Great Snow Car. Public Works' Letter: Fill & Download for Free

My mother grew up during the Great Depression in Readville, MA. Readville was a freight yard hub and a place where there were massive railroad repair shops. My grandmother moved there in 1917 because the Boston and Maine had planted wild roses along all the berms to hold the soil in place and when she saw the flowers in bloom, she decided this is where she would bring up her family. Her house was built by a man named Kissel and was the first house in the nieghborhood with indoor plumbing in 1917. She has a husband who was a hard core drunk and deadbeat and six children plus one dog.My mother was born in 1926 and so by 1938 she was 12 years old. Based on what she told me before she died, and her two sisters, I wrote this answer about the Great Depression and what it was like.During the Depression on the outskirts of Boston, even within the city limits, you could wake up as a child in the predawn, look out your bedroom window and see dozens of gray-clad men shuffling to their factory jobs at the railroad car shops as they walked down the street in droves carrying their lunch pails, Chesterfield cigarettes glowing, talking to each other in low voices. You would watch them filing past from the window of your tract house, some of them on the sidewalk, some even in the roughly paved street because there were few vehicles and those that did pass were beat up and ancient. Your house, like your neighbors, desperately needed to be painted but neither you nor they could afford the paint. As a result, the entire row of houses looked decrepit and run down with peeling paint flaking off onto the ground.At 7 AM you heard the factory whistle blow at the car shops where the sounds of cranes mixed with the sound of drop forges and steam whistles and rivet guns and the sight of black smoke pouring from the tall stacks. From the back of the house you could hear the steam locomotive barreling down the tracks in the distance and you knew exactly what train it was by the distinctive whistle, and even gave names to the Engineer because each one had his own signature way of blowing that whistle.Later, you and your brothers and sisters would walk the tracks with a bucket picking up large pieces of unburned coal that fell from the tenders or from the shovels of the sweating firemen as they built up steam to race to the freight yards of Providence. You would meet many of your friends doing the same thing as everyone needed coal for their stoves and boilers and many people were out of work and could not afford to buy it.You would dash off a letter to the girl you liked from school and put a 1 cent stamp with a picture of George Washington on it. The 2 cent stamp for heavier mail had Jefferson on it but you couldn't afford to blow 2 cents on a stamp. You put your letter in the mailbox. The mailman would come by and deliver the morning mail before 10 AM. Later on that day he would come again and give you a reply to your morning letter. In some neighborhoods he would come back a third time in the evening.Summer time and the living was easy. When you woke up on Monday, the milk man was downstairs in the kitchen bantering with your mother as he dropped off the cream-top. If you were fast, you could go down and pet his horse as it waited patiently for him to climb back up in the buckboard. The horse was tethered to the cast iron fire hydrant in front of your house. The connectors of the hydrant were painted yellow to alert the fire department that this hydrant used a non-standard connector. Many a house burned down in those days because the fire engine came with the wrong size hose until the city finally standardized on one size of hydrant. In downtown Boston all the old horse drawn fire engines had been retired and replaced by Macks but here in the outskirts of Boston there were still teams of horses and steam pumps scattered around and housed in civilian barns, rented by the city as a hedge against another Great Boston Fire. The last one would finally be retired in 1938.On hot days the milk man might give you a handful of the ice chips that he used to keep the milk and butter cool on his early morning trek from the massive Canton dairy farms to the neighborhoods of Boston. Behind him came Billy the Egg Man's horse-drawn wagon making the same rounds. Sometimes a woman in a housedress and curlers would run from a house, screen door slamming, asking to purchase a single egg, or if she had another penny, two eggs for her husband's breakfast. The horses would clip clop along at no hurry, leaving piles of manure along the street which you and the neighbor kids would scurry to collect in a little wagon for the gardens out back that provided your vegetables.As the day went on you would sneak into the car shop rail yard across the street from your house. The massive gray building was covered with soot, the ancient rail yard overgrown with weeds as well as dandelions, sassafras trees and wild rasberries and blueberries, all of which you stopped to pick and eat... a free meal could never be passed up. The yard was first built during the Civil War and later housed the side tipping railroad hoppers George Munson used to fill in Back Bay. Now it was at the height of its existence. It was here that the railroads brought their damaged and worn out Pullman cars, flat cars and hoppers to be restored or to rot. It was here that ancient, wooden-sided freight cars and cabooses came to be retired and either resold or dismantled. Some of the decaying cars had dates on them from before the Great War, their heavy lead-based paint flaking off, covered in rust and smelling of old grease. Some of the rotting Pullman cars with their foggy glass windows and torn green shades were also made of wood, meaning they dated back to before 1912. They had open vestibules and cast iron filigree and displayed an old world elegance despite the weeds that grew up all around them and the hornet’s nests in their eaves. Despite the locks on the car doors and the rail yard guard, the abandoned Pullmans were the temporary homes of hobos and displaced workers who slept in the sleeper bunks behind moldy curtains and passed bottles of cheap booze back and forth. There were also massive red painted flangers, used to plow snow from the tracks, stored here until the winter when they were needed, and worn out steam locomotives with no bells and coated in red rust, the black paint long gone. You would collect long rusty nails from the ground and bring them home to sell on the sidewalk for a penny a pound to the many carpenters and tradesmen who plied the streets seeking work. (I saw all this up until the 1960s when the shops were finally closed)When you walked home from the noisy, busy and somewhat dangerous railyard you would stop to watch a crew of workmen building a granite wall along the side of the road. The WPA in Boston hired thousands