I was raised on 10 acres outside of Hoquiam, Grays Harbor Co., Washington.
The house built in 1940 by my father was the first house built with indoor
plumbing and wired for electricity. We had a large garden, chickens, a milk
cow, and raised a calf and a pig each year. During WW II when gasoline for
tractors was scarce we had two horses for plowing that we boarded half a
mile away.

We two had a crank phone and were part of a ground return farmer line.
During the first part of WW II my parents were part of the airplane spotter
service. If a plane went overhead they were to get on the line and call RED
FLASH to get every one off the line and ring the operator and report the
plane.

We too didn't have a separator to separate the milk from the cream. We had a
screened cooling closet were the milk would sit in wide shallow pans to cool
and the cream rise to the surface where the cream would be skimmed. No
boiling and I don't know of anyone who boiled there milk.
Ed
[log in to unmask]
Olympia,  WA
"Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what
nobody has thought" --Albert Szent-Gyorg i (1893-1986).

----- Original Message -----
From: <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2001 5:22 AM
Subject: Re: Based on Inventory Contents: Country Dweller or City Dweller?


> Behind my Grandmother's house stood an old well, a smoke house where a
small
> fire sometimes burned to smoke hams hung from the beams; the cows were
milked
> and the milk boiled on the old wood stove, cream skimmed off when it
cooled,
> and butter churned; children went berry picking and the grown people made
the
> best blackberry jelly one would ever want to taste; sometimes I helped
> collect eggs from the nests underneath the hen's soft down; laundry was
> 'boiled' in an iron kettle over a backyard fire; a similar iron kettle
> sufficed for making sausage in the fall; on a summer afternoon neighbor
> ladies would rock and chat on front porches while they prepared string
beans
> for a family meal.   And, yes, there was an out house though by the time I
> was born, the houses had running water and electricity; and a telephone
> hanging on the wall in the hall. . . . .
>
> If I couldn't find my Mother or my Grandmother, I could stand on a chair
at
> the telephone to turn the crank.  The town operator would answer and could
> almost always tell me where they were.  Sometimes she would sit me on her
lap
> and let me pull the lines and plug it into the right hole to connect the
> caller to the right household.
>

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