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When a bath a week wasn't a joke
By Carl Heintze
My grandfather's house has been on my mind of late.
I suppose that's because I've lived in my house now for 42 years, which seems like a long time.
But my grandfather lived in his even longer, almost all of his 85 years.
In fact, he died in it, as did my grandmother. At the time, I thought of his house as very large, although in retrospect I suppose it wasn't. It was two stories high with five bedrooms, a front and back parlor, a dining room, a kitchen and a pantry, yet it had only one tiny bathroom and that was on the second floor at the top of a flight of steep stairs that curved as they approached the second story.
My grandfather built the house, or, rather, had it built and he had lived in it for 65 years before I came to make it my home, as well. My mother, my sister and I arrived because my dad had died and we didn't have anywhere else to go.
Before that we had lived in what was then called a bungalow, a little place with a living room, a dining room, a kitchen and "nook" and two bedrooms separated by a single bath. It wasn't much of a house compared to my grandfather's place.
Grandpa's house had three fireplaces, but few electric outlets and fairly primitive electric lights. It once had been piped for gas lights, but they had been replaced with electricity.
Water was heated with an odd contraption, a set of coils under which a gas flame burned. It took an hour to heat enough water for baths, so we took them only on Saturday nights. There was no refrigerator, although the pantry had a "cooler" that was supposed to retard food spoilage.
Eventually we got an ice box on the back porch, a square insulated box into which the iceman delivered ice a couple of times a week. We cooked on a gas stove that had attached to it a "trash" burner. This compartment actually was a place to put kindling and paper. When lit this heated a little well of water on the back of the stove to a temperature, if not boiling, at least warm.
Heating generally was a problem. The fireplace in the back parlor had been closed and piped with a big wood stove, and it was my job to carry in oak logs from a pile in the shed behind the house. I got the princely sum of a dime a week for doing this and considered myself fortunate. A dime could buy a lot in those days.
Laundry was done in the shed by the woodpile, with a washer that squeezed the water from the wet clothes, and sometimes one's fingers if one was not careful. Sometimes we put eggs "down" in what was called "water glass"--in crocks in the laundry to preserve them.
In short, it was a house that belonged to the 19th century, but which was being inhabited in the 20th. The ceilings were 11 feet high, the house had no insulation, its doors were solid wood and made noise when shut or opened, and the furniture would today be a boon to the "Antiques Roadshow."
Thinking about it today, I wonder what my grandmother would think of the house in which I live. I can, for instance, hear her scoffing about microwave ovens. She hated what she called "progress." She thought everything was moving too fast. She managed almost to live through the 1930s. What would she have thought of the millennium's turning, of the Internet, of jet planes, of freeways, of television?
Not much, probably.
She tolerated, but didn't really like radio. Much against her better judgment she accepted an Atwater Kent that one of her sons gave her, but she never really thought of it as a part of her life.
It was inconceivable to her (who claimed to have seen wild Indians ) that people in New York could instantaneously be heard in California.
What my grandfather thought I am not sure, because he never said. He never said much about anything, though.
But I suspect he would have accepted it with grace. He was more tolerant of change than my grandmother. He owned one of the first automobiles in his county, although he never really learned how to drive it and, eventually, was banned by the family from being anything but a passenger.
But he looked forward. My grandmother, like the house in which she lived, never wanted to look anywhere else.
I'd like to be able to report the house, like my grandmother, survived change unscathed, but it, alas, didn't. After my grandparents died, it was sold, then ripped up and moved elsewhere, remodeled and made into apartments. I'm not even sure where it now stands.
But it does live in my memory, as if it were somehow from another time and place.
And I guess it is.
Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to The Sun.
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Sunnyvale, California Since 1994