of unemployed men who worked diligently every day to build walls and public buildings, all for about 7 dollars a week. The best thing about watching the workmen was the presence of a gigantic Keck steam traction engine, as big as a bus, with two huge water filled rollers taller than an adult man that would crush down gravel and flatten the weak asphalt that was all the city of Boston could afford this far from downtown. The operators were filthy sweating men who shoveled coal into the firebox as flames leapt into the cab, columns of black smoke billowed from the stack while white steam and spraying water seemed to blast from every joint.Around lunchtime you could see and smell the honey wagon, a galvanized tin truck with bug eyed headlights and a motorized trough in the back. The garbage man would pay your mother a penny for your garbage that you kept in a bucket that sat in a hole in your back yard, surrounded by millions of buzzing flies and filled with maggots and foul-smelling eggshells, rotting vegetable rinds and other cast offs. You and your friends would follow the honey wagon despite the smell, just to see the operator pull the lever that caused the metal trough to move up the curved back and dump the garbage into the interior, disturbing the millions of buzzing flies from within. Later he would sell the garbage to a local pig farm where it would be used to slop the pigs. Following the garbage man was the Junk Man. He would come in a giant land barge with massive wagon wheels and pulled by two enormous horses. His wagon was filled with junk metal of all kinds -- car bodies and old stoves, stove pipe, bricks or lumber or anything people wanted to get rid off. He would sell the junk to the massive junk yards in South Boston where tall cranes with massive electro magnets would sort it into piles to be taken by train to the Pittsburgh steel mills or even to some small brass and iron smelters in Charlestown and Chelsea. The Junk Man was a massive man in filthy, blackened overalls and bowler hat. He had an unlit stogie in his mouth and he and his helper lifted everything into the wagon by hand using brute strength. There was a constant stream of unemployed men walking in either direction on the road with bulging, broken suitcases tied together with twine. They would stop at any house where there might be a few hours of day labor for a couple of pennies and a meal.If it was Tuesday, the ice man would come by. The Ice House was an easy walking distance, which could mean a mile, since everything was walking distance as no one had a car. The Ice House was a great place to visit in summer. It was always cool inside despite the heat and ice was stacked to the rafters. Huge puddles of water choked with sawdust covered the floor and water was always draining back into the lake next door. In the winter, men bundled up in heavy pea coats would cut ice from the lake with long saws and drag it with horses to a conveyor belt and inside a massive wooden building with no windows. It was freezing, dangerous work and men could easily fall into the freezing lake and die of exposure or drown. Inside the ice was covered with sawdust and stacked in piles. It would last until next winter when it could be resupplied. Throughout the year wagons came from the lumber yards and millworks to add to the sawdust piles or with men who would chip, cut and shape the ice, load it onto trucks and horse drawn wagons and deliver it to homes all across the city. Despite the fact that refrigerators began emerging 20 years earlier, most people still could not afford them or the electricity needed to power them and used an ice box. You had bragging rights if your ice box had a hose that eliminated the melted water for you. If not, you had to empty the drip pan regularly to prevent the musty water from stinking or spilling all over your floor. The ice man would come into your house wearing a leather apron and with the proper size block over his shoulder, carrying it with massive tongs. Your mother would decide how much she could afford in order to keep the milk, cream and butter cool so she and your dad could enjoy their coffee and you could have cornflakes. She put a s diamond-shaped sign in the window every other day telling the ice man how big a chunk you wanted. While he delivered the ice, you and your friends would cool off under the constant stream of ice cold water pouring from every crack in the wagon.At home your mother would be outside doing laundry on Wednesday. That was laundry day throughout the neighborhood and she would be kneeling over a massive galvanized tin bucket scrubbing your clothes against a washboard, probably while singing hymns from church. Often, your sister would be stirring the clothing in another bucket filled with hot soapy water, or rinsing them in yet another bucket and putting them through the ringer to squeeze out the excess water. You would often be called to bring more hot water from the kettle on the stove. If you looked down the backyards of the tract houses you could see laundry hanging from every line in every yard. The housewives could gossip, chatter and practice for church choir while they hung their clothes, calling to each other and spreading the news of the day.The kitchen stove itself was a massive, cast iron monstrosity with a copper cylinder behind it. Even on the most miserably hot summer days you would have to shovel coal into this stove because it was the only way you got hot water or hot food. It was cozy in the winter but during the summer it made it almost impossible to come indoors. Most of your summer "play time" consisted of taking your wagon around town searching for bits of wood you would collect and split and stack in the dirt-floor cellar to use as kindling to start the fire in the morning. You could make a fire only after you removed the cold ash bucket and coal clinkers, which you would have to sift so you could re-burn any left-over coal. The ashes you would pour into the garden where your mother would work them into the soil with a shovel and a pitchfork.Twice a year the dump truck from Brookline Ice and Coal would make the trip to your house, if you could afford it. He would attach a hinged chute to a gate on the back of the truck and then dump the coal through a cellar window into the coal cellar. You would be down there inside the coal bin with a heavy shovel, shifting the coal as fast as possible to make best use of the space. Clouds of coal dust would billow up as the coal raced down the chute. You would wear a handkerchief over your nose but you would still suck in lots of black coal dust to be hacked up later. When the coal truck left you would have to make sure the removable boards at the coal door were not blocked so you could shovel out coal into the coal hods to be dragged upstairs to the stove. In the winter you would put in a couple of shovels before bedtime, bank the fire by