LeTretta Jones, May 10, 2016
When I was a young child in the 1950s, many American cities were characterized by traveling salespeople and merchants who sold their wares along the streets. These vendors sold a variety of items from insurance, cleaning supplies, beauty supplies, milk and eggs, and produce.
I remember the insurance man who sold burial insurance from door-to-door and came monthly to collect the insurance payments. A milkman sold and delivered milk. When we placed emptied glass containers on the steps for him to pick up, he would leave refills. On top of the milk was a scoop of cream that we scooped out when we opened the glass container.
Do you remember the iceman? He made daily rounds delivering ice for iceboxes before the electric domestic refrigerator became commonplace. The tools of the iceman were hooks, tongs, and ice picks. Most of them wore leather vests and slung a wet piece of sackcloth over the shoulder. Once they had slid the ice into the ice box, they stood dripping while waiting for their money.
Another common entrepreneur of those days was the fish man. He brought freshly caught fish in the back of his pickup truck every Friday. The fish was packed in ice inside round wooden baskets. A hanging scale on the back of the truck was used to weigh the purchases. All the moms gathered around and bought fish on Fridays, which seemed to be the fish night for everyone.
We children had our favorite vendors as well. There was the ice cream man who rode around on the ice cream tricycle jingling chime bells to attract children. When children heard the ice cream bells, they surrounded the ice cream tricycle to buy frozen popsicles and ice cream sandwiches. There was also the water ice man. He pushed a cart with a large block of ice on it, covered with a burlap bag to keep it from melting too fast. The water ice man would scrape shavings of ice with an ice scraper scoop, then put the crushed ice into a cone shaped paper cup and pour flavored syrup over the ice. My favorite flavors were cherry and grape.
The call of the produce vendor riding a horse-drawn wagon was another sound I often heard as a child. “Watermelon! Watermelon! “Get’em red and ripe to the rind.” Strawberries! Cherries! “Fresh and fine, get’em for a dime, good at any time.” These special chants came out like a song weaving the various items for sale as a personal call to the public. The chants sounded like a mix of yodeling, calypso and the blues.
The horse drawn wagons were colorfully painted, and the horses wore special harnesses with gold trim, red tassels, and plumes designed to catch the eyes. I remember how I loved to see the colorful horse-drawn buggies and hear the horses distinct clapping of hooves on the black top. The rhythmic jingle of the bells and the slow gallop of the horse had a sound all its own.
Scenes of traveling salespeople and merchants selling their wares once was a common sight, but today, for the most part, they have all vanished. Roving peddlers of past times with their satchels, pushcarts, delivery and pickup trucks and the horse pulled wagons meandering through the streets no longer fit into the urban landscape.