All The Amenities, 1930

     I remember the old privy that was just north of our house but I don’t remember a single chamber pot.  That’s not surprising I guess because, by the time my memory kicks in, the outhouse was only used in the event of a very long power outage when the emergency was considered ‘dire.’  I think that once electricity came in, the chamber pots went out.  My grandmother thought nothing dire enough from then on that could possibly warrant their use.
     Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s rural electrification project didn’t get to Oysterville until the spring of 1936.  Before that, Bert Andrews furnished some power through a Delco system he rigged up in his barn.  The power was enough to supply a single light bulb or two to most houses in town, but it was “lights out” each night at 10 o’clock when Bert and his wife, Minnie, went to bed.
     So, it wasn’t until the second half of the thirties that Oysterville’s citizens had enough power to run water pumps and that was when most households added their first indoor bathrooms.  Often they were located near the kitchen – might as well put all the pipes in the same general area.
     I think our outhouse was a “two-holer” and I vaguely remember a partition or privacy wall in between.  I’ve heard that when my mother and her siblings were small, my grandmother would take a book out there and read – the one place she was fairly certain of remaining undisturbed.
      Even in his old-age after indoor plumbing had been around for twenty years, my grandfather always put on his hat before he went into the bathroom.  My mother once asked him why.  “Well, girlie,” he said, “I can still feel that wind whistling round my neck!”