turning off the oxygen, and wait for the heat to waft up the stairs or through the open grates into your bedroom. The fire would burn down during the night and you would often wake up and see frost on your bedspread from your breathing. Then you would have to go downstairs and start the fire, stoking it with wood and coal so that when everyone woke up the house was warm.Of course, on laundry day, all the neighborhood women would rush from their homes when they heard the Express Train coming. This is why Wednesday was laundry day -- there were fewer freight trains on Wednesday which allowed you to hang clothes on the line to dry without the soot floating down from the locomotives and speckling your whites and sheets. When the train whistle blew you would have to rush out and cover your clothes if they were still wet, or take them in as quickly as possible before the rain of soot ash.Every time a train passed, it would rain soot and ash for a while. Every neighborhood had piles of tiny grains of coal soot. When the wind blew, it flew everywhere. It collected in corners and had to be swept every day. It was bad for the garden and piles of collected soot were to be found in the corner of every yard. Since most side roads and back road were still unpaved, much of this coal dust was used to fill the many potholes in the gravel roads. Everyone worked at this, even though the streets were supposed to be maintained by the city. No one waited for the Public Works department and it was often that you and your dad and neighbors could be seen grading potholes on a Saturday afternoon. After bringing your clothes back to the kitchen from the clothesline your mother would iron them with a heavy hand iron heated on the stove. In the kitchen there was a clothes dryer for damp items and dish towels. This consisted of long oaken slats that were pulled from a circular quiver and stuck straight out.Many houses still had hand pumps for the soapstone sink, but this was getting rare by the Depression. Actual plumbing was fast replacing pumps and soapstone sinks, and most houses had a real claw foot tub and a water closet, a toilet with a tank near the ceiling and long pull chain. Toilet paper didn't come in rolls but in packets like we have Kleenex today, where when you pulled one piece, another would follow. On the other hand, it was not unusual to see outhouses in the back yards of many neighbors. Some were abandoned and used to store magazines or other things, but some were still used and on the weekends your dad would help a neighbor dig a new pit and manually push the outhouse over it. The contents of the old cess pit was called "night soil" and after a year was dug up and spread over the garden and worked into the soil as fertilizer. In addition, many houses still had rough wooden horse troughs and hand pumps. You would irrigate the garden from these troughs after filling them with the hand pump, and using a heavy galvanized bucket to haul countless buckets of water. You didn’t mind – if the garden died for lack of water, you didn’t eat.On Thursday the Rag Man would come. He would call out from his horse-drawn wagon for rags and newspapers. Anyone with old rags to sell or bundles of newspapers to sell could give them to him for a penny or two. He also sold sewing needles and other sewing supplies. Rags were important items for industry and there were factories in Boston where women would strip the seams from the fabric and fashion the rags into wipers for factory use all over the city. This was still being done up until the 1980s in some cities in Massachusetts.If your mother had the money, she would tell you to get your wagon and go to the local store to get bread. Sometimes, there would be enough money for meat for Sunday lunch after church. The butcher shop was next door to the market, the butcher always wore a white, blood stained apron and a white hat. He had a giant scale with a magnifying window that seemed like advanced technology. He used a massive butcher knife and sometimes he would give you a bone for your dog. No matter what he was doing he had a cigarette in his mouth and you would sometimes have to wash the cigarette ash off the meat when you un-wrapped it. This was not seen as a problem or even unusual. The bigger complaint was that his scale was "off" or that he put his thumb on it.At the market you could get a loaf of bread for five cents, or if there was stale bread, they would sell it for two cents. If there was still stale bread or day old bread, this is what most people bought. Fresh bread was a luxury. The clerk at the counter was usually the owner of the store. If he knew and trusted you, you could buy on credit. If your dad lost his job, the credit disappeared and he wanted cash. Everyone knew who was a deadbeat. People both looked down on deadbeats and sympathized with them. Times were hard and people had kids who had to eat. The market was also one of the few places with a telephone. You certainly didn't have one at home.Later in the afternoon, if it was late summer, you and your brothers and sisters would go down to the tracks to pick the wild concord grapes, apples and crabapples that seeded themselves from decades of fruit falling from the passing trains. When you brought it home, your mother would boil and can the fruits for the winter. She used the same Ball canning jars we use today, making sure to wash the rubber rings in boiling water before sealing the boiling liquid. If the liquid wasn't boiling when it was poured into the jar, the fruits would not be vacuum packed when she sealed them and the fruit would go bad in a matter of days. If it was boiling and vacuum packed it would last well into the winter when fresh fruit was too expensive to purchase at the market.When dinner was served you ate everything that was put in front of you no matter what it was. You didn't have the luxury of not liking a particular food because you often went to bed hungry, especially towards the end of the month when the mortgage was due. The average mortgage was $43 a month. The average salary was $27 a week. You would secretly sneak some of the food on your plate onto your younger sibling's plate, not because you didn't like it but because you knew they needed it. Your sisters would clean the kitchen while you read a magazine that came in the evening mail. The subscription would have been a gift from a well-off relative because you could never afford one. Maybe it was a white Saturday Evening Post with Norman Rockwell cover, or maybe it was a Time magazine with Adolf Hitler as its Man of the Year. Or if you were really lucky it was National Geographic with a pull out map poster showing things like the Sandwhich Islands, which we now call Hawaii, or showing India as a British colony. Vietnam was called French Indochina, Sri Lanka was called Ceylon, Zimbabwe was called Rhodesia and Israel was called Palestine. In the evenings you