The advanced design

Winters in Palouse were much worse when I was growing up than what they are experiencing now.

I can remember when we got our first refrigerator. That was in 1938. My mother was still using it in 1971. There was an emblem on the front telling it was a Philco Advanced Design refrigerator. It was still being used when my mother died. I doubt that many refrigerators last that long.

It was a big deal for me. It meant that I didn’t have to go to the icehouse for a block of ice a couple times a week.

It wasn’t unusual for snow drifts in the middle of Main Street during my early winters.

Up until 1938, we had an ice chest where we stored some of our food, such as milk, meat and other foods.

The bad weather wasn’t the end of the world, you could just see it from there. I can remember the refrigerator delivery and one of the two boys who delivered it.

Our ice house replenished its ice each year from ice cut out of the Palouse River. Ice was nearly a foot thick. It was cut into blocks with huge hand saws and transported to the icehouse by wagon.

The ice-covered river became a playground in the winter, with ice skating and a carnival-like time with cars racing out on the ice. Cars then were a lot lighter than our cars now.

We lived a half dozen blocks from the icehouse, but it was more of a task than that distance suggests. Sometimes the task of going for ice fell on me. I had a wagon and would pull it to the icehouse, load up a 50-pound chunk of ice and pull it home.

I had to pull it over the bridge, across Main Street, and up a long and very steep hill to Church Street, where we lived.

I was only 8 at the time.

We had a cabinet-like ice chest. I would pull up to it with my wagon and someone would lift the block of ice into the chest.

We also had a box on the side of the house where we could keep some items.

My parents always had a couple of spaces in a community freezer place where you could rent spaces to store meat in.

My dad would buy half a beef, cut it and wrap it, and store it in these spaces. My dad was, among other things, a meat cutter.

I hated going to these lockers more than anything. The door was eight inches thick, and I always worried that I couldn’t get out. I had three older brothers who usually trapped me into going to these places.

Getting a real refrigerator was the beginning of change for the family in getting free from the effects of the Depression.

Winters are much milder there now, not too different from what we suffer here.

Sort of an advanced design of its own.