Warning: Childhood memories ahead

 

A '39 Chevy, close to my memory.

Author's note: be sure to stay for the ending in which my friend Joe May recalls his family's history in the ice business of the Great Lakes,

    

I love the noon hour on National Public Radio. First you get a quick review of national news, then local news, announcements and some other local stuff. The second half hour is usually filled out with two or three short pieces on various subjects like science, history, literature, or a myriad of other subjects. Garrison Keillor used to read a poem during that half hour.

            Today a historian went into a talk about the development of cold storage from the Pilgrims observing Native Americans cutting blocks of ice from ponds to preserve their food to the 20s and 30s when an ice-block industry sprang up in the United States. In those days the main storage for perishables in the home was an ice box. They were shaped generally like refrigerators today with one difference. Where today the upper section is the freezer portion, that compartment then held a block of ice. You had to go to an ice house every so often to buy a new block, or I believe there were delivery services as well.

     

Some ice houses were huge. This one was in
Denver.

Those trips to the ice house have been etched into my mind. When we did that, I couldn’t have been more than 5 years old but I remember those trips vividly. We had a pre-war Chevrolet four-door, black, with running boards and fenders. We had to drive quite a way or so I recall; distances seem to change with age. How I remember this, I have no idea, but we drove most of the way on the Humboldt Parkway from Kenmore south into Buffalo in New York State.

     The ice house as I recall was a huge square building maybe two stories high but only had one floor.
Inside blocks of ice in piles rose to the ceiling in some parts, other parts were being filled or emptied, I guess depending on how long the ice had been there. Workers using tongs moved the blocks around as needed, for instance, bringing one to our car. Hunting season made the trips more exciting. In addition to all the ice, deer carcasses dangled from the ceiling, apparently draining and being preserved until they could be butchered. I wonder now if there might have been deer blood in that precious ice we bought.

     With the purchase made, the workers strapped the block of ice to the Chevy’s running board and off we went. Now, Humboldt Parkway had an interesting construction. To begin with there was a wide median that held large trees. More fun for me was where the side streets entered, they had crowns in the center and those extended out into the parkway at intersections. They made for serious bumps which were wonderful things to a 4-year-old boy who almost flew out of his seat when the car lurched over them. Of course, my father hated those bumps. I suspect he may have lost a block of ice to one at some time or other.

Raggedy Andy

    Another recollection from that time was something I lost on one of those trips. I can admit this now: at 78 I have no one I need to impress with my manhood anymore. I had a doll. It was a Raggedy Andy. I suppose there was a Raggedy Ann around too, but I only wanted Andy. He went everywhere with me until one day after we arrived home from the ice house, Andy had disappeared. We searched everywhere; my father even drove a little way back. But we never saw Andy again. I don’t recall how I suffered the loss or how long that lasted, but in time I forgot about it. At that age new things come along almost daily. There was one aspect of that time that lingered a whole lot longer than the memory of the missing Andy. I don’t think my parents stopped calling refrigerators “the ice box” until well into the 1950s.

Joe May's family has a history in the ice business

     Icehouse: Mid 1800's my great grandfather immigrated from Sweden/Norway to Chicago. He found work with a company that sent him north to western Wisconsin near Green Bay. He homesteaded a wooded peninsula on the water and set up a sawmill, a great log icehouse, a deep-water dock to accommodate the company sailing ships that plied Lake Michigan and supplied Chicago with timber, horse hay, etc.

Gram, she was gone
before I was born.

     In summer they sawed lumber for export to Chicago and in winter sawed (by hand) big blocks of ice from the bay, skidded it up to the icehouse, and layered it in sawdust saved from the summer sawing. In spring, after ice-out, the ships would come in, load the hold with ice and more sawdust, and the deck with a cargo of lumber. A half dozen live-in hired men made it a beehive of industry with a bunkhouse with an enormous dining room table (old growth oak).

   
 He married a local belle, built her a magnificent three story house of old growth hardwoods and painted it snow white. It stands yet on "Gustafson's Point" near Green Bay. Grampa Gustafson died the year after I was born but I clearly remember a childhood playing in the old icehouse, on the rickety dock, and in the dilapidated warehouse with my red-headed cousins.

Treasured memories here...thanks, Tim.

— Joe May