The Outback
When you're a kid playing outside all day, it's kind of handy having a toilet right there in the back yard. When it's dark, five degrees above zero and blowing snow at bed time, that little house behind the house doesn't seem near as convenient though. One Halloween our little house suffered a horrible indignity as it was unceremoniously tossed onto it's face and split open at the corner. Dad stood it back up and hammered it back together to serve just long enough to get a new one constructed. There was a man that had a sawmill down on Railroad Street in that strip of land between the street and the railroad. He built outhouses among other things, and he constructed a new three-holer for us. That one never did get turned over because dad sank some deep postholes, set up big timbers to either side of the outhouse, and bolted them to the building. It wouldn't budge. It served us well until dad installed indoor plumbing and we joined the modern world of flushables.
A vaguely associated memory. Dad was in the back yard digging a hole for the septic tank when a vacuum sweeper salesman came to the front door trying to sell mom a sweeper. She told him he'd have to talk to dad around back, so he walked back to stand on the edge of the deepening hole. He started his spiel by saying something to the effect his little machine would do practically everything the housewife could do. Dad said "Can it bake biscuits?" The salesman laughed and said no, it wouldn't do that, and dad told him he wouldn't be interested then. That was pretty much the end of the sales pitch, but the guy stood there and talked with dad for quite a while, both seeming to enjoy the conversation.
Thinking back one wonders about the sanitation of earlier days in our home town. Many people drew water from dug wells right on their property, and about every home in town had an outhouse. Okay, that's enough thinking back.
A vaguely associated memory. Dad was in the back yard digging a hole for the septic tank when a vacuum sweeper salesman came to the front door trying to sell mom a sweeper. She told him he'd have to talk to dad around back, so he walked back to stand on the edge of the deepening hole. He started his spiel by saying something to the effect his little machine would do practically everything the housewife could do. Dad said "Can it bake biscuits?" The salesman laughed and said no, it wouldn't do that, and dad told him he wouldn't be interested then. That was pretty much the end of the sales pitch, but the guy stood there and talked with dad for quite a while, both seeming to enjoy the conversation.
Thinking back one wonders about the sanitation of earlier days in our home town. Many people drew water from dug wells right on their property, and about every home in town had an outhouse. Okay, that's enough thinking back.
posted by Fish-2 at 9:46 PM
2 Comments:
There's still a lot of country people around here who draw water from wells, Fish, but for the most part the outhouse is a thing of the past.
This post reminds me of a story I heard long ago and can't remember whether it was a true story or not, but seemingly there was this farmer who farmed in the daytime but went to the tavern every night and didn't come home until he was three or four sheets to the wind. These people used an outhouse, and he would usually stumble in there first before going in the house to sleep. Supposedly the woman hired some people to move the outhouse but leave the hole. You guessed it! The drunken farmer came home and fell into the hole. That solved his drinking problem. :)
We did have a true story like that in our little town. I asked dad one time why everyone called this one old fellow "Dirty" instead of his first name which was Ben. It seems as a teenager a bunch of them were turning over outhouses around town and one homeowner had moved his little house forward so the hole was exposed behind it. They came up in the dark and Ben was the first one there landing in the pit. He never lived it down.
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