I guess it works photo
Ditch-Runner
Member Posts: 25,393 ✭✭✭✭
it reminds me of visiting relative's in Tennessee when I was a kid bare essentials when it came to living
my grandfather ( a WWI vet ) on dads side lived a super modest life . no TV maybe a radio ? had no running water still had a out house complete with catalogs 😁 a rope& bucket and well , and wood /coal cooking and heating stoves kerosene lamps . he always had a garden and canned food he was reality star about being off the grid before the shows were even thought of
he had electric but I remember dad saying he had the electric turned off he never used it, but they razed the min charge a few more dollars a month to have it I think five or six dollars its been too long ago but it was almost nothing
per dad grandpa said that would buy him another couple six packs a month ( he did like his beer ) so he turn it off no need for it
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Yep, I remember when we were kids in the early-mid 70s we would go with our parents to visit an old timer they knew. It was over an hour away, so we only went once or maybe twice a year. The old fella was about 80 then. I remember several things about his place. I don't know if he had electricity, because we were always there in the daylight, so there would have been no need to have lights on. I do remember he had a big old six lid wood range, which even at the time I thought was so cool. He also had a mantle click like the one in the picture. I can still hear the loud tic-toc that clock made. Outside he a big first class chicken barn really. It was way more than just a coop. He raised/butchered chickens, and course, sold eggs. I also remember he had one of those big pedal grinding wheels. The kind for sharpening axes, scythes, sickles and the like. I think in his younger years he had been an old ax and crosscut saw logger. He passed away about 1977-1978 at around 86-87 years old, IIRC.
Thanks for stirring those memories DR!
I was a gold miner way out in the sticks, there were two two-man teams of us. In the evening after dinner we'd play poker for peanuts, by the light of a kerosene lamp. It was absolutely silent that far out in the bush. One of the guys on the other team had had a heart valve replaced and it went "tic tic tic" and if you listened really carefully you could hear it.
We found out that when he got a good hand his heart would change from "tic tic tic" to "TICTICTICTICTIC" and we'd all fold.
🤣
My dad had an artist paint a picture of the old "line shack" he had grown up in and raised my six siblings and I in before we moved to town when I was in high school. (It was actually two line shack spliced together. A "line shack" was a very simple house for cowboys that were riding the fence line to make sure there were no problems, hence "line shack" )
It had natural gas for heat (from a well about 3/4 mile away) but didn't get electricity until after he joined the Navy in WWII.
The picture features a windmill and my sibs assume it was a water well, but that windmill was in a different direction.
What the windmill in the pix was is a "wind generator" that charged batteries. Dad loved music and he could live with kerosene lamps but couldn't run a radio with it so he installed a generator. The wind up Victrola was okay but too limited.