OH YES I STILL REMEMBER OUTDOOR PLUMBING – THE EARLY YEARS 1950’s.

Once again, my mind drifts off to the early years of my life and too things that left an indelible image in my mind. Unlike most of the days gone past, memories of which have been scrubbed from my mind as clean as an erased blackboard, some small and insignificant flashes of my early life remain. It is these I cling to while rambling thru these posts.

I vaguely remember our early years in Red Deer after leaving the prairie hamlet of Rosalind in the early 50’s. Shortly after my Dad’s business had burned, to a crisp, in the Great Inferno. In the first couple of years in our new home, we suffered the experience of no indoor plumbing. It was to arrive by the late 1950’s in our part of town. I know all of you younger than 30 or so, are shrinking back in horror and disbelief wondering, “where did you go for relief”? Having been told, they might say “NEVER”, but I say “give them about one week and they would joyously embrace their outhouse and the Simpson Sears catalog found inside”.

Our place of relief was called the Outdoor Toilet. It was an imposing building, to a young child and harboured many of my personal fears or dislikes. Every household had one of these structures, made of unpainted wood that stood about 7 feet tall and was about 5′ long on each side. It had a door and a latch, so someone had to be inside to lock it. Inside this menacing looking structure was a bench seat with “one” hole about the size of a butt, cut into the seat (unless you had the deluxe version which had two holes, a spot for males and one for females). Whatever the type was, it was perched over an eight foot deep hole dug into the ground. Once that hole was filled, another could be dug and the outhouse moved.

These outhouses, were perched at the back of each lot and ran all the way down each side of the alleyway. Everyone had to have one, and these were the great equalizers of society. No matter how rich, smart, beautiful, snobby or high society you were, at some point you were going to have to visit the outdoor crapper in the same manner as the most common and humble of the rest of us peasants. There were no decorations or vanity mirrors inside, only the bench, the hole, a paper role and (someone’s) Dad’s old newspaper.

This, seemingly, humble structure had a part in shaping many of my early habits. For, instance I remember being terribly afraid of what lurked in the dark, so unless I was in danger of unleashing the worst flood or a major crap storm, I never went outside for relief after dark, and you sure didn’t want to be accompanied by my brother, who would stand outside, slinging insults at me. Also, because there was no heating inside, I don’t ever remember going during the winter days. I heard rumours, probably from classmates, of little kids, their butts frozen to the seat and unable to free themselves, discovered only upon being missed, a couple of hours later. I’m not sure how, but I have no memory of a visit to the crapper in the cold. I guess I just waited for school in the morning, which might account for half of the days in my youth.

One vivid memory is of a Halloween when I was 9 or 10 and my dad came up with a nefarious plan to catch the “little buggars” that spent their Halloweens going up and down the alleys, pushing over outhouses as a ‘trick”. They would push them onto their sides and then move on. My Dad hated righting the toilet in the dark late at night and could usually be heard cussing in the back, on discovery of his outhouse laying on it’s side. So he came up with a plan.

The way he described it was that because it was so dark out there, he would merely push or slide his outhouse about two feet forward onto our property from the alley. This would leave a gaping hole of about two feet between the alley and the back of the toilet building. What was down this two feet opening was a thing of nightmares and didn’t smell real good. His theory was that in the pitch dark, when they snuck up to the outhouse to do their evil deed, they would not see the yawning chasm behind the outhouse and would then fall into the hole and be irrevocably caught. Mom was telling him, “Slim I don’t think that’s a good idea”! Mom could be the master of understatement. In any event another halloween passed, and thank god my dad didn’t catch a “little buggar” in his crap trap.

That memory stuck with me, and whenever I approached that outhouse from the alleyway, I gave it a wide berth and walked past it on tiptoes. Just in case dad had moved it away from the hole again for one reason or another. I would have rather been hit by a bus, than fall into that open cesspool.

One last little outhouse story I am reminded of, is of a cabin, by a lake north of Edmonton, owned by Uncle Cleeef and Lalita. This had to do with our weekend visits, there, in the early days. The girls (Deysi and Lalita) refused to use it. They would “hold it” all weekend and get meaner and meaner as time went on. Sunday afternoon when we would leave the cabin, we had to make a mad dash for the nearest town, about 10 miles away. We would fly into the parking lot of the local service station, come to a full screeching, sliding ,4 wheel stop at the store or gas station. The doors would fly open and the two of them would pile out and scramble for the restroom. Lord, if it was ever occupied, we would have been at risk of a major flooding. Once they had visited the public facility they were a lot nicer for the remainder of the trip. Talk about just in time delivery!