Garbage and vege's in SF

I'm so old---- I remember the garbage men in SF came around with a large canvas tarp.  They placed the tarp on the ground and went to each home close by and brought the silver metal garabage can out to the tarp and emptied it onto the tarp.  Once the garbageman had enough garbage on the tarp they grabbed the four corners and flung the "bag" over their shoulder and took it to the garbage truck to empty.  Then they'd do it over again.  AND...back then garbage stunk!!    People ate a lot of fresh vegetables and nobody in Hunter's Point had a garbage disposal.  Never-the-less, we loved to go outside and watch the garbagemen work. 

By the way, we ate fresh vegetables and fruit brought to our home on a cart pulled by a horse!!!!

Laundry in the 50's

I have no idea how to get started on this again...so I decided to just tell you how old I am.  The thought that keeps running through my mind has been - I'm so old I remember my mom's washing machine in Novato.  It was a ringer washer.  The tub just agitated--- back & forth, back & forth.  You had to add the soad and water.  Then it just went back & forth for as long as you felt was appropiate.  Once you thought the clothes were clean, you drained the tub, then ran each piece of laundry through the ringer.  Thank goodness ours was electric!!   They had hand crank type back then.  I was always very careful not to get my fingers caught in the ringer--I heard of other's that had.  the ringer just wouldn't let go...and back then they didn't have safety features that automatically shut the thing off.  You had to shut it off and get your smashed fingers out.  Anyway, once you ran the laundry through the ringer you placed it into a laundry basket, filled the tub with clean water and put all the laundry back into the tub... so the tub could go back & forth, back & forth to rinse the laundry.  THEN...you got to drain the tub again, and run all the laundry through the ringer again.  This time though-- you got to take the rung-out laundry out to the back yard and hand it on the clothes line.  For some unknown reason you never had enough clothes pins, so you had to learn to be creative about pinning clothes on the line.  You learned to put the edge of one piece of laundry next to another piece so you only had to use one clothes pin for two sides of laundry.  But...that wouldn't work with jeans--they were too heavy and needed their own clothes pin.  Once the clothes were dry you had to go out and take them all off the clothesline and fold the dry, STIFF clothes.  Jeans could stand on their own after drying on the line, shirts and underwear were so stiff and crunchy feeling.  We never had fabric softener...I don't know if it was invented yet or not--but we sure didn't have any. 
AND--- once you took those blouses, shirts and dresses into the house---you had to iron them!!!  I learned to iron quite young.  Nobody would have been caught wearing wrinkled clothes.  We either sprinkled the clothes with wather and then rolled them up (to hold the moisture) then took them one at a time and ironed them.  Or we took a soda bottle with a cork and metal sprinkler top and sprinkled each piece as we went.  And irons back then were heavy!!
The good thing was-- we only owned a few dresses and a couple pairs of pants.  We wore them more than one day before washing them (you can see why!!!)   Back then ALL girls had to wear dresses to school--- girls/women only wore pants around the house or hiking. 
I remember going on a date in the late 60's and being turned away from a restaurant on the pier because I was wearing a nice pants suit.  Dresses only for women!!!   boy have times changed.  Now girls wear anything, anywhere!!!
Clothing standards were so strick I remember a few girls at my high school coming to school with "granny dresses" on.  Those were dresses that came to your calves. The girls got sent home.  Dresses had to be at your knees---not above or below!!!   And, yes, this was a public school!!