would sit around the radio for a serial program like the Lone Ranger or perhaps listen to a night ball game. The radios were made out of walnut and took up to 5 minutes to heat up and work after you turned them on. You could actually see the light from the tubes glowing from the inside. If a tube blew and your dad was handy, he could remove it and take it into town to find a replacement. Tubes did not last very long and this happened alot. There were many stores on Boston that sold nothing but tubes and radio partsDad would have a massive Boston Evening Globe or Herald Traveler or Record American. Papers were about twice the size they are today but not as thick and the Globe published up to 5 different editions per day. The Globe was the low-class rag, started by Jordan Marsh as a vehicle to publish ads for their department store, but the Irish loved its melodramatic, pro-workingman style. The Record American was the patrician paper for snooty intellectuals and the Herald was the workaday paper. In all the papers the writing was miserable and incredibly biased, the hand-set type was tiny and hard to read and the photos were as graphic as possible. Newspapers held an important role in everyday life, as a news tool, educational device and source of entertainment and the paper was used for everything from wrapping fish to wrapping toys. Midwives used the inside sections to wrap newborns because newspaper was considered sterile. It was used as insulation in the walls or even inside the clothes of drunks. It was used to make toys like hats and kites and it was saved as a fire starter for boilers and stoves.While your dad read the paper and listened to the radio, your mom would knit socks. One thing everyone needed was socks and mothers were constantly making new ones. A pair of shoes didn't last long in those days because everyone walked and chances are your shoes had holes in the bottom. At first you could use newspaper as insoles but eventually your dad might pull up some linoleum from a hidden spot in the kitchen floor and cut it to form a new sole. In any case, socks took a beating and had to be darned or replaced frequently. You were often aware that she was knitting the only birthday or Christmas gift you would get that year -- and you were happy to get it. When your dad was done with the paper, he would hand you the comics. If you read the Globe you had Mutt and Jeff and Andy Capp. In the Herald Traveler you had Blondie and the Katzenjammer Kids.On Saturday it was bath night. You had to be clean for church on Sunday so the stove would be stoked and the water heated so hot it raised blisters. At night you might share a bed with your brother in the sweltering but tiny bedroom. It was quiet then, no jets or even prop planes to mar the silence. You could hear pounding from the car shops in the distance and occassionally a night express would scream by on the tracks to Providence but there were no cars, no big trucks. Maybe the odd taxi would come down the street but mostly it was silent. You could hear the ticking alarm clock from your parent's room.If you were lucky, a neighbor had a telephone. The one neighbor with the phone was usually a civil servant who had a "good job" where he could afford the risk of owning a phone in the house. Maybe this neighbor was next door. Maybe he was 4 houses down. Most neighbors of this type were kind enough to take calls for you and the caller would have to wait while he dressed and walked to your house to get you to come take the call. Usually the phone owner would stand right next to you and listen. Getting a call was rare and gossip was good. It was not unusual to see the Western Union man in his blue uniform and hat on his bicycle riding around town dropping off telegrams. Even if you could not afford to ride on a train, you could go to the train depot to send a telegram or watch to see who did. The depot was a great place to be for all the activity that took place there. You could walk there on the way to the street car because the street car was the fastest, easiest way to get into downtown Boston unless you didn't have the fare. Then you walked.In those days, skanky bars were everywhere and you had to be careful. Many people were poor and miserable and they blew whatever money they had on booze and rotgut in gin mills where loose women who used to be schoolgirls drank and slept their lives away with grimy, down on their luck men who chain smoked cigarettes and dreamed of better days or got into bloody fights over nothing. At night, even the best street lights were weak and if you ventured outdoors at night it was common to come across a flasher or pervert exposing himself or to a drunk passed out in the gutter while other drunks went through his pockets. When the cops were needed for any reason, everyone scattered. Police were feared and respected and a beating from a cop was a daily occurrence. No one blinked, it was normal. It was expected and most people thought it was deserved. Things people call corruption today were considered normal -- free meals, gifts, petty thievery, drinking on the job and so on -- by the cops. On the positive side, the cops really protected you and hurt the bad guys and kept them moving so the grifters and muggers and perverts and other bad types did not hang around long. The cops knew everyone by name, who was good and who was bad and you kept your nose clean out of fear as well as good upbringing.If you fished or hunted, you always did so with the intention of eating your catch, not just you but your entire family. Nothing was wasted. For 12 box tops from the cornflakes box, Kellogs would send anyone a scoped, bolt action .22 rifle. You were on your own for the ammunition. It was not a toy and if you couldn't shoot you gave up -- you just couldn't waste a nickel on fifty rounds.You pretty much knew who you were going to marry by the sixth grade...you had been going to school with the same people your entire life and you knew everything about them, their character, their moods, their family situation, their prospects. That's why those marriages lasted. Even without dating you already knew everything about each other. By the time the dating started, all you had to figure out was the kissing. Everything else was known.Then the war came and everything changed so fast people couldn't believe it until here we are now, not even recognizing that it was not so long ago that horses were regular sights on the streets of Boston and that everyone in the neighborhood knew everyone else and everything about them.

