Shoes, Ships, and Sealing Wax

Ice, remembered

A lot of the kitchen stuff I brought back here from my aunt's is stuff that I'll use, but I did keep a few things just because they were old and interesting. For example: an icepick.

True, not something you use every day (although sometimes you do need to poke a hole in something). Mostly, though, I kept the icepick because I could (barely) read the faded printing on the wooden handle: THE M.J. ULINE COMPANY THIRD & M STREETS N.E. WASHINGTON D.C.

In case you are curious, as Victor and I were...yes, that's the Uline of Uline Arena. Kind of an obvious connection, I suppose...if you're going to make ice, might as well put in a rink too.

It was interesting to realize that my aunt, who had cable t.v. and a microwave, remembered the days of gaslights and ice delivery. (The one modern invention that we just couldn't interest her in was a computer. The Internet had no appeal to her.)

She wrote about the ice man in that book I mentioned:

Before refrigerators, people had iceboxes. Ours was wooden, a little over 5' I guess, because I could reach into it. The door in front opened into a space with three or four shelves for food. The top opened and the ice was placed inside that area. The pan on the bottom had to be emptied often of the water from the melting ice. If the pan wasn't emptied the last thing at night it flooded the kitchen floor. Everyone had a card for ordering ice. It was a square with numbers at each corner [here she has a drawing, with 5-10-15-20 in the corners of a diamond] and I don't remember whether the figures meant pounds or cents. People put the card in the window in front of the house. The iceman came down the street with a horse-drawn truck. It was open and had large chunks of ice. A scale hung on the back of the truck. The man would look to see any cards, then get a block of ice, chop it down, pick it up with the tongs, sling it over his shoulder, which had a sheet of rubber, and simply walk into a house, drop the ice, and leave. I can't remember when he was paid.
We used to wait till he got into a house, then go to the truck and grab what bits of ice we could, trying not to upset the horse.

Thinking about how archaic the ice delivery seems reminds me: not long ago, a dairy here in Maryland brought back milk delivery. One of my friends at work was considering signing up, and it made me remember that in the house where we lived in the early '70's, some of our neighbors still used a milkman. I remember playing with the little square boxes that they kept on their porches. I guess that's like my aunt sneaking ice chips without scaring the horse, huh?

Posted by Nic at August 30, 2006 07:57 PM | TrackBack