Some About My Childhood Homes in the 1940s

More about the houses I lived in growing up.

Life was very different in the 1940s and 1950s from what we have today. There were not the conveniences in the homes and while many were modern by the standards of that era, meaning electricity and indoor plumbing, the caring of a home and family still required a lot of manual labor.

I previously published stories about the very first places I lived. http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474976861562

I guess the best place to start is telling about the house we lived in that didn’t have indoor plumbing. It was all that was available in 1946 when the house my parents had been renting was sold and we had to move. This was a large two story house meant for one family. A widow occupied it and was willing to rent the east half of it to our family of 6. That meant we had two bedrooms upstairs (you had to get to the second one by going through the first. Since there was no bathroom it meant chamber pots (we called them slop jars) under the beds or going outside to the privy or outhouse. A stairway divided the house so Mrs. Webster’s side was private from ours. I don’t remember that we had closets, but they may have been very small ones. I do know we had clothing on hangers on pegs along the wall. My two sisters and I slept in one room and my mother and dad and little brother who was still pre-school age slept in the other.

Downstairs there was a living room, dining room and what was meant to be our kitchen. It was more or less a porch when we moved in. My dad being handy did a lot of work on it to make it habitable. I know he had to put in a new floor because there were places where you could look through the old one and see the ground. Even with the new floor it was very cold in the winter. There was no water into the kitchen, but there was a pump just out side out door. We had to pump all of our water and carry it inside , there fore it also had to be heated on top of the stove. We had a sink that was put into a small table top and it drained into a large pail underneath which requires empting many times a day. Our bathes were taken in the dining room because that was where our oil stove was that heated this side of the house.

When it was cold in the winter we warmed blankets to put around our feet on the pipe from the oil stove that went up through our bedroom. In the summer when it was very hot. We were allowed to take old quilts and pillows out on the front porch to sleep. There was a very big yard with lots of flowers. My mother always said, all Ida Webster had to do was throw out a bouquet of flowers and they would take root and grow. We also had a grape arbor that afforded us a shady spot to play and some delicious Concord grapes. The mowing was usually up to my sister Betty who was a teenager by then. She just had the push type reel mower and there was a lot of stuff to mow around. We used to wonder if she didn’t get dizzy doing all that trimming.

It was here that my parents were finally able to purchase a piece of land just up the block where they would build a house of their own. That will be another whole chapter of my childhood homes.