I'm younger than Smitty (by a couple of years) but I remember living in a few places with an outhouse, no electricity, kerosene lamps (did lots of homework under one of those), riding in a horse drawn wagon to town (I was about 6 when we got our first car -- a Model A Ford, coupe without the rumble seat... a family of 5 riding on one seat... I generally rode laying across the back seat behind mom and dad... when we moved to west Texas I rode 500 miles laying there.), my dad plowing 60 acres of farmland behind a pair of green broke mules, training them to pull the plow and cultivators, also remember when the electric companies first installed electricity down the primary roads... (we lived back aways and didn't get electricity right away.), drawing water from a hand dug well, taking baths in a wash tub, some times on the front porch as it was as far as we could get it to the house, heating the water in the sun (our well was at the neighbor's house and we had to haul water a quarter mile to the house, chopping wood for the fireplace... our primary source of heat in the winter time(my job was to keep the wood box full.. dad did most of the chopping), also my mom cooking on wood burning stove, 'til we got modern and got a kerosene cook stove.
I ain't old, but have been around for a long time.
I was born at home in a house in the Poconos of PA with no electric, no indoor pluming, and no central heat. We did not have a telephone until I was almost 9 years old. We used a coal/wood cook stove until I was about 12 and my mother kept it in a barn for canning for 10 years after that. Although when we lived where there was no indoor plumbing the hand dug well was in the back yard. Coal was cheap so in the winter we used coal in the stove but I carried in wood in the spring, summer and fall when the stove was only used when actually cooking.
Not trying to one up you Smitty, but was born at home also, our house was a rent house that was covered with tar paper, no siding... the night I came, my dad rode to town on a horse to get the doctor... I almost beat him back to the house. The house was across the road from one of the local cemeteries and chapels... for years when people asked where I was born, would tell them Wilson's Chapel... wasn't 'til I went into the navy and had to get a birth certificate I learned I was listed as having been born in Jewett, TX...also found out I had been using the wrong name all those years... the doctor wrote Charles on the birth record instead of Charley,the name Dad wanted me to have-named after his favorite uncle....
When we moved to west Texas, the house we rented had a dug well in the back yard, about 20 yards from the house... it actually had a windmill over it to pump water into a raised holding tank, but no water into the house?? Dad plumbed the tank and put a screen around it, then a wood floor under it so we could shower under it... but only got cold water. The girls and Mom wouldn't use it, just Dad and me ever showered out there - and not in the winter.
And my last year of high school, I had an apartment in friend of my mother's house... her phone number was 98.... only two digits.
