Life Without Computers and The Like -- Chapter Two

Dear Grandchildren,

Last time I talked about life as I first remember it. The home where my immediate family lived had more

My Mom and Brother Brian

modern conveniences than our grandmother's and grandfather's house. I recall moving into our home on "the main road" (US 1) in Littleton. It is unclear where we moved from, but it was definitely exciting to be in our new house.

The house had been purchased by my parents and moved about 1/2 mile to the small farm they bought from Grammie Ruth's Aunt Lillian and Uncle Howard Graham. The house sat on blocks at first across the driveway from a rock foundation where the farm house was before it burned. I am not sure just how long we lived in our house on blocks, but it was for a few years.

We had electricity, but no running water. Having electricity meant we had lights in all the rooms, a refrigerator for keeping our perishable food supply, an electric washing machine for agitating and cleaning clothing and a power-driven wringer for getting the excess water out of the laundered items. There were lights in the barn where we had varying numbers of cows, calves, pigs, chickens, and turkeys, so no oil lanterns were needed in our barn! Near the house was our water well with a hand pump. On the other side of the barn was our outhouse -- a two-seater. And, yes, there was a Sears catalog there!

At night and on cold days we listened to the radio. There was music and news, yes. But the thing we liked the most was to listen to the stories. We gathered around the livingroom and waited for one of the adults to tune in the radio. It made strange sounds until the dial was set just right and then it was ALL ears! One program was "Dragnet" with Officer Joe Friday. He always caught the bad men. Then there was Boston Blackie. I don't remember what show he was on. We listened to the "Inner Sanctum". I don't remember much about the stories, but I remember the creaking door that sent chills up my spine. I think there were monsters -- scary, but funny to some. We liked Abbot and Costello -- so funny, always! And there were more. Some of those shows made it to TV a few years later.

We liked to be out-of-doors more than anything. Some of the games we played would not be politically correct today. We played "Cops and Robbers" and "Cowboys and Indians". Those were games that were maybe a take-off on the game of "Tag". Basically we chased each other around pretending to be shooting each other. Boy, would that get us into trouble in the 21st century. We played things like "Kick The Can", "Hide and Seek", "Frozen Tag", and "Alley Over". The only need for real sporting equipment for that kind of game was a ball for "Alley Over".  That was a great game at school, too.

We had clubs with rules. And sometimes children got into trouble with parents or grandparents for making a girl ONLY club or a "No Girls Allowed" play house. Saw horses, planks, tires, just about anything became construction material for our creations! Oh, yes -- we had to put things away, but we turned that into fun, too.

Of course, we played baseball and soft ball in the pasture; we played croquet; and we liked to play horse shoes, too. We loved to play "house" and that was really a role play game. It was fun being the baby and bawling like one. The girls liked to make "Mud Pies" -- it was just stirring up dirt and water and putting it into our tiny cake pans or some other substitute. Sometimes we would decorate them with wild flowers. Grammie Muriel was famous for letting us go to the hen house to gather a few eggs to stir into our mud concoctions. (She rarely said "no" to us but when she did, she meant it!)

What about rainy days? OH, they were great fun. We put our swim suits on during down-pours and played in the mud puddles. On really hot days, we made shelters under the trees and then begged for crackers and milk or some other goody so we could sit in the shade and have a picnic. Another favorite was to get a banana, climb up into a tree, sit on a branch and pretend to be monkeys eating our fruit.

We liked to climb up on a tractor and pretend to drive it. And we loved to go out and pet the cows. Sometimes we even laid on the grass and rested our heads on a nice, warm cow who was placidly chewing her cud. The hay mows were awesome places to play and hide -- and so were the bins of oats being stored for the hens and pigs.

 Every yard had a sand/gravel pile and we used to make awesome roads with the toy graders and run the dump trucks over them to pick up loads of gravel to create new landscapes to go with our network of roads.

So what about life without computers and TV?  Somehow I think childhood was a lot richer in certain ways. Our great and delicious fun knew no bounds except the limits of our own creativity and the inability of  the adults to always see why we needed to do this or have that!

To be continued. . .

How Did We Live Without Computers?

This year, Grampie and I will have our 71st birthdays. Now, to clear the air, I should say my birthday comes FIRST. According to your grandfather, that makes me WAY older than he. And when I say "five months", he replies, "5 months and THREE days". Oh, well! I am not going to live that down. So maybe I should embrace it and tell him I am older AND wiser. What do you think?

What was life like, growing up in the 1940s and 1950s? How could we have had any fun without computers, televisions, and very few battery operated toys? What did kids do in the "olden days", anyway? You must wonder. So I'll give you a brief tour of life for us "back then".

First of all, I remember when my grandparents had NO electricity in their home. Their lights were mostly oil burning lamps which gave out enough light to do evening chores. It was hard to read by their light, though. They cooked their food on a wood burning stove that had a tank on the side for warming water. And, speaking of water, they had a cast iron hand pump installed by their sink and so they were able to pump water from the well by pumping up and down on the handle. It worked quite well.

With no electricity, what did they do to keep their food from spoiling? Well, they had an icebox in the shed (an unfinished room off the kitchen). In the winter, they would go to the lake and cut out blocks of ice for use in the icebox. So how did they keep the blocks of ice frozen from one winter to the next? They stacked the blocks on the ground and covered them with a thick covering of sawdust. The sawdust pile was always wet from melting ice, but the cold ice blocks kept it cold under the sawdust that insulated them from most of the warmth of the spring, summer, and fall air.

