
VIEW STOP 8A SCRIPT
Hi. This is Ella again. That’s me standing in the back door next to sister Eula who happened to be visiting that day.. That’s Ma and Pa sitting. They were getting on in years, but with the kind of healthy living we have hee-aa, they lived to celebrate their 65th wedding anniversary and Pa celebrated his 101st birthday back in 1939.
Do you see that little window over Ma and Pa’s head? It is still there today. That was our back pantry.
We didn’t waste energy inside the house either. Instead of an electric refrigerator, we had this ice box. In the winter, the menfolk cut ice on our pond and stored it in a below-ground ice house behind the barn. Covered it with straw to keep it from thawing. Lasted most of the summer there. Every day or two we went out and brought in another hunk of ice. Kept our milk and things nice and cool.
You know, I lived in this old Homestead most of my life – 95 years, in fact, before I had to move out because my kitchen faucet froze. Well, after I finally moved out in 1979, my niece came in to check on things. She thought the modern electric refrigerator in the back pantry wasn’t working. But you know what – it was winter, so I had just unplugged it. It was cold enough in that pantry as it was without wasting any electricity. We Hallocks, that’s the way we were, we never wasted anything.