Most of you people had refrigerators to keep your food cold all your life - but for a good portion of my life we had ice boxes to do that - it was a two door insulated wooden box about 5 ft high - in one door went the ice that you purchased from the ice man - he would come by every couple days and deliver the block of ice you wanted - we put a sign in the front window with the size we wanted so he didn't have to make a extra trip into the house - in the summer time the big treat for us kids was to get a small piece of ice to suck on - every day you had to empty the water pan that was under the ice box - if you forgot you would see water crawling over the floor of the kitchen -
In the winter we would put the ice box outside on the back porch - sometimes it would get too cold and freeze things inside - besides the ice man there were a lot of other things that were delivered - a bread man - a egg man - beer man - produce - milk - coal - you rarely had to go to the store because so many things were delivered right to your door - in those days even the doctor would come to your house if you was sick -
The other thing I remember was when someone died - the body was usually kept in the parlor and friends would come to visit - that lasted for about 3 days - the poor family was wore out after that time from all the people showing up at anytime - this whole thing made things harder on the family - as a kid I always felt that it was creepy having a dead body in you house -
The other thing that I remember was the coal miners walking up hill near my house - a lot of them had such bad black lung disease that they would have to stop half way up and take a breather - the dust in the mines usually was so bad that few of them escaped from getting this disease - yes things were sure different in those days - I kinda think we are somewhat spoiled now
