Gum interrupts a stitch in time

Singer sewing machine

It was an old Singer sewing machine, with the pedals that I could barely reach, sitting down and stretching my legs.  But I was determined to sew a skirt, as it just took too long to do one by hand, as the Girl Scout instructor said was an option.

My male cousin, 10 years old as well and much shorter than me, was quite the clown, putting wads of chewing gum under both pedals while I was in the outhouse doing personal business awhile.  I was not able to figure out why the pedals would not work until my Mother came home and saw the gum.

The skirt was not finished as fast as I had hoped, as my Aunt and Uncle had to look at the evidence too, as my cousin's punishment was to get off the gum and forfeit one week's allowance.

It got quite a laugh at the time, although it was some time before I worked on the sewing machine after that.

Carol

Trip to the Loo

The Loo as rendered in art

I well remember the outside toilet at the far end of our backyard.  Our paper of choice was the Daily Herald, stuffed between the pipe between the cistern and the toilet.  We were a working class family, and the Daily Herald reflected our status.  I was born in a rural village a million miles from the industrial town where I grew up, but the toilet was still in the garden.  In this case hidden in the copse of Yew trees.  Going to the loo in the dark was not a happy time.  Much singing and whistling!

Robin Rendell
France

'Crying in the Chapel'

Outhouse shed, the type where I had been singing

I like to sing, since I was a child.  And my father taught me to project my voice at a young age.  But one morning the family had a laugh especially about that in the context of what had happened in the middle of the night.

"We heard you singing," my mother said.  "In fact the whole neighborhood heard you.  This morning I had several calls about it."

I had been singing at the top of my 12-year-old lungs "Crying in the Chapel" in the outhouse (outdoor toilet in a shed) at two a.m.!

The song, recorded seven years later by Elvis Presley as part of his gospel collection, was on the top of the charts in 1953 and like other young folks I could not stop singing it no matter the time of day---or night--or location.

Carol

Toilet paper

Toilet paper on a roll, not always available in the '40's

We stopped at a supermarket one afternoon recently at a place called Tamuras, on the Waianae Coast of Oahu, a rural area in Hawaii and a store where most locals shop.  I observed the cost of toilet paper and said to a young 20-something clerk, as she laughed, about the $12+ price for 12 rolls, "Gotta tear up the newspaper pieces the right size because these prices are simply too much."

In the 1940's in the small towns of America not everyone could afford an indoor toilet, especially if the family was poor, like ours.  And it surely could not buy toilet paper. When the war was on, many people still had outhouses. I lived in a town called La Grande in Eastern Oregon where that was true for us and others.

 Instead of indoor toilets there were small sheds, just big enough for a door and a single person to sit on a raised, box-like apparatus with a hole cut out in the center.  Beside it was a stack of torn pieces of newspaper to sanitize oneself after using the facilities,ordinarily located close enough to a house, not to trip in the dark, yet far enough so the odors would not drift into the living area. There was, you see, no cover for the hole in the box, except for a piece of butcher paper.  The newspaper pieces, however, were softer for a growing behind or even the older ones too.

Newspapers for us had more than one use years ago.  Of course, some might say, much in jest certainly, that they still should be used the same way these days after reading.

Carol