They canned (or jarred) most of our food from the garden and some of our meat. This lined shelves in the basement for use year-round.

In my earliest years, most of our food was home grown. I can still remember the big barrel of molasses, the sacks of flour, and the sacks of sugar my grandfather carried in. The flour and sugar sacks were made of cloth and that cloth was used to make aprons, back quilt blocks, or to make other clothing. Nothing was wasted. It was always too hard to get. Besides, there was no dump accessible to us back then, so things were recycled as much as possible. What little that was discarded was burned in the back yard in a 50 gallon drum or dumped in a heap in a back field or in the woods.

And what about taking a shower? They didn't have one. Every day we had warm water, soap, a wash cloth, and a towel. We washed up and then threw the water out the back door or down the sink -- but the sink drained out back anyway so if it was easier to throw it out the back door than go to the sink, that is what we did! On Saturday night we took a bath in order to be extra clean for going to Church the next morning. We had galvanized steel tubs that sat on the kitchen floor near the wood stove. Hot water was taken from the tank on the wood stove and poured into the tub. This was usually too hot for a bath, so it was adjusted with cold water from the hand pump at the sink. The curtains were pulled in the room for privacy and everyone stayed out of the kitchen until it was their turn. Everybody used the same water and when it started to cool off, a little more water was taken from the tank on the stove and poured into the tub. If the tub was too full, some water was dipped out before the warmer water was added. After the bath, the water was dipped out and thrown away until the tub was not too heavy to carry and then the rest was taken outside to be dumped.

And laundry? They did it by hand. There was a "scrub board" that sat in the wash tub for rubbing off dirt. A boiler of water with some bleach was on the wood stove for the "whites". After they were in the very hot water, they were fished out with a large wooden tool used for that purpose. Washed clothes were put in a tub of cold water for rinsing and then they were put through a wringer. This consisted of two rubber rollers a foot or more long and a handle for cranking. The clothing was fed in between the rollers and the excess water fell on a drip pan and back into the tub. Once wrung out, the clothes were put into a basket and carried outside to the clothes line. There was a wooden clothes rack to stand near the stove on freezing and rainy days and a folding rack attached to the wall over the stove. On those days, wet clothes could dry inside. We liked the smell of our sheets after they dried outside. And towels? Before the day of the electric (or gas) dryer, towels and face cloths were rough.

I don't think they had time for computers or TV. And this is only the beginning.

Thus ends chapter ONE.

God Sticks To His Word

It is so important for Christians to read the Bible for ourselves. Part of the reason is that there are false teachers and we must beware of them. Some of them are like wolves in sheep's clothing. And some of them are just sincerely wrong. It is very possible for any of us to be deceived. 

Remember how Jesus said that He was going to send another comforter to us? That is the Holy Spirit, who would indwell us and lead us into all truth. We can trust Him to teach us and to warn us when we see or read something. Even so, believers can take some bypaths and we do not always understand perfectly. We still are human and we are weak. However, I believe if we are faithful to our study of the Word and asking God for wisdom, He will teach us what we need to know. 

In Acts 17 the people from Berea were admired because they were constantly searching the Scriptures to confirm what they were being taught. "Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true." (verse 11 - NIV) We have advantages over them because they only had the Old Testament -- we have the entire Bible, the revelation of God to us in writing. 

The reason I entitled this little blog "God Sticks To His Word" is because some Churches and some prominent individuals are deviating from the clear teachings of the Bible. Some of us are caving in to relativism and to political correctness. And while some believe their re-interpretations are compassionate or loving, they are forgetting that God is not only loving. He is HOLY and He is JUST and He is IMMUTABLE (does not change). There are more and more instances where professing Christians are embracing the thinking of this world system (which is, in essence, opposed to God -- His enemy). 

The Bible says:

Malachi 3:6 "I the Lord do not change."

Heb.1:10 "And, Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth; and the heavens are the works of thine hands... and they shall be changed: but thou art the same. . ." (quote of Psalm 102:25)

Hebrews 13:8 "Jesus Christ the same yesterday, today, and forever."

It is not my purpose here to discuss particular sins. The list of offenses against God is long. Some of them are obvious to us, and others are less visible. But let me just say that the Bible teaches that we have ALL sinned and come short of the glory of God. His standard is Jesus and NONE of us can claim to be as good as He is. In fact, the Bible says there is no good thing in any of us. When we look at each other, we might see different traits that we admire -- but even those things are inferior to Jesus and His altogether perfection. When we come to know Christ, He imputes HIS righteousness to us. So our record in Heaven is clean. A background check up there would reveal no wrong doing. It is by HIS grace that we are saved, but it is on HIS merit and not on our own. 

God does NOT overlook sin, though. He took a huge mountain of sin from every believer and threw it away, never to look at it again. And while he has great compassion toward us, He expects Christians not to settle down and think that anything goes now that we are in His forever family. NO! If we love Him, we will want to KEEP His commandments, not violate and excuse them. We aren't to do that in ourselves or on behalf of anyone else. We are to repent when we fall. See I John 1:9 (if we confess our sin, He is faithful and just to forgive our sin and to clean us up again). So we must turn away from our sin and apologize to God for it (repent) as often as we need to and that will probably be often. Examples: lose our temper; lie; be rude; put ourselves first; disrespect someone -- and more. (Read I Corinthians 6)

Bottom line, grandchildren: God's opinion is the one that counts. It is an admirable thing to listen to the teachings of others. That is usually very helpful. But check it out in the Bible. GOD is never wrong.