SINGAPOREThings not to do in Singapore. I write on behalf of all Singaporeans who have had to put up with these things.Do not forget to wash everyday and change your clothes, esp. your shirt and socks. Please shower everyday. You might even need to take a shower three times a day if you have been spending a lot of time outdoors. Its very hot and humid in tropical Singapore. You will sweat profusely if you are outdoors. If you do not wash, you will stink and people will avoid you like the plague.Do not attempt to hide your body odour with cologne, perfume etc.. No matter how expensive the perfume is, it will make you stink more. Adding more won’t help!!!! Take a good shower with soap everyday please. If necessary, twice.Do not forget to drink water. Tap water in Singapore is safe to drink. If you feel uncomfortable about it boil the water and filter it using a sieve. Please do not buy plastic bottled water - 1 use plastic containers are bad for the environment. It is a good idea to bring a small reusable bottle of water to drink. The tap water here in most areas is safe to drink.Do not stand in the street under the hot sun for long periods, especially if you have just arrived from Northern Europe. You risk getting heat stroke. The heat together with tropical humidity and the concrete urban environment is an awful combination. The average temperature in Singapore is 30C (86F). For the same reason do not leave your kids or dogs in the car!!! Singapore has a lot of air-condition shopping malls, MRT stations (subway trains), etc.. please take every opportunity to use them or stand in the shade. Consider using an umbrella walking in the hot sun. The umbrella will also be invaluable if you get caught in a tropical rain downpour.Do not walk into someone’s private home with your shoes on. In Singapore, it is regarded as unhygienic and extremely disrespectful. Please wear clean socks and please wash and clean your feet daily. The humidity in Singapore causes bad body odor if you don’t wash.Do not talk loudly on the bus, train or in enclosed public spaces, and definitely do not play loud music on your phone speaker. Its a vulgar and rude thing to do in public places such as train carriages or buses. No one wants to hear your conversation or your loud music, esp. the modern kind. Please try and be considerate to the strangers around you.Do not drink, eat, smoke on buses, trains, and all public transportation. And if you are carrying the food with you on the bus or train, please try and keep the food hidden and not exposed. Do not carry the Durian fruit in public places either, it stinks up the place (Recently in Australia, it caused an emergency situation in an Australian University; the Emergency service team was even called in to investigate the “toxic gas”. A hazmat team was deployed to remove the odious smelling fruit.)Do not stage a public protest. If you wish to complain about the death penalty for drug smuggling, cutting of beautiful tropical trees or the destruction of Bukit Brown or bird sanctuaries like Biddari park to make way for more generic shopping malls, do not chain yourself to the tree or stage a public protest on the street. It only gets you a one way trip to the jail. Singapore highly prizes social harmony and cannot tolerate public expressions of dissent. Write an open polite letter to the relevant public department or popular websites. The government does pay attention to such forms of complaints.Do not bring illegal drugs into Singapore even marijuana. If you have consumed illegal drugs before you enter Singapore wait until you have detox before entering the country because having illegal drugs in your blood stream is a crime. Singapore is very strict on drugs. We hang drug smugglers. On the plus side, our streets are safe and women and children can walk home safely at night.Do not get drunk in public. Its much too hot to drink anyhow. Being drunken and disorderly is not a common sight here in Singapore. Do not get drunk, beat up our citizens and riot. There are now laws that ban the consumption of alcohol in public places after a certain time at night. Singapore is a safe country, we like it this way.Do not litter, spit or defecate in public. Singapore places great emphasis on hygiene. At one point we even fined people who did not flush public toilets. The government even fitted sensors in lifts to catch idiots who pee in them. Offenders get a good beating. Being drunk is no excuse.Do not pick up (unopened) tissue paper packets left on tables. They are not freebies!!!! Singaporeans use tissue paper packets to reserve (“chope”) seats in hawker food centers. If you see a new tissue packet on a table or seat someone has put it there to “chope” it / reserve it. Its not a freebie.Do not sneer, mock, or laugh at Singaporeans’ English accents. English is the working language of Singapore but not the mother tongue of most Singaporeans. They are doing you a favor of speaking the language to you as opposed to speaking speaking their native language like Bahasa Malay, Tamil, Hindi, Mandarin, Hokkien, Cantonese, Teochew, Hakka, etc.. Do not correct any English grammar or pronunciation error too unless they are your best friend.Do not mock religion or preach your religion unsolicited to a stranger. In Singapore, we have religious tolerance. Religion is like genitalia, everyone has it (everyone believes in something, even vegans and atheists). Don’t wave it around, or tell people how impressive is it; no one is interested. Don’t make fun of other people’s religion too. Religious harmony is very important in Singapore and we will jail people who flout these rules. You will notice that Muslim, Hindu, Christian, and Chinese temples side by side, and the worshipers living in harmony. That didn’t just “happen”. Singaporeans worked very hard to achieve this peace. Don’t come here and fk it up.Do not come unprepared for tropical ailments. One word of caution. You should bring the necessary medication to prevent indigestion or food poisoning as the bacteria in a tropical country will be different from a temperate climate. If you also eat too much of a different food/fruit there is no telling how your body will react. So eat with moderation on the first few days of arrival otherwise you might get a stomach ailments before you acclimatize. This does not apply if you are living in the region and have already acclimatized.Do not come without travel insurance. Hospitals here ARE expensive. The ambulance is not free. If you get terribly injured or sick, you could face financial ruin. Please buy Health Insurance before coming! Read it here. Thai teen hit by car is improving.Do not go to Sim Lim shopping mall or Lucky Plaza without doing your research first. Consumer protection laws in Singapore is poor compared to the West. There is often no refund or assistance once you buy an item and want to change it, or discover you have been duped or massively overcharged. Unfortunately some shop owners will prey on the unwary, especially new tourists, and do their utmost to rip them off. You can read about the horror stories here. Scammed in Sim Lim Square - Sim Lim Square, Singapore Traveller Reviews - TripAdvisor . Sadly the authorities seem slow in taking firm action against predatory shops