Contributors

Thursday, July 6, 2000

The old wooden icebox was once a real luxury

My know-it-all teenagers whooped, hollered and cackled with laughter when my wife or I called the refrigerator the icebox.
   I didn't have the heart to tell them how lucky they were that they never knew what a real icebox was like. They wouldn't have believed me anyway. Just like when they'd roll their eyes and flash that "yeah, right" grin when I'd tell them how I walked two miles to and from school when I was young.
   Decades ago we had an icebox in our house. It was about four feet high, crude, plain and ugly looking. It was made of wood and tin-like metal that served as insulation. There were two or three shelves inside for stacking things on. Barely room for enough milk, eggs, cheese, butter and a few other perishables.
   It probably cost $50 or less. The thing was a joke compared to the $1,300, six-foot, porcelain, double-door, multi-shelf refrigerator/freezer/ice-maker/water-dispensing modern convenience monument that now graces my kitchen.
   Our icebox of olden times had an opening in the top which held 50 and 100-pound blocks of ice delivered every day or two by a CPL ice man. My wife Rae still has the ice tongs her father used to carry ice blocks. Our icebox had a drip pan on the bottom for collecting smelly melted ice water. One of my jobs was to empty it daily, rain or shine.
   Almost every South Texas town had an ice house. These were built like World War II bunkers. Here all the ice blocks were frozen and stored. A boy could slip inside an ice house on a sweltering summer day and cool off for a while.
   The icebox was one of two indoor luxuries our house held. The other was piped cold running water. My dad built a makeshift wooden structure adjoining the house where he ran a garden hose attached to a sprinkle nozzle. This served as an outside summer bath shower. The first blast of cold water hitting your face and body was invigorating to say the least. In the winter we bathed inside in a wash tub filled with stove-heated water.
   Iceboxes helped popularize another successful enterprise, the independent fresh meat market. Since you couldn't keep large amounts of meat in small size iceboxes for long, many consumers frequented markets to purchase two or three slices of lunch meat or cheese for sandwiches or larger meat cuts for daily main meals.
   I recall one night my dad came home late from work. He didn't want to turn on the house lights and wake everybody. But he was hungry for a snack before going to bed. In the light from the moon he spotted what he thought was leftover meat spread in the ice box. He ate it. The next morning my brother, Travis, asked what happened to the saucer of his cat's food. My father confessed he consumed it. Dad said it tasted good. Only thing it was just a little mealy.
   (Grady Phelps is a retired business writer for the Caller-Times.)
  

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