Posted by Sherman in Idaho [108.162.246.23] on Friday, May 20, 2016 at 12:33:33 :
In Reply to: Re: hand dug wells posted by Jerry in Idaho [162.158.68.47] on Friday, May 20, 2016 at 11:37:07 :
You have a couple of years on me, I guess. When I was a kid, everybody had a TV (maybe it was a rich neighborhood) but at some point one of them got a COLOR TV and we all went over to watch the after-school cartoons on it. I had neighbors in Everett who didn't have a phone. They said they had it taken out when Frank worked at the mill so they wouldn't call him up in the middle of the night and tell him to go to work to fix something (he was a welder). I asked how their friends knew if they should come over to visit. She said they just come over and if we're here, we visit, and if not we don't.
They did have a TV, though. She only liked to watch "animal pictures and the fights" as she put it. She used to watch baseball with Frank, but quit after he died because it was sad to watch it without him. Said they tried to watch football at one point, but stopped because they didn't understand the rules. When she was young she worked at the Lowell paper mill pasting paper grocery sacks together by hand. Sometimes she and her girlfriends would take the Interurban (electric trolley) to Seattle for some big-city shopping. Later, when they were married, they'd drive on the Bothel-Everett highway before Highway 99 was built. The first time Frank went to Seattle there was a logging operation with 1/4 mile of high lead running out from the spar tree, logging the old growth near where the Alderwood Mall is today. They stopped going to Seattle after they built "that new freeway" (I-5, constructed around 1965) because they couldn't find their way around any more.