Who was the last member of your family without running water?

[AlienGirl]

In an international chat with a couple other DUers tonight, we started talking about ways of measuring economic/social hardship, and we came up with the idea of what generation of your family was the last one to live without running water.

For me, it was myself as a kid, and only for a few months. We were rural poor, and my dad and grandparents and uncles were working on building the house that my family would live in for the rest of my childhood. The house took several months to build, and until it was finished my Mom (who was pregnant with my sister) and Dad and I lived in a trailer owned by our extended family. The trailer had no electricity, running water, or indoor plumbing. We washed in the river, used an outhouse, and hauled drinking water from town every week. We ate a lot of fish that we caught ourselves or various family members had caught. For entertainment we read or listened to a battery-powered radio. Our lights were candles and a Coleman lamp.

How about you? Who was the last in your family to be without running water?

Tucker

[Beam Me Up]

1. My parents.

Both my parents grew up poor without running water. This was rural southern Indiana up to 1948 when I was born. I was my mother's last child and she insisted that she would not have another baby WITHOUT running water. The house my family lived in was built in the 1860s, just after the civil war. My father installed the electrical wiring. A pump was set up in the cellar to pump water from the well into the house. Prior to this the entire family used an outhouse. Even as a child, butchering, gardening and canning of food was still an important part of the family diet (as opposed to store-bought meat and vegetables).

So, it was there when I was born and I've never lived without it except when camping or during a natural emergency for a short period of time.

[oscar111]

8. parents

on farms.

as a kid, i vsited grandparents and pulled a bucket up from a well by hand. Flies were around, and the drinking bucket was kept covered.

[ThoughtCriminal]

2. Spouse

On a remote farm for a few years before we met.

[Richard Steele]

3. MYSELF, although it is a distant memory now...

Some of my EARLIEST childhood memories
are of the first home my parents rented in rural PA...

I recall walking 50 yards to use the outhouse...

And I recall my dad and my uncles installing the bathtub and toilet in our home.

I was unhappy about the change, because that tiny backroom had been my playroom...the "flush toilet" went where my toybox had been.

This was 1972 or so...and I was 4 years old.

[shraby]

4. Me, we had an indoor hand pump.

No indoor bathroom until I was about 13. No television until I was 14 when we got one...only radio. Listened to the B-Bar-B and The Shadow Knows.

[SeattleGirl]

10. Me too

Except I was 5. Lived in Arkansas, had an outhouse, went indoors in a bucket during the night. Damned near killed myself one night by taking in too much of the junk they put in the indoor pots. Bathed in an aluminum tub in the yard in the summer, indoors in the winter. Had a handpump in the kitchen (modern by the standards of the time). Mom had a hand wringer washing machine. Learned to draw water from a well, churn butter and ice cream, milk the cows, fish, cook squirrel and possum. Sounds primitive, but I know that if I were in a situation where all power was cut off, I'd know how to survive! Sometimes, living the "poor life" can have its benefits!
B-)

[melody]

11. my Nana told me those stories

She was born and raised in Greenwood, Arkansas and she might have written your paragraph word for word. Just shows you how little things changed over a great number of years among rural folk.

My mother was born at their house without indoor plumbing and lived there into early childhood, so I guess that makes me somewhere on the fence between grandparents and parents.

[wli]

5. homelessness right in the city

I was "working poor" for a short time. I basically hooked up with friends, got a 70 hrs/wk temp job, and am now pulling 80K USD/yr.

I don't expect such good fortune to happen to everyone, nor for my own job to last long.

[preciousdove]

6. I keep being surprised

The last of my Dad's sister's families to get running water in the house on their farm had to be about 1960, however I visited my grandmother's 90 year old cousin who had gotten cancer and after treatment was not allowed to return to her rural home in 1991 that she shared with a son. It had no running water, no electricity and used wood to heat.

She was in a small Danish town nursing home. It was not a bad place. The staff was pleasant and helpful. It was clean and cheerfully decorated Lots of family and volunteers around all the time but she still just wanted to go home.

If you are healthy, living like that is work but doable, no worse than tent camping.

I heard three middle school girls, probably 12 or 13 on the city bus talking about another girl they knew. Two of them knew her and the other one must not have. They said that there were no combs, brushes, tooth brushes or soap at the absent girls house so the first girl had gotten her some after she had helped her somehow cause she didn't think the absent girl wanted charity and the second girl had got her mother to let the girl wash her clothes at their house. They told the third girl that absent girl was all right but her parents had problems.

[oscar111]

9. Danes meet and discuss politics weekly

was what i read twenty yrs ago.

still true?

BTW, just saw that as of '91, danes had the most politics on tv of any surveyed nation... abut forty percent of all tv programs. True?

Scandia seems to be the best place on earth.

[preciousdove]

14. Whoops, meant to say descendants of Danes

http://www.tylermn.com/

Haven't been to Denmark and haven't talked to any Danes in person recently.

They don't teach civics in the schools anymore at all do they? My adult kids and spouses roll their eyes whenever I mention anything political. But then their lives are working for them right now.

[oscar111]

7. Squad turns off city water daily

it still happens in every town in the US, as far as i know.

If you cant pay the water bill, the shutoff squad comes and turns it all off.

A pen pal said his tv news had a story on one such case.

This is part of what REAL media would report daily, .. other REAL stories are

the medical bill collector at folks doors

the sherrif's eviction squad

the electric turnoff squad

the 48=hour awake med intern at the ER, making boo boos that cost lives

homeless folks' life stories, showing why they are homeless

the triage nurse at the poor's hospital, telling folks their illness is not serious enough to get treatment... tho it would be at a ritzy hospital

[Blue_In_AK]

12. I lived in a house with no running water

until I was seven in rural southern Ohio. I have some really great old family movies of my mother giving my brothers baths in big old wooden tubs in the front yard. My aunts, uncles and grandparents all lived nearby and nobody had running water except for my Aunt Ludene who was a hairdresser in her home, and my grandparents on my dad's side. We didn't think anything about it ... it's just the way things were. We had a pump in the back yard and one in the kitchen sink. We DID have a TV early on, though, about 1950 or '51. My dad was big into gadgets.

[NoPasaran]

13. I believe it would be my grandparents

Back in the Old Country (Austria-Hungary).