I am going to compare how my grandparents lives differed in the everyday things from mine. I’ll use 1923 (which is when my grandparents and family moved into the house I remember) most of the time but sometimes the 1950s creep in there.  I can remember how different things were even when I was little in the 1940s from today.

For breakfast I had oatmeal with raisins, cooked in a stainless steal pan on a gas stove. Water from the faucet. Oatmeal from a cardboard container with a plastic top, milk from a waxed cardboard carton stored in the electric refrigerator. My grandmother used a long legged gas stove. They still kept it in the basement when I was growing up.  My grandfather cooked the holiday turkeys in it.  They had to light the burners and oven with a match. More about kitchens in the olden days – Transitioning into the modern kitchen

Back in 1923 my grandparents would have had an ice box to keep food cold. The ice man would have delivered the ice. Milk was in glass bottles.  Leftovers were kept in china containers with matching tops.  I remember a green one. Or in glass bowls with cloth tops with elastic around the edges to put over the container. Our leftovers are in glass dishes with plastic tops that always end up splitting.  We also use plastic containers that once held take out from the Chinese restaurant.  She kept her butter on a saucer in the cupboard so that it would be ready for spreading.  I do the same with mine.  They kept chickens in their Detroit backyard so eggs came from them.  We buy ours at the supermarket.

Washing dishes – I use a plastic dish pan. My grandmother (and so did we) used a metal one. I would still if I could find one.  I fill another container with rinse water.  So did she.  She saved leftovers, cut them small and put them outside on the bird feeder.  I throw mine in the plastic garbage can lined with a plastic bag.  It goes outside to the big plastic bin after dinner. A full days garbage fit in a small metal can that had a step on opener. They wrapped it up in newspaper and took it out to the metal garbage can.  There was a towel rack on the back of the basement door and a continuous towel hung there. We have a rack on the wall and hang smaller towels over them.

Washing clothes – I use a small washer/dryer.  My grandmother used a wringer washer and hung the clothes up on lines in the basement.  By the time we came along, she had an electric wringer washer but that is as far as she was willing to go.  When I was small, we had a wringer washer too.  It wasn’t until my mother retired that they got an electric dryer.  I like to hang my wash outdoors but haven’t hung any lines since we moved here, so it’s the electric dryer.

I spend lots of time working on computer research – nothing to compare with in my grandmother’s time.

Listening to the radio – Actually I’m listing to the radio via my computer while I type this. During the 1950s my grandmother listened to a small radio in the kitchen.  She listened to the radio soaps and baseball games.  I am listening to BBC4. Metamorphasis by Kalfka right now.  In the evening my husband and I sometimes watch programs on our screen.  It isn’t actually a television but a large computer screen that we have connected to a device (Hulu) that allows us to watch movies and old TV programs from Amazon and Netflix and PBS. It comes in via our internet.   There was no television in the 1920s.

Grocery shopping – We drive to the supermarket and picks things off of the shelf. We also belong to a urban farm where we pay a certain amount and get vegetables in season. My grandfather had a garden and they had an apple tree.  My grandmother made the best applesauce from the apples.  I sometimes make applesause from boughten apples but cannot match hers. They kept chickens in 1920.  I don’t know if they had milk delivered to the house in glass bottles like we did in the 1940s and 1950s but I’m thinking they did. It seems from reading  Got Milk? that milk in Detroit began to be pasteurized in 1916 and that milk men gradually replaced the milk peddlers that arrived with containers of milk from which they spooned into the housewives pitcher raw milk.

 A grocery store in 1920 Detroit. In the 1950s, I remember walking to a poultry market with my grandmother where she picked out one of the living chickens kept in crates around the room, they killed and plucked it for her.  In the 1950s my grandfather bought ice cream from a dairy in the neighborhood. It was always vanilla ice cream. The kind we get at the store doesn’t match the taste.

We sleep in a queen size bed, wooden frame.  My grandparents slept in a brass double size bed in 1923. They had headboard lights that hung over the bed frame so that they could read before they went to sleep.  Or turn the light on when they woke up in the middle of the night.  I use my kindle to read on before I go to bed and often wish I had one of those lights.  Read the story of the brass bed here Dollhouse Update.

I almost forgot the bathroom!  We have three bathrooms in this small house. Mine is the size of a closet, containing a stall shower, corner sink and toilet. There is no window. My grandparent’s bathroom was a full size room that was a bathroom.  It had a claw foot tub, a toilet, a sink, a cupboard and a kerosene heater to warm up the room before baths. The window looked out on the neighbor’s house, but it wasn’t so close you could hear them talking.  My cousin Dee Dee made up a story that the tub was magic and that it could go up through the ceiling somewhere magical, not the attic we knew was up there.  They always used floating ivory soap for bath soap.  I do too.  And they used lava soap at the sink to get the grime off. It was a gritty gray soup.

For more about the house on Theodore, T is for Theodore Street.