Introduction
When I was a girl, it was the time of the
five-cent ice cream cone, penny candy, and soda fountains in the
drug stores.
There were shinplasters (paper currency
worth twenty-five cents), horse-drawn wagons to deliver bread
or milk, the cream-top milk in one-quart glass bottles with cardboard
caps that allowed the cream to freeze up out of the bottles in
winter. (After all, this is Canada!)
It was the days of Quarantines for communicable
diseases, the mustard plaster, and ink wells and straight, nib-pens
and blotters.
Saturday matinees were five cents, and
those "Cokes" that we walked for miles to have at the
soda fountain were six cents a glass and you could have any flavour
of your choice put in by the "Soda Jerk"; my favourite
was 'lime'.
We kept our food cool in ice boxes; heated
our homes with a coal furnace, had a gas 'rud heater' that we
lit with a match to heat the water for Saturday baths, and baked
our potatoes along the side ledges inside the furnace box, flames
serving two purposes.
Women used the washboard or a wringer washer.
We had clocks with hands, tube radios, and record players took
78 rpms that would break if we dropped them.
Recycling was done by "The Rag Man"
who travelled the streets by horse and wagon, calling, "Rags,
bottles, bones." I did not like the 'bones' part, but he
paid anyone who flagged him down to collect the things that they
did not have use for. And, if you are wondering how the horses
survived the long routes in the city of Toronto (Ontario), there
were water troughs at the curbs of the streets, and, at noon the
driver would put the horse's feed bag on and he would eat as he
worked.
Yes, these are all things that I remember,
but, they are stories of their own. Some of my fondest memories
were not spent in the big city but in the country, during summer
holidays, so you will find a mixture, in no given order, just
as I think of them. ~Joan Adams Burchell~ (copyright)