and they tarnish the reputation of the good ones.Do not ask for pork in a Muslim restaurant or eat pork food near a Muslim food stall or bring pork products to a Muslim household. It is against their religion and we have to respect that. In Singapore we want to have religious harmony and the best way is to be respectful to people of other faith.Do not *only* eat at McDonalds or American or European restaurants. The pasta will never be as good as in Italy, the burgers are better in America or Australia, the sausages and beer are better in Europe. Please don’t come here to complain and consume something which you can cheaply and easily purchase in your own country.If you’ve come a long way from home do not only eat what you’re familiar with. Singapore is famous for its myriad of local cuisine. Singapore is BIG on food. Mr. Chan Hon Meng, a hawker food seller recently won a Michelin star award for his chicken rice dish which cost less than US$2. !!!! There are a great many more unsung chefs, look them up in the Makan Sutra guide. You have to try the (reasonably priced) chicken satay, nasi lemak, nasi briyani, curry chicken crab, fish head curry, harmee (prawn) soup noodles, curry chicken puff pastry, bahchor mee, bahku teh, curry chicken, roti prata, chicken rice porridge, and you also have to eat the local tropical fruit like papaya, mangosteen, dookoo, langsat, longkong, soursop, mango, chi-koo, rambutan, and durian (if you dare) etc.. Most of the fruit are imported from Malaysia or Thailand or Indonesia. Do try and appreciate the difference in taste. Chinese noodles taste different from Italian pasta. Nonya kwey (Perankan cakes) taste different from European cakes because they are often than not steamed not baked and use coconut. You’re in foreign country; try and appreciate the difference and not complain. Its like a Singaporean going to Switzerland and complaining about the snow. Please go easy on the food though. It will take sometime for your stomach to acclimatize.Do not attempt to overeat chili, especially the small variants. If you have never eaten chili, especially raw chili please be extremely careful. The smallest chili, chili padi, are the most potent and not for first-timers. If you have touched raw chili or even the leaves do not touch your eyes or genitalia without first washing your hands thoroughly.Do not smile at strangers, even neighbors, unless first introduced. When I first returned to Singapore after living in Melbourne for a few years, I was living in a small private apartment block. When I smiled and greeted my neighbors as I did in Melbourne and they thought I was crazy. One of them even stood with his mouth open and stared at me until I closed my front door. However if you are European, Caucasian, Singaporeans may treat you differently and smile back because they may realize your customs are different. But if you are Asian, you risk being openly rebukedIf you are in town do not forget to take a walk to Fort Canning Hill; it is near Dhoby Ghaut MRT (subway train) station (Dhoby is pronounced “Doe”, “Be”, “Got”) MRT station. Fort Canning Hill is a historical site. The ancient Malay Kings once had their residence here and called it a different name. When the British came they took over the hill and turned it into a fort; parts of the original fortification still remain today. During WW2, the British used an underground bunker to coordinate their defences against the Japanese. Unlike the rest of the city centre Fort Canning is still relatively green and home to many impressive tropical trees. I like to walk up there and pass the massive fort gates and admire the lush tropical trees. Avoid walking there at night in case you bump into a ghost.Do not be like the travel writer who complained that Singapore wasn’t like (another South East Asian city). Singapore is a modern city state and the financial center for many Multinational corporations. It is one of the most expensive places to live in the world. Naturally, things won’t be as cheap as other places. Singapore’s symbols, not by accident, are the Merlion and the Vanda 'Miss Joaquim' orchid, which are hybrids. Most of the population of Singapore can trace their ancestry back to migrant stock. Singapore is not this or that; Singapore is Singapore. Somethings here are good, some other things can be improve upon. Our civil and police service are honest and efficient. Open corruption and bribery are rare. Our police are honest and very, very rarely use their guns in anger.Grab bag: Our public libraries are great and a wonderful place to take refuge from the heat and noise. There is no vandalism on the trains and buses. Vandals get caned. Women here can take public transportation safely at night. Gang violence is rare and gangsters can be jailed indefinitely without trial. Gun crime is rare. Sex-work is legal in designated areas. Consumer protection here is inadequate. Social welfare is lacking; some poor pensioners collect cardboard in the hot sun to sell to make ends meet which some politicians think they do for the exercise. Drivers exasperatingly do not indicate when changing lanes. You can find a tropical jungle in the city. The people can be exceedingly helpful and friendly to foreigners. The trains and buses are cheap and efficient. We have Grab (Uber got taken over); use it! Try and appreciate the difference and not hate it the day you first arrive.Do not forget to eat Mangosteens. Do not wipe your fingers on your shirt afterwards. Be careful to wipe the juice or skin residue on a tissue paper, it can badly stain. Did you know that Queen Victoria, the Queen of Great Britain when it had an Empire whose sun never set, wanted to eat Mangosteen but never got the chance to? Apparently she offered a solid gold coin for it but no one succeeded in transporting it for her to eat. So now’s your chance to eat what an Empress could not. Its one of the most delicious fruit in the world.Having said that if you want imported European or American beers for a cheap price you can visit the Good Beer Company located in Chinatown Ask the Experts: Chilli and craft beer pairing The Good Beer Company …And please, refrain from talking loudly or listening to your music device at ear deafening sounds in enclosed public places like trains, buses, movie theatres, etc..Update:Thank you for the 2,500 votes… I contributed to this question because I am bemused when I see (some visitors) walking around in full business suits on very hot days. I was shocked when I saw a British family standing in the hot sun, the kids melting away in the heat and the mother and father fumbling away at a map; and sadly, wary of any offers of assistance.And if you downvoted my answer because you do not like to take a daily wash and like to use a lot of body perfume, please stay away from my country.Source:3 foreigners charged for beating 4 S'poreansCEO gets jail for slapping cabby

