The home in which I grew up got electricity in 1949—a refrigerator was required to keep the baby formula cold. Before power kerosene lamps were the order of the day and it was said that my grandmother was so frugal the family didn’t get light in the livingroom from the single lamp that was allowed to be lit until she finished up washing dishes in the kitchen. If you left a room without turning off the lights you heard about it from my father. To this day nothing matches the natural glow emitted by the grail of an Aladdin Lamp. Kerosene was not scented or treated in those days and homes smelt of the fuel—rural homes still keep oil lamps handy for when the power goes out to this day.
Battery operated radios produced wonderful sound because they lacked the alternating current hum emitted on AM Stations by electrified radios. I treasured that old radio and discovered the best antenna I could find was the metal of my bedspring when I was confined due to illness.
Before indoor plumbing the back door was always left unlocked as it led to the outhouse. Having a safe pathway shovelled to that essential service was a priority in winter. Cleaning chamber pots and thundermugs with Javex was an ugly but necessary task. Hand pumps got water into the kitchen, woe betide the child who left the lever in the wrong position causing the pump to lose prime. If no water could be found inside someone had to lower a pail into the well to dip water for the purpose.
Before electricity homes had ice houses and ice coolers. Every home had a mini-well in the basement to keep the creamer cool in summer. If you wanted skim milk you tapped the creamer, if you wanted cream you opened the creamer and dipped it off the top—nothing was homogenized in those days. The mechanical separator was turned until the bell in the handle no longer clanged and then a centrifuge separated milk from cream. Cream was allowed to go sour and then churned to make butter. Guernsey cows made the most naturally orange butter. Nothing produced today matches natural buttermilk.
We kept sheep until the only Nova Scotia carding mill closed and the wool had to be sent to New Brunswick. I’m told they still mail their wool to NB from Newfoundland to this day.
Family clothes were sew and mended on a foot treadle Singer Sewing Machine. The trick was to make sure the next bag of flour or sugar bore the same pattern as the last so you’d have enough cotton for the dress or blouse you were making.
I was home sick with the Red Measles when our first telephone was installed. Being on a ten-party line it was assumed someone else was listening in on your calls, the annoying thing was when they answered the phone before you did. I don’t remember seeing my father answer the phone, if he needed to talk to someone he got into his Ford Pickup Truck and drove to talk to them in face to face.
Baddeck on Cape Breton Island, where the telephone was invented--unless you live in Brantford Ontario--was one of the last places in Canada to get rotary dial telephones. Telephone rings such as three ring 13 were not uncommon and someone manned the central exchange as operator. Today most children wouldn’t know what to do with a rotary phone. Bell Canada still flagrantly charges extra for digital dialing.
I still own my Smith Corolla Manual Typewriter though I’m not aware of where I’d obtain a typewriter ribbon. Correction tape was a necessity and copies were made by using onion skin and carbon paper. Computer word processors such as the one upon which I am composing this document make editing and correcting a snap. What was life like before spell check, automated thesaurus, and dictionary software. Whenever I eat corn on the cob I still think of the Heckle and Jeckle Cartoon in which they peck at corn cobs like a typewriter carriage with a bell sounding at the end before the carriage gets thrown. Jack Kerouac would have typed On The Road on a roll of paper towel, word processors do not run out of paper or run off the end of the page. Did you know the letters are arranged that way to ensure less likelihood of letters jamming if they struck the paper at the same time?
When was the last time you used a fountain pen? Have you ever used a quill and ink? The old one-room school I attended still had desks with holes for ink wells. Boys like my father dipped girl’s pig tails in the ink. I still have my father’s slate and slate pencil. Once your work was corrected the slate was cleaned with a damp cloth. Did you have an abacus as a child? Were you taught to use a slide rule? Were you aware that there is no Roman Numeral for zero? Do you know Morse Code?
