What Service Economy?

I was long grown up before the arrival of today’s Service Economy, a term which is like calling crop harvesting a country vacation.

When I was a child, we had pleasant-voiced women employed to help people talk long distance person to person on the telephone.  Ushers used small flash lights to help movie goers find seats.  Gasoline station attendants cleaned windshields and checked the oil and tires.  A golf course might have a hundred caddies or more to carry golfers’ clubs.  Store clerks got the canned goods and cereals you wanted down from the shelves themselves and if you couldn’t make it to the grocery, bread wagons and milk trucks and fruit and vegetable wagons several times a week came down the street clanging bells announcing their arrival. Family-owned stores delivered groceries and medicines to the door without charging extra for the service.

 There were a few farmers still using horses to plow small lots.  A horse also pulled the Sterling Bread wagon  which came past the house. Twice a week in the late spring and summer the ice truck went by, dripping water from its tail gate. People along the street would show they wanted to buy ice and the pound size block needed by putting a card in a front window with black  numbers written large: 25, 50, 75, 100.

Seeing a sign, the driver, a man with the build of a Sumo wrestler and wearing a soaked blue shirt and dark pants, would stop the truck, waddle to its rear and pull down the tail gate.  The ice was stacked tightly in 100-pound blocks scored into four parts, each quarter representing 25 pounds -- at least that was what the blocks weighted when the truck left the plant, before as much as  10 percent of their mass had dissolved and dripped onto the hot pavements over which the truck had passed and was now rapidly turning into water vapor. 

The driver would reach into the back of the truck with his large, curved tongs and pull one of the 100 pound blocks toward him.  For any size less than 100 pounds, he used an ice pick to break off the proper size, pounding the pick into the blue-white ice, sending pieces of icy shrapnel flying around him.

That job completed, he picked up the block of ice with a pair of large curved tongs and slung it onto his shoulder, resting it on a wide leather pad he wore to keep the ice’s cold from piercing his skin. Then sweating and breathing heavily he would carry the block into the house.

As soon as he was gone from sight, kids from the neighborhood, myself among them, would rush the truck, climbing onto the tail gate, reaching our hands into the damp truck in violation of the sign posted on its side, in violation of our parents’ repeated warnings, scooping up the pieces of ice, then running and sucking and biting the hard, clear chunks dripping water and tasting faintly of wet wood.