Taking out the trash in the "old'n days"

I was on a trip and came across this and throught it would be a perfect blog. How true it is.

Talking out the trash was hardly a chore.

By Clancy Strock (Contributing editor)

You can bet there was no curbside trash pickup during the 1930s on our northern- Illinois Farm. The only way to get rid of refuse was to haul it to the dump.

Kitchen garbage wasn’t much of a problem, because it was quickly and efficiently disposed of by our pigs and chickens. They were the In-Sink-Erators of that era.

We made the trip to the dump every few weeks, hauling the trash from a family of four in just a couple of gunny-sacks. We dumped the trash, then brought the burlap bags home. Waste not, want not.

Now let’s fast-forward to the present. Every Thursday night when I take out the garbage, I marvel at how just my wife and I can generate enough to pretty well fill a large plastic trash bin.

I’m positive we throw out more stuff than we bring into the house. But if that’s true, why aren’t we down to only a stove, a bed and two chairs? Where does all that trash come from?

Welcome to the Disposable Society. I remember the days when grocery stores had a double-decked row of glass-topped cardboard boxes filled with various kinks of cookies. You lifted the lids and helped you to your favorites, then the grocer weighed a paper bagful and wrote down the damages on your bill.

Nowadays, my favorite cookies are somewhere down a 50-foot-long supermarket aisle crammed with hundreds of tempting goodies. Most come packed in plastic trays wrapped in cellophane so sturdy that it takes a cutting torch and two sticks of dynamite to penetrate.

When I was a kid, our butcher kept a big barrel of fragrant sauerkraut behind the counter. He scooped out order into a little cardboard boat and wrapped it in waxed paper. Now my kraut comes in a metal can destined for the trash.

Years ago, tin cans didn’t have as much importance in the kitchen as they do now. That role was filled by mason jars. Thick, heavy and nearly indestructible, they were used year after year and then passed along to the next generation.

Thanks to those jars, we enjoyed lots of string beans, beets, kernel corn and lima beans during the winter. The vegetables came from our own garden and were preserved in glass.

The same was true of jams and jellies. Jelly jars usually started out life as peanut butter jars. They, too, served for years and years. It was unthinkable for anyone to throw them away.

Now we feel virtuous if we clean out our store-bought jelly jars and but it into the recycling container.

Especially prized were the little decorated jars that held cream cheese spread. They became fruit juice glasses that brightened our breakfast table. Throw them out? Never!

BOTTLES FOR FOOD

We didn’t drink much soda pop years ago because it was a luxury. When we did have some, it came in glass bottles that carried a refundable deposit.

Later, during the ‘40s and ‘50s, my five young-uns guzzled considerably more of the stuff than I’d ever had. At times, this came in handy.

When the checking account was running on empty, we’d fill the car trunk with pop bottles, take them back to the store and use the deposit money to buy food. Lots of neighbors did the same toward the end of the month.

But not now. Soda pop comes in cans and big plastic bottles…more stuff of the trash container. Good thing recycling’s catching on. Excess packaging is especially irksome when I bring home breakfast cereal. The box is big enough to ship a large dog, but holds only enough flakes to feed a dieting canary.

Ask the manufacturer about it, and he’ll explain the need for “slack fill” (an-oxymoron if I ever heard one).

The milk to go with that cereal arrives at the table in different ways than it once did, too.

Out on the farm, our milk came straight from the cow. Friends in town received theirs in glass bottles. The milkman picked up the empties when he left off the day’s order and took the bottles back to the dairy, where they were sterilized and used over and over again. Today milk comes in plastic jugs that are once and go into the trash. A lot of people even get their drinking water in such containers. Years back, the faucet used to do.

Food and drink aren’t the only commodities that help us generate modern mountains of trash. When I go out to buy some nails or screws, I find them in aggravating plastic boxes containing 12 screws or 20 nails or six itty-bitty washers. Never mind that I need eight screws or 32 nails.

What I wouldn’t give to go to an old-time neighborhood hardware store with open bins from witch I could scoop as many nails as needed into a paper bag.

Then there’s the matter of clothing. Mom used to darn our socks…and darn them and darn them again. She patched trouser knees and sewed elbow patches onto sweaters and flannel shirts. Mending clothes was her Tuesday night job, while we listened to the radio.

Shirts were made of cotton, sweaters and coats of wool and shoes of leather. They lasted a long time, often passed down from kid to kid.

With today’s cloths, you don’t patch, you pitch. Stuff that’s been worn only a year is generally threadbare, hardly fit to pass along.

We also live in the Non-Repairable Products Era. Don’t even consider trying to have a radio or toaster or VCR repaired. “Sorry,” they say, “it’s cheaper to toss it and buy a new one.” Every town used to have a guy who could repair just about anything that ran on electricity. But no more.

Tube-Testing Time


For that, even the average inept husband had a pretty good chance of rejuvenating those old TV sets and radios, which relied on vacuum tubes instead of transistors and printed circuits. It took a while to pull dozen tubes and put them through a tube-tester at Woolworth’s or Walgreens. But you could usually locate the bum one and, for $3.98, be back in business in time for Ed Sullivan and Fred Waring.

Wherever you live, I’m sure your local paper has carried reports on how the local dump is just about full. Where will we put all our future garbage? (Answer: Anywhere but my backyard.)

A few places continue to pile up, creating “Mount Trashmores” like the one outside Chicago that makes a dandy ski run in winter.

Other areas are recycling what they can. But it’s a losing game. We generate a lot of junk.

Household trash plus the contents of those brimming dumpsters behind fast-food restaurant, schools, hospitals, shopping malls and factories create another small mountain every 24 hours.

Life sure was simpler back when two burlap bags held our family’s trash for the month. I know…I was there.


‘I Know… I was There’
Another in a series looking back on the unforgettable times and memorable events in our lives.

From the July/August 1998 issue of Reminisce the magazine That Brings Back the Good Times

Vol. 8, NO. 4 PG 6-7