Time for another in the weekend photo series. I’ve been neglecting them recently in the rush to complete Other Things.
This is a hoot, but can anyone explain why it’s happening? I don’t get it at all. Then they all sit down to take a break.
Again, lovely. But in god’s name why is this happening? Those are big-ass chunks of ice requiring heavy equipment to lug out there into the middle of a golf course, so this is no snapshot. Somebody thought this whole thing up and organized it. In other words, someone got the idea; “Hey, I know, let’s get Frank and his truck, then haul a couple of giant blocks of ice out onto the 18th fairway, then let’s get some local teenage girls in swimsuits and street shoes to, you know, wave golf clubs around and such. Oh, then they can sit on the ice, too, that’ll be titillating”
Like they say in New Mexico, cada chango a su columpio, I guess.
I’m guessing they aren’t in the middle of the golf course at all, but at the edge of it, next to the clubhouse.
Blocks like that were completely ordinary in those days. They were cut from clean lakes in winter, packed in sawdust and delivered a couple of times a week to keep iceboxes and cold rooms cold. The ice wagon would load up at the warehouse and do the rounds. My father could remember even in the thirties and forties only having an ice-box. They cut the large blocks up for domestic delivery, but a big cool-room at a restaurant (say at the clubhouse) would take big chunks like that.
I’m guessing that one day the wagon had some extra ice they didn’t want to haul all the way back to the warehouse, and so dumped them at the end of the route. And then much fun was had. Or… maybe more likely, there was going to be a big shin-dig that day out on the lawn, and the ice has just been delivered, and it’s going to b chopped up in a moment to cool down the champagne and punch and such, and the guys with the picks are standing somewhere behind the camera.
The girls were probably sunning themselves by the pool and the guy with the camera saw the big chunks of ice sitting in the sun and, knew the girls were there, and couldn’t resist putting them together.
Either that or it’s frozen alien pee dropped out of a passing flying saucer.
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“They were cut from clean lakes in winter, packed in sawdust and delivered a couple of times a week to keep iceboxes and cold rooms cold.”
Yeah, I knew about that, having seen photos of the process. But those blocks have an odd kind of cavity-looking thing running through their centers, as if they were extruded or otherwise manufactured somehow.
The manufacture of ice had taken off pretty well by the early 20′s. Those blocks look like these, manufactured in Mississippi in the early part of that decade.
Well spotted. Manufactured or cut, I’m betting there’s gonna be a party.
I can remember watching blocks of ice being delivered to our grocer. He also sold meat so had a big ice locker in his back room.
It was pretty primitive compared to today’s refrigeration and yet I can’t ever remember anyone in the family getting stomach bugs. Perhaps because mum thoroughly smelled the meat before she bought it, and then cooked it to a cinder!
I hope they weren’t going use the ice in cocktails at the clubhouse afterwards. It puts a whole new meaning on ‘you never know where it’s been’.
Di, in those days, who knows they coulda charged extra.