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Show 17 take me long to become a connoisseur of catalogs, though of course the good paper was gone long before the other. When we moved to town some of our neighbors still had their privies out near the alley, except they had water to flush them, but ours was practically inside, and heated. For when the sewer line came in, Granddad enclosed half the back porch to hold tub and toilet, and all we had to do was step out the kitchen door onto the porch, then enter the bathroom. Also on the back porch was a door which opened up out of the floor and led down to the basement, dirt walls, dirt floor. The door had to be down to get to the icebox, in winter keeping food above freezing, in summer cooled by a sign stuck in the screen which brought the iceman up from the alley in leather apron, his tongs sunk into a block of ice. He no longer used horses, used a truck, and I and other small boys ran down the alley behind it in its blue exhaust for the pleasure of snatching up the slivers of ice and feeling them melt on our tongues. When Ricky Carver's parents got a Frigidaire with a round condenser sitting on top, I was too impressed to be envious, awed by technology. The biggest change for me was the electricity, and that now we had a radio. On winter afternoons, daily in the dusk of five o'clock, I settled into the big chair in front of a box shaped like a gothic window and for fifteen minutes listened to "Bill, Mack and Jimmy," a serial introduced by "The Flight of the Bumblebee," which has given me chills ever since. These three adventurers roamed the world in an aeroplane, to Egypt, Mesopotamia, Bombay, Zanzibar, blundering boldly into the most exotic scrapes, into hair-breath escapes, and I held my breath for them, heart hammering especially for Jimmy, the youngest. It never occured to me that those people weren't real, only voices. Somehow I knew that Ken Maynard and Tom Mix were real |