Television arrived in my home only a short time before I left home for good. If I wanted to watch Tales from the Riverside or Thunderbirds in Supermarianation I had to visit my Grandfather or go to the neighbours. With one TV in a family one neighbour household watched Doctor Kildare one week and This Hour has Seven Days the next. There were two choices of channels—CBC or CTV.
The advent of video players—cassette or DVD has changed the nature of island life forever. In places such as Grand Manan the ferry schedule made it impossible to go to a movie on the main and get home the same day. When I visited the island every grocery store, barber shop, garage, coffee shop, and drug store on the island rented movies. Today kids sit in their rooms and play computer games. Before that families sat around the TV and no one was allowed to talk unless a commercial was playing. During important games the men at the sewage treatment plant didn’t need a TV to know when breaks in play occurred. Before all these modern technologies families played cards and parlour games. Every parlour had a foot operated treadle type harmonium. Rich families had player pianos and rolls. People made their own entertainment and they actually talked to one another.
Modern paved highways and reliable fast motor cars have made commuting long distances commonplace. The drive from my home to Halifax was once 103 miles and took 3 hours. Now I can make the 90 KM trip in under an hour. Before the advent of Consolidated Schools Lunenburg County, NS, possessed at least three distinct dialects or regional accents. I was bused over seven miles of dirt roads 25 miles to high school—mud in spring and fall, ice and snow drifts in winter, and dust in summer—three to a seat in a vehicle with dodgy brakes. School buses ran to take kids to dances. Glee Club was a major event. I got my picture in the Halifax Chronicle for singing in the Kiwanis Music Festival and bused to Lunenburg to sing in the stars of the festival concert. My first trip to Halifax to visit an allergy specialist was a major event. Today I and my RV have travelled 75,000 KM circling North America twice.
The letters I sent home to my parents from University took 3 days to arrive. This message will arrive in a CBC inbox seconds after I hit send. Via instant messaging we can ‘talk’ immediately. Chess games by mail once took months to complete, now we can play online games with immediacy. If someone took the time to sit down, write you a letter, buy postage, and walk to a post box to send it the recipient felt some obligation to post a response. I’d appreciate the same courtesy for the effort I put into writing this anthropological essay.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
My first ‘record’ was a shellac 78 rpm copy of Bimbo followed by an original 78 of Rudolph on vinyl. Both were worn to death on my Mother’s 1930ies Victrola. Long playing disks were capable of playing for approximately 5 minutes before the disk had to be turned over manually. The needle needed frequent cleanings and regular replacements and exerted several pounds of pressure on the disk. The singer on those early disks was rarely identified, only the orchestra, as voices did not reproduce particularly faithfully.
Contrast this with vinyl 33 rpm records that could record up to half an hour of music per side and could be stacked to play for hours with a cartridge and stylus exerting micro-grams of pressure on the disk. My Mother thought the voices were real.
Cassette tapes for the first time made players portable. Afficiandos had for decades listened to and recorded sound on giant reel to reel recorders at speeds of up to 15 inches per second. Cassette players suffered from the bane of tape hiss but finally anyone could afford to take music wherever they went.
Compact Disks truly entered the electronic age electronically sampling sound and converting it back though to the discerning ear with a certain sheen. Capable of holding 80 minutes of music for the first time an entire symphony could be recorded on one disk--unless we’re talking Mahler or Bruckner. My cataloguing CD Player can play over 24 hours of music non-stop and the laser that reads the disk never physically touches it. CD Players were made portable but suffered from skipping if jiggled too much.
Enter MP3 Players. Finally a runner can place a portable player the size of a large wrist watch on his/her wrist or upper arm and go jogging as the device has no moving parts. Larger players can hold ‘cards’ that contain days of music. The compressed files may not faithfully reproduce the 24 cycle per second tone of a 64 ft bombarde reed at Notre Dame de Paris but for pop music that feeds on distortion they’re ideal. A 5 terrabyte hard disk can hold years of music. A nine-speaker system can literally place you in a concert hall.