I wrote this answer in response to another question, “What was it like to live through the Great Depression?”My mother grew up during the Great Depression in Readville, MA. Readville was a freight yard hub and a place where there were massive railroad repair shops. My grandmother moved there in 1917 because the Boston and Maine had planted wild roses along all the berms to hold the soil in place and when she saw the flowers in bloom, she decided this is where she would bring up her family. Her house was built by a man named Kissel and was the first house in the nieghborhood with indoor plumbing in 1917. She has a husband who was a hard core drunk and deadbeat and six children plus one dog.My mother was born in 1926 and so by 1938 she was 12 years old. Based on what she told me before she died, and her two sisters, I wrote this answer about the Great Depression and what it was like.During the Depression on the outskirts of Boston, even within the city limits, you could wake up as a child in the predawn, look out your bedroom window and see dozens of gray-clad men shuffling to their factory jobs at the railroad car shops as they walked down the street in droves carrying their lunch pails, Chesterfield cigarettes glowing, talking to each other in low voices. You would watch them filing past from the window of your tract house, some of them on the sidewalk, some even in the roughly paved street because there were few vehicles and those that did pass were beat up and ancient. Your house, like your neighbors, desperately needed to be painted but neither you nor they could afford the paint. As a result, the entire row of houses looked decrepit and run down with peeling paint flaking off onto the ground.At 7 AM you heard the factory whistle blow at the car shops where the sounds of cranes mixed with the sound of drop forges and steam whistles and rivet guns and the sight of black smoke pouring from the tall stacks. From the back of the house you could hear the steam locomotive barreling down the tracks in the distance and you knew exactly what train it was by the distinctive whistle, and even gave names to the Engineer because each one had his own signature way of blowing that whistle.Later, you and your brothers and sisters would walk the tracks with a bucket picking up large pieces of unburned coal that fell from the tenders or from the shovels of the sweating firemen as they built up steam to race to the freight yards of Providence. You would meet many of your friends doing the same thing as everyone needed coal for their stoves and boilers and many people were out of work and could not afford to buy it.You would dash off a letter to the girl you liked from school and put a 1 cent stamp with a picture of George Washington on it. The 2 cent stamp for heavier mail had Jefferson on it but you couldn't afford to blow 2 cents on a stamp. You put your letter in the mailbox. The mailman would come by and deliver the morning mail before 10 AM. Later on that day he would come again and give you a reply to your morning letter. In some neighborhoods he would come back a third time in the evening.Summer time and the living was easy. When you woke up on Monday, the milk man was downstairs in the kitchen bantering with your mother as he dropped off the cream-top. If you were fast, you could go down and pet his horse as it waited patiently for him to climb back up in the buckboard. The horse was tethered to the cast iron fire hydrant in front of your house. The connectors of the hydrant were painted yellow to alert the fire department that this hydrant used a non-standard connector. Many a house burned down in those days because the fire engine came with the wrong size hose until the city finally standardized on one size of hydrant. In downtown Boston all the old horse drawn fire engines had been retired and replaced by Macks but here in the outskirts of Boston there were still teams of horses and steam pumps scattered around and housed in civilian barns, rented by the city as a hedge against another Great Boston Fire. The last one would finally be retired in 1938.On hot days the milk man might give you a handful of the ice chips that he used to keep the milk and butter cool on his early morning trek from the massive Canton dairy farms to the neighborhoods of Boston. Behind him came Billy the Egg Man's horse-drawn wagon making the same rounds. Sometimes a woman in a housedress and curlers would run from a house, screen door slamming, asking to purchase a single egg, or if she had another penny, two eggs for her husband's breakfast. The horses would clip clop along at no hurry, leaving piles of manure along the street which you and the neighbor kids would scurry to collect in a little wagon for the gardens out back that provided your vegetables.As the day went on you would sneak into the car shop rail yard across the street from your house. The massive gray building was covered with soot, the ancient rail yard overgrown with weeds as well as dandelions, sassafras trees and wild rasberries and blueberries, all of which you stopped to pick and eat... a free meal could never be passed up. The yard was first built during the Civil War and later housed the side tipping railroad hoppers George Munson used to fill in Back Bay. Now it was at the height of its existence. It was here that the railroads brought their damaged and worn out Pullman cars, flat cars and hoppers to be restored or to rot. It was here that ancient, wooden-sided freight cars and cabooses came to be retired and either resold or dismantled. Some of the decaying cars had dates on them from before the Great War, their heavy lead-based paint flaking off, covered in rust and smelling of old grease. Some of the rotting Pullman cars with their foggy glass windows and torn green shades were also made of wood, meaning they dated back to before 1912. They had open vestibules and cast iron filigree and displayed an old world elegance despite the weeds that grew up all around them and the hornet’s nests in their eaves. Despite the locks on the car doors and the rail yard guard, the abandoned Pullmans were the temporary homes of hobos and displaced workers who slept in the sleeper bunks behind moldy curtains and passed bottles of cheap booze back and forth. There were also massive red painted flangers, used to plow snow from the tracks, stored here until the winter when they were needed, and worn out steam locomotives with no bells and coated in red rust, the black paint long gone. You would collect long rusty nails from the ground and bring them home to sell on the sidewalk for a penny a pound to the many carpenters and tradesmen who plied the streets seeking work. (I saw all this up until the 1960s when the shops were finally closed)When you walked home from the noisy, busy and somewhat dangerous railyard you would stop to watch a crew of workmen building a granite wall along the side of the road. The WPA