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Originally Posted by senior citizen
Everybody back in the 1950's only had one bathroom...........unless they added one in the basement, which many did. That's how homes were built. Aren't we all so spoiled now with three bathrooms, etc.???????
We had two bathrooms because my folks converted a two family home into a one family....using the upstairs apartment for extra bedrooms, thus freeing up the first floor for other big rooms. One bathroom up and one bathroom down.
The front foyer had an open staircase to the upstairs bedrooms and that second bathroom.
Downstairs, off to the left were the living room, dining room, huge kitchen, two side rooms and the downstairs bathroom......plus a screened in back porch......one up and one down....(the two side rooms would normally have been the two bedrooms, had not my mom decided to evict the tenant and turn the upstairs into a one family home for us).
We did have two bathtubs and two showers (as my older brother was big into the 1950's craze of home improvements....getting magazines like Popular Mechanics and some others whose names escape me....but he and my dad would remodel the kitchen, the bathrooms, etc.....like a hobby.)
Back in the older days, most people only took one bath a week....on Saturday night. The working men would come home nightly and wash up in the kitchen sink with their shirt sleeves rolled up. That did it till the Saturday night bath.......(when we had foreign exchange students from Spain, none of them liked to take baths....this was in the 1980's......they just went into the bathrooms to smoke as it was not allowed in the houses and they knew it.....then they'd spray the room with perfume. They also thought Americans were crazy because all of us "read in the bathrooms" and had "magazines and books" in the bathrooms.) Off topic I know. But funny nonetheless when I think back. Those boys and gals are now lawyers in Spain with families of their own.
My husband's childhood home, bought after the great depression for$3,000 (my folks bought our two family for $8,000) had the one bathroom up.......but then his dad added one in the basement.........ditto for his grandfather at his house.......always had one in the basement.
My mom, on the other hand, recalls when she was a child....having an outhouse. Yikes. She had some stories.
Hard to believe there were no Italian families in Cincinnati.
I have a HUGE group of cousins, in my family tree, whose parents came from Laurenzana Basilicata Italy to Cleveland Ohio. These cousins are all deceased now. They settled all over Ohio.
I do remember all that ironing.......
My mom would iron all day long on her day off from work.
She would "sprinkle" the starched clothes.......then iron.
She even ironed SHEETS, PILLOW CASES and towels........
She would set up her ironing board in the living room and watch MILLION DOLLAR MOVIE......which had a lot of old movies as I recall......but it still was a lot of ironing.
She had lots of stories about ironing as well. When younger, she was at her mom's place and IRONING when the radio show now referred to as WAR OF THE WORLDS came on......and they actually lived near Ferry Street where these martians were supposed to be landing.........I could write a book.
She was also ironing when she heard that Pearl Harbor had been attacked.
In 1965 , newly wed, with a day job....on Saturdays I would iron an entire basket of my husband's white shirts. I ironed for a long long time, even after we had kids. NO MORE. Nothing needs ironing anymore, thankfully.
For the military guys and gals out there........this should be your chuckle for the day. Back in the '60s when my husband was still going to Fort Knox as a drill sergeant.......he got some promotion so I had to sew his new patch on his army uniform. I guess he figured I knew what to do.
He didn't advise or show me how it should be. I sewed it on upside down. Never asked me again. From then on, he began sewing his own patches and buttons on.....
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There were Italian families in Columbus, But not as many as the predominantly German population. We didn't know any of them well enough to be invited for home cooked food and I knew some Italian girls from public school. In the generation prior to mine, I am told that people didn't intermarry. Meaning Italians and Germans, and Germans and Irish, but that wasn't so anymore when I was growing up. I don't remember any Irish parishes, but we had one Italian Parish in Columbus when I was a kid. No French speaking people at all that I can remember. You knew this because everyone always went around to the church festivals.
Cleveland had a lot of people from Southern Europe and Slovakia, Bulgaria and so on.. Just as Wisconsin and Minnesota had a lot of people from Northern Europe. There were a lot of German Lutheran churches in Columbus too. I was raised German Lutheran and became a Catholic as a young adult.
Our worlds were very different back then than from now. It is very interesting to live in The Villages where people really didn't have the same exact life experiences as children