By Al Bossence
2018
My friend Jim Hagarty and I recently enjoyed a few hours in a coffee shop and one of the topics Jim and I touched on was our childhoods and that reminded me of something. In July of 2011 I wrote the following about my memories as a young boy.
I remember happy times …
Heating water on an old cast iron coal/wood stove for washing, once a week baths, bringing in water from a pump outside, coal oil lamps for when the electricity went off as it frequently did, no television, wind up clocks, buckled galoshes on cold winter feet, a hand crank phone on the wall, pee pots under the bed, wooden sided refrigerator with a big block of ice in the top part, no such thing as a supermarket and fish was pedaled on Fridays by a man pushing a wagon around my little home town of Tavistock Ontario, Canada.
Knives could be sharpened from a vendor the same way and milk was delivered by a horse drawn wagon. I can still see our local happy smiley faced chicken farmer standing just inside our door with his wooden basket of freshly killed chickens (de-feathered and headless, of course). A folded white cloth covered two or three at a time and that is how my Mother selected and bought our meat in those days.
A big old wooden floor model Crosley radio was the main source of entertainment in our house and my Mother, my Grandfather, my Uncle Fred and I would gather around it Sunday nights for Our Miss Brooks, Fibber McGee and Molly, the Great Gildersleeve and many other great old time radio shows. Arthur Godfrey in the mornings, Gunsmoke and Gangbusters on Saturday nights. Friday night boxing matches sponsored by Gillette.
We had an old crank up Victrola which could play big round 78 RPM records. I listened to those records over and over. My Mother could play piano by ear and it was always a great treat for me to sit on the piano bench beside her as she played my favorite tune, Greensleeves. Our house always had music in it and I’m very grateful for that today. Whether it was the radio, the Victrola, my Mother on piano which my Grandfather bought one day on impulse or an old record player years later, there was always music in the house. To this very day I still surround myself with music from dawn to dusk. My Grandfather made a few violins and could really make them screech.
Sometimes I would like nothing better than to just climb aboard a time machine to go back and turn on that big old wooden floor model Crosley radio again. I’d like to tune in Amos and Andy and gather round in the living room with my Mother, my Grandfather, and my Uncle Fred to listen and laugh once again to a simple humor that seems to be all but lost and gone the way of the Dinosaur now. A way of life, a way of family, a way of remembering. And some days those old memories just keep on coming and coming and I like when they do.
