THE SCHWARTZ CHRONICLES – There Was A Time!

There was a time when milk was delivered to our home by a horse-drawn wagon and while the milkman, in his uniform and wearing his hat was dropping off milk bottles at our side door and picking up the empties in which payment had been left by my mother, the horse took this opportunity to relieve himself in our unpaved, gravel driveway. As I recall this was not an infrequent event!

There was a time when bread was delivered to our home, yes, you guessed it, by horse-drawn wagon and our choice was simple… enriched white, doughy bread wrapped in some sort of waxed-paper . For those families wanting freshly-baked egg bread, or sourdough bread or pumpernickel bread or rye bread or raisin bread or as I recall possibly 3 grain bread, one had to go to specialty bakeries to buy these products and that was indeed a treat, the smell was to die for. Bagels were not yet a household staple.

There was a time when “the iceman cometh”. This was when electric refrigerators were just starting to reach the consumer market and most of us had… ice-boxes to refrigerate the food. The ice-man, as I remember, actually had a truck and a huge pair of tongs which wrapped around large square blocks of ice which he brought into the house. I believe he came by at least 3 times a week, but I do stand corrected, it could have been more often. For those of us who remember, a cubic foot of water or ice weighs about 63 lbs!

There was a time when the man who delivered coal to fire our furnaces came to the house. He also, to my recall, drove a truck, something like a large dump truck and it had a removable slide or chute. Our house had a “coal door” at ground level, facing the street and when this door was opened, and the chute placed in position from the coal truck into the coal door opening, that was when I and my friends would watch a steady flow of coal nuggets slide down the chute and into our basement coal storage room. How none of us contracted black lung disease is a mystery.

There was a time when mail delivery to our homes was twice a day and also on Saturdays.

There was a time when streetcar tickets cost 5 for 25 cents and a “transfer” was good for the entire day. If you took the streetcar on it’s complete route, you could watch the conductor manually turn the streetcar around and re-connect the contact antenna to the overhead wire.

There was a time when my parents acquired an Inglis wringer-washer machine. This was state of the art. The washing tub had an agitator which stirred the detergent-laden hot water (Rinso was our detergent of choice) that in turn washed our clothes. There would be of course, separate loads for whites and coloured clothing and at the end of each wash and rinse cycle the garments were pulled out of the wash tub and compressed between two rubber rollers suspended above the washtub to squeeze out as much of the water and moisture as possible. Thus the term “wringer”.

There was a time when either my mother or my sisters or I carried these damp clothes upstairs and out to our back porch where we had a clothesline suspended between the porch and a tree some 50 feet away. The clothesline was wire cable and ran around metal pulleys .. one on the porch and one on the tree. The clothes were hung up on this clothesline using hinged wooden pegs called.. “clothes pins”, and our clothes or sheets or table cloths were dried in the wind. There was and maybe still is something about fresh air drying that cannot be matched by today’s electric or gas clothes dryers.

There was a time when my mother or my sisters, but not I, reeled in the dried clothes and took those items requiring ironing back to the basement “laundry room” where smaller items were ironed by hand, folded into piles and brought upstairs to be claimed by their rightful owners.

There was a time when the larger items, sheets, pillow cases, table cloths were put through a roller iron, if a family was fortunate to have one, some of which were up to 48” long and one often saw these machines in  commercial laundry facilities. Permanent press cotton and synthetic materials eventually made these roller irons obsolete for the most part.

There was a time when families mended, tended or even created their own clothes. I recall a treadle-operated sewing machine that my mother and sisters used, but not I, to darn socks, hem dresses and pants, sew on buttons and in some cases even make a complete garment from a design. When I last checked with my wife about darning socks, she made a suggestion which is not fit for printing in this chronicle.

There was a time when my sisters and I shared the responsibility, daily, of feeding our coal-fired furnace in the basement with wheel-barrows of coal trucked from our coal storage room to the furnace and then shovelled into it. That furnace looked like an immense spider with ductwork heading off the main fire chamber in many directions to carry the heat to various rooms in the house. Naturally it was also our responsibility to shovel the cold coal ashes each day into containers which would ultimately be hauled upstairs for removal by the waste disposal service, then known simply as the “garbagemen”.

There was a time, in some of the newer, semi-planned communities after both World Wars when properties had “lanes” or easements running between the houses, presumably to allow for hydro and gas service personnel but I am not 100% certain about this. Perhaps they were just shortcuts from one street to another?

Earlier today, I took a walk into the neighbourhood where I spent the first 10 years of my life.. it is not very far from the condo where we now live. I passed by our old house, sort of a nostalgia outing, and I tried peering into the backyard to see if the “lane” was still there behind the house. I could not see it and I then walked to each end of the block figuring I would see where the “lane” accessed the streets, but to my surprise, there were no access points and no lane. Some 68 years have passed since I last saw/used that lane behind my childhood home and.. it’s not there anymore nor is there any visible sign that it was ever there. This was indeed a bit unsettling and upsetting. Where have all the flowers “er” lanes gone?

There was a time, when as kids, we were sent out to play and told to come home from the park or playground when it got dark and finally, there was a time when there were no electronic devices, or cellphones, or i-pads or game-boxes and as children we had to use our imaginations and create our own adventure and excitement. There were no Barbie dolls yet for the girls and if the boys elected to play cowboy good guys and bad guys, using cap pistols, the “good guys” always wore white hats and the bad guys.. black hats. Names like Rex Allen,  Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Trigger,  Dale Evans, Hopalong Cassidy, The Lone Ranger and Tonto all come to mind.

We would build and maintain skating rinks by flooding our backyards, or stage impromptu “circus acts” on our swingsets or simply play shinny and other street games and not be concerned about buying high-priced tickets to professionl hockey, football, baseball or basketball games. Soccer was a “European” sport not even on the North American map in those days and cycling was just starting to become popular when the Belgian, Eddie Merkx captured The Tour de France road race title for several years running.

Those were simpler times and today the times are not quite so simple.  Now if you are a Canadian and want to play professional soccer, better steer clear of using drones to spy on your competition.

There was a time when one would ask.. “what’s a drone”?

Allan Schwartz is a 79 year-old retired Canadian entrepreneur who spent decades owning and operating a successful manufacturing company specializing in stainless-steel food service, medical and laboratory equipment. After selling the business, he spent some 5 years as a Business Broker before shifting his attention to writing during the Covid years. Married for 56 years, he is the proud father of adult children and grandfather to five and continues to enjoy exploring new interests in his retirement.

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