Ice Deliveries, Party Lines, and Summer in the Basement

My earliest memory is from when we moved to 3209 39th Street, when I was just four years old. It was 1942. I can remember running from one empty room to another, yelling and jumping in and out of the windows. Moline is a small town on the Mississippi River, and the area of town where we lived was called South Moline Township. We had an acre of land in the country. There were no paved streets, no bus lines, and no streetlights. To this day, the street in front of the old homestead has never been paved. When we bought the house, there were only four rooms: a kitchen, living room, and two bedrooms. There was no garage, basement, or bathroom; merely an outhouse and a well. I found a receipt in Mom and Dad’s strongbox stating the purchase price of the house was two thousand one hundred and eighty-seven dollars. Behind the house, there was a large yard and an orchard with many kinds of fruit trees. We had ripe, red cherries in July, golden peaches in August, big beautiful red and yellow apples in September, and crisp juicy pears in October. There were grapevines and red raspberry and blackberry bushes bordering our property as well as a small strawberry patch. Mom canned all this fruit each season, and made wonderful pies. I especially loved her apple pie, and will never forget the heavenly fragrance wafting from her oven whenever she made one. We had one of the neighborhood’s biggest gardens on the south side of the house. (Daddy later sold that piece of land to George and Evelyn Sajben. They were good neighbors and friends to Mom and Dad the entire time they lived there.) Grandpa Williams (Mom’s dad) lived with us and helped Daddy plant and harvest the garden. As each of us kids got old enough, we also helped. I remember sitting under the big elm tree in the back yard with Grandpa shelling peas and snapping beans when I was still very young. We always had a big tomato crop. I have fond memories of picking that first juicy vine-ripened tomato of the season, sprinkling on a pinch of salt and biting into all that goodness, the juices running over my arm. Some of these tomatoes were sold to Sam Gnatovich, who had a large open-air supermarket on 23rd Avenue. (Sam later tore down the open-air market and built a bowling alley on the property. It is now called Highland Park Bowl and Wells Fargo Lounge, and Sam still owns and operates it to this day.) This was about 1950 and I was twelve years old. I helped Daddy pick the tomatoes, shine them up with a cloth, and put them in a bushel basket. Daddy taught me to put the smaller, less perfect ones on the bottom and the largest, prettiest ones on the top. We got three dollars a bushel for them and Daddy let me keep the money we made. Mom canned all the produce from the orchard and garden, doing most of it late at night after we had gone to bed so we wouldn’t get burned or be in her way. Grandpa Williams and Iris helped her with the canning. Virginia McFarland told me Iris could handle the canner like a pro. Mom was always so proud of the number of jars she preserved each year, and she and her neighbors would compare the number of jars each had preserved. She canned jars and jars of jam, jelly, applesauce, tomatoes, tomato juice, green beans, sauerkraut, corn, and pickles of all kinds. Dill pickles were my favorite. I remember the aroma of spices mixed with vinegar, and I can still hear the sound of the lids popping as the jars were sealed. In later years, several of us tried to duplicate Mom’s dill pickles, but could never quite get the taste we remembered so well. We came to the conclusion it must have been the well water she used that made all the difference. I know the harvest from the garden and orchard kept us from going hungry during the long winter months in the 1940’s. One of the first things Daddy did was build a basement under the house. Even though our house was very small for a family of ten (Grandpa Williams lived with us until his death in 1953), we didn’t realize it at the time. Barbara slept in her baby bed in Mom and Dad’s bedroom. The rest of us girls slept in the living room. The couch made into a bed where I slept with Diana and Delores. Iris slept on a rollaway bed. Every morning, these beds had to be put away so we would have space to live and play. The boys and Grandpa slept in the second bedroom. There were two double beds and a small dresser, which didn’t leave much room to move around. We had mice in the attic. We had more mice than Disneyland. We would lay awake at night and listen to them scamper around the attic. We had one small closet in Mom and Daddy’s room and one small closet in the boy’s room. There were curtains instead of doors on all the closets and doorways. When we first moved there, we had a pump at the side of the sink to pump water from the well. We only had cold water then, so Mom heated all our hot water on the stove in a big kettle for baths and washing clothes. We had an icebox that held a large chunk of ice in the top section to keep the food cold. The ice melted into a large tray that had to be emptied on a daily basis. The iceman delivered the ice to the house every few days. We had a sign that we put in the window so the iceman would know how much ice to deliver. The number facing upright was the pounds you needed. It looked something like this: Illustration: Ice sign 25/50/75/100 On a hot summer’s day, if we were really lucky, the iceman might take his ice pick and chip off a small piece of ice for us to suck on. We weren’t as poor as our school friends, Juanita and Lavelle Nelson, who lived in a boxcar in a ravine on 41st Street. They didn’t even own an icebox. They stored their milk and butter in a large hole dug into the side of the hillside behind their house. The milkman delivered quarts of fresh glass-bottled milk to our house early in the morning during the war years. He left them in a metal container kept on the front porch. The glass containers kept the milk so much colder than the waxed cardboard and plastic used today. The milk bottles were divided into two sections; the lower portion for milk and a smaller bulging portion above a narrow neck for the cream. Mom sometimes made whipping cream out of the cream on top. The bottles were sealed with a cardboard disk. In the winter, if you didn’t get the milk right in, it would freeze, expand, and push the cardboard disk up above the top of the bottle. After the war, supermarkets sprang up everywhere and it was cheaper to buy milk in waxed cardboard cartons at the store. We had a telephone party line of three or four families. Each family had a certain number of rings to identify their calls. One family might have two rings, another family three. So when the phone rang, you listened to the number of rings and then answered. If you wanted to call out, you picked up the phone and listened first to see if anyone else was using the phone. To this day, I still “listen” before dialing. If you had an emergency you asked politely if the person talking minded hanging up the phone so you could use it, but sometimes they would get nasty and not hang up. If the phone was free you had to tell the operator the number you wanted to call. When Mom wasn’t around, we often listened to other people’s conversations. We lived and ate in the basement during the summer months because it was much cooler down there. We had no fans or air-conditioning. We simply left the windows and doors open and hoped for a nice breeze. We had a big, round, beautiful oak table we ate on in the basement. Eventually Daddy chopped up the table and made a punching bag ceiling-mount out of it. That table would be worth a fortune today.