

1 comment:

Stephanie Frieze said...

My dad remembered his mother getting her first automatic washing machine. It was gas. They had no electricity or indoor plumbing when he was young. I think seeing his first airplane when he was about three years old had the biggest impact on him. He said, "I looked up in the sky at that biplane and said, 'I wanna do that.'" And he did! He wound up in the Naval Air during WWII and went to work at the Boeing Company as an aeronautical engineer his whole workin life. For myself, I'm grateful for indoor plumbing and computers. Toilet paper goes with the plumbing because the Sears catalog would clog up the pipes!