I’ve seen a cylinder recording of Caruso played on an acoustic horn player and I’ve sat in a subway car and heard youngsters doing their ears permanent damage with ear buds blasting ‘music’ I can hear across the aisle. Times have changed from the old crystal set that picked up radio signals and played music in an ear phone using the energy of the broadcast signal to create sound.
Battery operated radios produced wonderful sound because they lacked the alternating current hum emitted on AM Stations by electrified radios. I treasured that old radio and discovered the best antenna I could find was the metal of my bedspring when I was confined due to illness.
Before indoor plumbing the back door was always left unlocked as it led to the outhouse. Having a safe pathway shovelled to that essential service was a priority in winter. Cleaning chamber pots and thundermugs with Javex was an ugly but necessary task. Hand pumps got water into the kitchen, woe betide the child who left the lever in the wrong position causing the pump to lose prime. If no water could be found inside someone had to lower a pail into the well to dip water for the purpose.
Before electricity homes had ice houses and ice coolers. Every home had a mini-well in the basement to keep the creamer cool in summer. If you wanted skim milk you tapped the creamer, if you wanted cream you opened the creamer and dipped it off the top—nothing was homogenized in those days. The mechanical separator was turned until the bell in the handle no longer clanged and then a centrifuge separated milk from cream. Cream was allowed to go sour and then churned to make butter. Guernsey cows made the most naturally orange butter. Nothing produced today matches natural buttermilk.
We kept sheep until the only Nova Scotia carding mill closed and the wool had to be sent to New Brunswick. I’m told they still mail their wool to NB from Newfoundland to this day.
Family clothes were sew and mended on a foot treadle Singer Sewing Machine. The trick was to make sure the next bag of flour or sugar bore the same pattern as the last so you’d have enough cotton for the dress or blouse you were making.
I was home sick with the Red Measles when our first telephone was installed. Being on a ten-party line it was assumed someone else was listening in on your calls, the annoying thing was when they answered the phone before you did. I don’t remember seeing my father answer the phone, if he needed to talk to someone he got into his Ford Pickup Truck and drove to talk to them in face to face.
Baddeck on Cape Breton Island, where the telephone was invented--unless you live in Brantford Ontario--was one of the last places in Canada to get rotary dial telephones. Telephone rings such as three ring 13 were not uncommon and someone manned the central exchange as operator. Today most children wouldn’t know what to do with a rotary phone. Bell Canada still flagrantly charges extra for digital dialing.
I still own my Smith Corolla Manual Typewriter though I’m not aware of where I’d obtain a typewriter ribbon. Correction tape was a necessity and copies were made by using onion skin and carbon paper. Computer word processors such as the one upon which I am composing this document make editing and correcting a snap. What was life like before spell check, automated thesaurus, and dictionary software. Whenever I eat corn on the cob I still think of the Heckle and Jeckle Cartoon in which they peck at corn cobs like a typewriter carriage with a bell sounding at the end before the carriage gets thrown. Jack Kerouac would have typed On The Road on a roll of paper towel, word processors do not run out of paper or run off the end of the page. Did you know the letters are arranged that way to ensure less likelihood of letters jamming if they struck the paper at the same time?
When was the last time you used a fountain pen? Have you ever used a quill and ink? The old one-room school I attended still had desks with holes for ink wells. Boys like my father dipped girl’s pig tails in the ink. I still have my father’s slate and slate pencil. Once your work was corrected the slate was cleaned with a damp cloth. Did you have an abacus as a child? Were you taught to use a slide rule? Were you aware that there is no Roman Numeral for zero? Do you know Morse Code?
Television arrived in my home only a short time before I left home for good. If I wanted to watch Tales from the Riverside or Thunderbirds in Supermarianation I had to visit my Grandfather or go to the neighbours. With one TV in a family one neighbour household watched Doctor Kildare one week and This Hour has Seven Days the next. There were two choices of channels—CBC or CTV.
