We thought it would be interesting to again reprise the ambient scene of our childhood experience in 1940″s East New York, Brooklyn; this time, as an homage to the period’s diverse species of hard-working American tradesmen, gone entirely extinct. We would ask the reader, if possible, to imagine the presented images in sepia brown, as an enhanced reminder of the antiquity of the elegiac experience.
To our recollection, the existence of certain specific species of societal extinction heads the list of the plethora of bygone examples as the most prominent. Such examples include the coal deliverymen, the “ice man,” the milk and seltzer delivery men, the horse-drawn vendors of fruit and vegetables, the horse-drawn, knife and scissor sharpeners, and the familiar, loud cowbell clanking of the old clothes (“schmatas” (yid.) merchant. In the ambiance of the eternal street trolleys noisily clanking and sparking and an occasional street whiff of stale horse droppings, Brooklynites went about their mundane business, mundanely accustomed to the nuanced and exotic stimulus of their times.
In our view, the most dramatic were the “coal delivery men.” These hard-working, variously carbon-stained, aproned workers would, as needed, raise the coal shute on their transport to fill the several wood barrels with coal, then roll them on their respective bottom edges over to an opening to the basement of a serviced apartment building and tilt the heavy barrels to spill onto the sliding chute, leading to the building’s basement. Such grueling labor was required to deliver coal for the transmission and maintenance of warmth for the variously tiered apartments of resident tenants.
Such gladiator-like capability was also demonstrated by the heroic”Ice Men” who with large metal tongs would remove from a horse-drawn ice truck, large, heavy, square blocks of ice, place them onto their cheese cloth-protected shoulder, and repeatedly march up the many-tiered staircase levels to deliver blocks of ice to the resident-tenants for insertion ion their “Cold Box” (The latter a non-motorized, insulated pre-cursor of the refrigerator}. The blocks of ice were heavy and undoubtedly became more so with repeated acts of delivery. The mechanical advent of the electrified “refrigerator” empirically spelled the emancipation of the slave-like labor of the ice man.
Also gone extinct were the challenging services of milkman and seltzer delivery man. The milk bottles in such era evinced cream floating at the top of each wire-and-paper sealed bottle. Seltzer bottles, delivered by the “seltzer man,” were somewhat dangerous but ubiquitously desirable among devoutly religious Jewish people who, because of ancient religious dietary prohibitions were limited in their choice of menu.
Cobblestones stonily resounded with the daily sound of moving vehicles and horse-drawn carts. Among these were the fruit and vegetable vendors, often of Italian extraction, and the used clothing wagons, often of Jewish Ashkenazi proprietorship, mutually festooned with softly tingling cowbells, publically advertising their appearance.
Today, by cosmic and digital contrast, basic and extracurricular needs and desires of the individual are effortlessly summoned and predictably fulfilled, merely with the mindless pressure of the tip of a finger on a proffered selection proffered on a laptop or smartphone. There is, by sheer contrast, little energy or effort required, however, the resultant empirical satisfaction from such robotic efficiency appears to leave much-needed, fulfilling, inter-active humanism, to be desired.
-p.
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