When I Was A Kid

Hi. My name is Wayne. It’s 1951 and I'm a kid. Someone asked me to tell you about my world. So here goes.

I live in a two story house with my parents and my mother’s parents. They call our house a “double tenement” because a wall divides the house down the middle, from front to back. My family lives on one side and another family lives on the other side. 

Our kitchen has a refrigerator, but a lot of the houses on my street have "iceboxes." The food in the icebox is kept cold by putting a block of ice in the top of the icebox. A yellow truck drives down the street every few days bringing ice to the people who need it.

We have a coal furnace in our house. In the winter the big people send me out to the coal bin near the back alley to fill up a metal bucket with coal and bring it into the house. They call the bucket a coal scuttle. It’s funny, but some of the pieces of coal have impressions of plants and ferns on them.

My room is upstairs near the front of the house. My room is cold in winter because there’s no heat upstairs. The only heat in our house is the coal stove downstairs near the back of the house.

In the kitchen Mom and Grandma cook meals on a wood stove. Whenever you want to cook food you put sticks of wood inside the stove and build a fire. That wood stove can really heat up the house, especially on a hot day in July or August. And especially because we, like all our neighbors, don’t have air conditioning.

We have a telephone in our house. You pick up the telephone and a lady says “Number please”, then you tell her the phone number you want to call. My schoolteacher says that soon, telephones will have a round thing called a “dial”, and when you pick up a phone's handset the lady won’t say “Number please.” Instead, there will be a buzzing noise—they call it a “dial tone”—and then you can “dial” the number yourself. But all that is in the future.

We don’t have a television. Almost no one owns a television. If we had one, we could watch black-and-white programs on the three TV stations in the area. Maybe one day there will be color TV. That would be interesting to see.

In a few years my parents will buy their first TV and find that we can receive all 3 networks, but the stations are located in 3 different cities. Cable TV doesn't exist. We receive TV on an antenna bolted to our chimney. A TV antenna is directional—it receives best from one direction, so we have to choose one station to see clearly and point the antenna at it.

All the good radio stations are on AM radio. FM stations are few and far between. In a few years FM radio will begin to take off, but mostly for classical music. There is no FM stereo radio. In fact, there is no stereo anything.

Phonograph records are 10 inches in diameter and have one song on each side. Some records only have a song on one side and the other side of the record is blank. Records play at 78 rpm on a phonograph equipped with a steel needle. To avoid ruining the record you have to replace the needle after each record you play.

Rock and roll music doesn't exist.

Streetcars and trains run down the middle of Main Street although they are fast disappearing.

It is not unusual to see steam locomotives pulling freight trains. Sometimes at night the train will put on its brakes and the wheels become circles of white fire in the dark. It is an amazing sight. The brakes on trains sometimes start fires. When my mother was a child, a train passing her house started a fire that burned down her home. She lost everything she owned. And so did her parents—my grandparents.

There are no jet passenger planes. Most people travel by bus or train. Sometimes my parents take me to Florida and we ride on a train called the “Silver Meteor.” I love the smell of the train and the sound of the diesel engine when it pulls into the station. I love the soft, cushioned seats, I love that you can push a button and get ice water. One time our train broke in half and my half of the train (which had the engine) had to stop and go backward up the track to link up with the other half of the train again.

Imported automobiles are non-existent. Cars are built by companies with names like Hudson and de Soto. My dad drives a de Soto. The de Soto's windshield wipers are powered by something called “manifold vacuum.” When my dad steps on the gas pedal to make the car go faster, the windshield wipers stop working.

Almost no one has air conditioning. Neither my grade school nor my high school will have air conditioned classrooms during the years I attend school.

A local dairy delivers milk to our front porch in glass bottles. You have to shake the bottle before you drink the milk in order to mix the milk and the cream together.

Milk is delivered by the milk man. Bread is delivered by the bread man. Potato chips are delivered to our house, too, in big, round, metal cans.

There are no shopping malls. All the stores are downtown. One of the stores has metal posts outside its door with “electric eyes”. The electric eyes open the door for you. Amazing.

Transistors are laboratory curiosities. Radios and televisions have vacuum tubes. When you turn on a radio or a TV, nothing happens for a while because the tubes have to warm up.

A computer is a person who sits at a desk and does math on paper or adding machines. Scientists are working to replace those people with electronic machines, but so far it's science fiction.

My doctor works in a room in the basement of his house. If I get sick, I go to his house, but if I'm very sick, he will come to my house to check on me. He carries a black bag with him. His "doctor tools" are in the bag, and maybe some medicines.

All the houses have big front porches and the neighborhood kids can gather on them and play games. 

I have to go now. The house is getting cold and my dad wants me to go out to the coal shed and bring in another scuttle of coal. See you later.