The advent of video players—cassette or DVD has changed the nature of island life forever. In places such as Grand Manan the ferry schedule made it impossible to go to a movie on the main and get home the same day. When I visited the island every grocery store, barber shop, garage, coffee shop, and drug store on the island rented movies. Today kids sit in their rooms and play computer games. Before that families sat around the TV and no one was allowed to talk unless a commercial was playing. During important games the men at the sewage treatment plant didn’t need a TV to know when breaks in play occurred. Before all these modern technologies families played cards and parlour games. Every parlour had a foot operated treadle type harmonium. Rich families had player pianos and rolls. People made their own entertainment and they actually talked to one another.
Modern paved highways and reliable fast motor cars have made commuting long distances commonplace. The drive from my home to Halifax was once 103 miles and took 3 hours. Now I can make the 90 KM trip in under an hour. Before the advent of Consolidated Schools Lunenburg County, NS, possessed at least three distinct dialects or regional accents. I was bused over seven miles of dirt roads 25 miles to high school—mud in spring and fall, ice and snow drifts in winter, and dust in summer—three to a seat in a vehicle with dodgy brakes. School buses ran to take kids to dances. Glee Club was a major event. I got my picture in the Halifax Chronicle for singing in the Kiwanis Music Festival and bused to Lunenburg to sing in the stars of the festival concert. My first trip to Halifax to visit an allergy specialist was a major event. Today I and my RV have travelled 75,000 KM circling North America twice.
The letters I sent home to my parents from University took 3 days to arrive. This message will arrive in a CBC inbox seconds after I hit send. Via instant messaging we can ‘talk’ immediately. Chess games by mail once took months to complete, now we can play online games with immediacy. If someone took the time to sit down, write you a letter, buy postage, and walk to a post box to send it the recipient felt some obligation to post a response. I’d appreciate the same courtesy for the effort I put into writing this anthropological essay.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
My first ‘record’ was a shellac 78 rpm copy of Bimbo followed by an original 78 of Rudolph on vinyl. Both were worn to death on my Mother’s 1930ies Victrola. Long playing disks were capable of playing for approximately 5 minutes before the disk had to be turned over manually. The needle needed frequent cleanings and regular replacements and exerted several pounds of pressure on the disk. The singer on those early disks was rarely identified, only the orchestra, as voices did not reproduce particularly faithfully.
Contrast this with vinyl 33 rpm records that could record up to half an hour of music per side and could be stacked to play for hours with a cartridge and stylus exerting micro-grams of pressure on the disk. My Mother thought the voices were real.
Cassette tapes for the first time made players portable. Afficiandos had for decades listened to and recorded sound on giant reel to reel recorders at speeds of up to 15 inches per second. Cassette players suffered from the bane of tape hiss but finally anyone could afford to take music wherever they went.
Compact Disks truly entered the electronic age electronically sampling sound and converting it back though to the discerning ear with a certain sheen. Capable of holding 80 minutes of music for the first time an entire symphony could be recorded on one disk--unless we’re talking Mahler or Bruckner. My cataloguing CD Player can play over 24 hours of music non-stop and the laser that reads the disk never physically touches it. CD Players were made portable but suffered from skipping if jiggled too much.
Enter MP3 Players. Finally a runner can place a portable player the size of a large wrist watch on his/her wrist or upper arm and go jogging as the device has no moving parts. Larger players can hold ‘cards’ that contain days of music. The compressed files may not faithfully reproduce the 24 cycle per second tone of a 64 ft bombarde reed at Notre Dame de Paris but for pop music that feeds on distortion they’re ideal. A 5 terrabyte hard disk can hold years of music. A nine-speaker system can literally place you in a concert hall.
I’ve seen a cylinder recording of Caruso played on an acoustic horn player and I’ve sat in a subway car and heard youngsters doing their ears permanent damage with ear buds blasting ‘music’ I can hear across the aisle. Times have changed from the old crystal set that picked up radio signals and played music in an ear phone using the energy of the broadcast signal to create sound.
