There’s an old saying: you never miss the water until the well runs dry. Earthquake, floods, and other natural disasters have thrown millions of homes without power all over the country. Many young people have never faced a prolonged loss of electricity, and may wonder what they would do without ice if the outage became widespread. Actually, ice was available without electricity in the early 20th century, but it was hard to come by. This is what happened when the iceman came, circa 1940:
Although my parents had an electric refrigerator, most of our neighbors in the middle class neighborhood where I grew up had an ice box. Ditto my country cousins. The iceman’s truck was a welcome sight on a hot summer morning for kids playing outside. He moved slowly between deliveries, giving we children a chance to hop on the back of his truck and find slivers of ice to suck on. It tasted wonderful to the tongue: smooth, cold, refreshing. Sometimes, we “rode” the truck; other times we waited until he was parked for a delivery.
The ice didn’t do a very good job of keeping things cool; a 50 pound block only lasted 2 or 3 days during the long hot summers without air conditioning. The neighbors’ ice boxes looked pretty much like our refrigerator from the outside. The top section was for the ice, the lower for the food. At the bottom was a drip pan which needed to be emptied often, as the ice melted.
Where did the ice come from? My Nebraska-raised husband can tell you, because he helped his grandfather with the ice harvest. In the dead of winter, they would drive down to the Blue River, cut huge blocks of ice, bring them back on a horse drawn wagon to a wooden ice house insulated with hay, and cover the ice with sawdust. Miraculously, the ice–clear and cool–was still intact months later. Grandpa Sinn didn’t deliver the ice back in those days, but farmers could buy a chunk by stopping by his filling station. It was a good business, then
http://www.drinkingcup.net/1850-ice-harvesting-storage-techniques-and-tools/
What would happen if we experienced long periods without electricity, due to terrorism or natural disasters? Many people throughout this planet could probably tell you. And I have to think we might go back to harvesting ice.