I’ve read accounts of people riding in dumbwaiters, and they talk about it in movies(“Eye-gor! How did you get here?” “I heard the music coming up the dumbwaiter, so I followed it down.”) but the ones I’ve seen in pictures always looked way too small for people (I’m not sure if I’ve seen one in Real Life).
I wonder if this trope of “riding the dumbwaiter” is like the one about people crawling through the ventilation shafts – it looks like a convenient route for fictional travel, often used by writers who need to get their characters surreptitiously from one point to another, but the reality is that it’s too damned small.
We are slowly getting to the time when there will be no-one who was ever woken for work by a ‘knocker upper’ - they were pretty common in the North of England in mining towns and mill towns.
I grew up in late 50’s early 60s SoCal. The neighborhood was put up in 1958. We didn’t have milk doors, but we did have milk & eggs delivery until maybe 1965-ish. And a roving knife sharpener.
But the two best things (for a kid) were the Good Humor man and the Helms Bakery truck. I can still feel the excitement has the guy slid open the giantic drawer full of doughnuts & such.
When I was in Junior High (late 70s) we had to take showers (communal) after gym. Then you had to check in - wet and naked - with the PE teacher. You had to tell her if you had your period. Then you would go back to your locker - wet and naked, where your towel was. As someone who was “young for my age” (I was a year younger than my classmates) and then hit puberty late on top of it, this was humiliating. I’m sure it was equally humiliating for anyone who hit puberty early.
We just had an application to join our farmers’ market from someone with a portable sharpening setup; apparently does all sorts of tools including saws and lawnmower blades. Don’t know yet if they’ll get enough customers; but I think it’s quite likely.
I sharpen my own kitchen knives – plenty of tools for that on the market, some of them designed for klutzes – but I might bring in the lawnmower blade.
I often get around to sharpening mine when I realize I’m trying to cut with a dull knife and the next one I grab is also dull . . . so yes, I often do need to sharpen one Right Now. That’s why I have a sharpener in the kitchen, though.
They vary. I’ve seen some that were/are definitely large enough for a person to fit into.
My wife and I are both left-handed and she grew up in a rural part of Ontario and I grew up in various suburban areas. In her upbringing left-handedness was frowned upon (though not actively discouraged) but in my upbringing it was a total non-issue. I also worked for a woman back in the late '90s and she had appalling hand-writing. She explained that when she was a left-handed kid she was forced to become right-handed.
This happened to me, with the same result and I ended up still writing left handed anyway. To make it worse we were only allowed to use fountain ink pens - no biros at all, and lots of our work was just writing down the rubbish that the teachers dictated instesad of proper lessons.
That dictation meant you had to write fast - which means appallingly and almost illegibly - but being left handed means that you smear the ink as you hand slides across the wet ink you just laid down
We still get an ‘old iron’ man who comes down our road in the UK, shouting (via megaphone) what sounds like ‘old rags’ (but really he is mostly interested in metals).
I assume because they had the power to force compliance and enjoyed using it. Purportedly it was to ensure that you had taken a shower, so most girls dashed under the water long enough to get a modicum of water droplets on us and then dashed over to get checked off.
My only guess about the periods was to prevent us from getting out of swimming by saying we had a period every two weeks. If you tried to avoid swimming by reporting a period every time they would soon catch on. When I was in school swimming was mandatory and the only suits you could wear were baggy, saggy cotton knit ones~like a grown-up onesie. I was a late developer also and I would have done everything to avoid having to swim. All of PE was one giant humiliation, which 55 years later still powers my avoidance of exercise.
Speaking earlier of obsolete neighborhood peddlers, I learned awhile ago of door-to-door rabbit slaughterers. Can’t say we had those in 1960s SoCal though.
I grew up in a 4 story brownstone in Brooklyn, with a dumbwaiter. My uncle owned the building and each evening, at a specific time, he would shake the ropes of the dumbwaiter. That was the signal that the dumbwaiter would be sent up to collect everyones garbage. He started on the 4th floor and brought it down. Once when he was sending it up, I opened the door the let the thick rope go through my fingers. That resulted in multiple spinters…ouch.
In an episode of “I Love Lucy” Fred (dressed in his comfortable, thus raggedy, clothes) embarrassed Ethel by calling out “Any old rags” at the top of his lungs periodically as he walked down the street (this was after he took off his hat for a moment to scratch his head, and a passing lady tossed a dime in it).
My guess on checking in is the same as Bippity’s - they wanted to make sure you had showered. The period thing - I have NO idea. The swimming thing is as good as anything I can come up with. Another possibility - they were involved in some study and were doing data collection on onset of menstruation? We did have a pregnancy problem, they may have been trying to find pregnant girls (Yes, in Junior high - 10% of my graduating class were pregnant or already parents by graduation - and two of them started between seventh and ninth grade).
We’ve got a sharpener guy at the local weekly farmer’s market, and I think he makes visits to other local markets too.
This “The Two Ronnies” sketch from 1980 still assumes viewers will know what’s meant by “the local knocker-upper Billy Hardwick” (starting timestamp 2:12).