in Boston hired thousands of unemployed men who worked diligently every day to build walls and public buildings, all for about 7 dollars a week. The best thing about watching the workmen was the presence of a gigantic Keck steam traction engine, as big as a bus, with two huge water filled rollers taller than an adult man that would crush down gravel and flatten the weak asphalt that was all the city of Boston could afford this far from downtown. The operators were filthy sweating men who shoveled coal into the firebox as flames leapt into the cab, columns of black smoke billowed from the stack while white steam and spraying water seemed to blast from every joint.Around lunchtime you could see and smell the honey wagon, a galvanized tin truck with bug eyed headlights and a motorized trough in the back. The garbage man would pay your mother a penny for your garbage that you kept in a bucket that sat in a hole in your back yard, surrounded by millions of buzzing flies and filled with maggots and foul-smelling eggshells, rotting vegetable rinds and other cast offs. You and your friends would follow the honey wagon despite the smell, just to see the operator pull the lever that caused the metal trough to move up the curved back and dump the garbage into the interior, disturbing the millions of buzzing flies from within. Later he would sell the garbage to a local pig farm where it would be used to slop the pigs. Following the garbage man was the Junk Man. He would come in a giant land barge with massive wagon wheels and pulled by two enormous horses. His wagon was filled with junk metal of all kinds -- car bodies and old stoves, stove pipe, bricks or lumber or anything people wanted to get rid off. He would sell the junk to the massive junk yards in South Boston where tall cranes with massive electro magnets would sort it into piles to be taken by train to the Pittsburgh steel mills or even to some small brass and iron smelters in Charlestown and Chelsea. The Junk Man was a massive man in filthy, blackened overalls and bowler hat. He had an unlit stogie in his mouth and he and his helper lifted everything into the wagon by hand using brute strength. There was a constant stream of unemployed men walking in either direction on the road with bulging, broken suitcases tied together with twine. They would stop at any house where there might be a few hours of day labor for a couple of pennies and a meal.If it was Tuesday, the ice man would come by. The Ice House was an easy walking distance, which could mean a mile, since everything was walking distance as no one had a car. The Ice House was a great place to visit in summer. It was always cool inside despite the heat and ice was stacked to the rafters. Huge puddles of water choked with sawdust covered the floor and water was always draining back into the lake next door. In the winter, men bundled up in heavy pea coats would cut ice from the lake with long saws and drag it with horses to a conveyor belt and inside a massive wooden building with no windows. It was freezing, dangerous work and men could easily fall into the freezing lake and die of exposure or drown. Inside the ice was covered with sawdust and stacked in piles. It would last until next winter when it could be resupplied. Throughout the year wagons came from the lumber yards and millworks to add to the sawdust piles or with men who would chip, cut and shape the ice, load it onto trucks and horse drawn wagons and deliver it to homes all across the city. Despite the fact that refrigerators began emerging 20 years earlier, most people still could not afford them or the electricity needed to power them and used an ice box. You had bragging rights if your ice box had a hose that eliminated the melted water for you. If not, you had to empty the drip pan regularly to prevent the musty water from stinking or spilling all over your floor. The ice man would come into your house wearing a leather apron and with the proper size block over his shoulder, carrying it with massive tongs. Your mother would decide how much she could afford in order to keep the milk, cream and butter cool so she and your dad could enjoy their coffee and you could have cornflakes. She put a s diamond-shaped sign in the window every other day telling the ice man how big a chunk you wanted. While he delivered the ice, you and your friends would cool off under the constant stream of ice cold water pouring from every crack in the wagon.At home your mother would be outside doing laundry on Wednesday. That was laundry day throughout the neighborhood and she would be kneeling over a massive galvanized tin bucket scrubbing your clothes against a washboard, probably while singing hymns from church. Often, your sister would be stirring the clothing in another bucket filled with hot soapy water, or rinsing them in yet another bucket and putting them through the ringer to squeeze out the excess water. You would often be called to bring more hot water from the kettle on the stove. If you looked down the backyards of the tract houses you could see laundry hanging from every line in every yard. The housewives could gossip, chatter and practice for church choir while they hung their clothes, calling to each other and spreading the news of the day.The kitchen stove itself was a massive, cast iron monstrosity with a copper cylinder behind it. Even on the most miserably hot summer days you would have to shovel coal into this stove because it was the only way you got hot water or hot food. It was cozy in the winter but during the summer it made it almost impossible to come indoors. Most of your summer "play time" consisted of taking your wagon around town searching for bits of wood you would collect and split and stack in the dirt-floor cellar to use as kindling to start the fire in the morning. You could make a fire only after you removed the cold ash bucket and coal clinkers, which you would have to sift so you could re-burn any left-over coal. The ashes you would pour into the garden where your mother would work them into the soil with a shovel and a pitchfork.Twice a year the dump truck from Brookline Ice and Coal would make the trip to your house, if you could afford it. He would attach a hinged chute to a gate on the back of the truck and then dump the coal through a cellar window into the coal cellar. You would be down there inside the coal bin with a heavy shovel, shifting the coal as fast as possible to make best use of the space. Clouds of coal dust would billow up as the coal raced down the chute. You would wear a handkerchief over your nose but you would still suck in lots of black coal dust to be hacked up later. When the coal truck left you would have to make sure the removable boards at the coal door were not blocked so you could shovel out coal into the coal hods to be dragged upstairs to the stove. In the winter you would put in a couple of shovels before bedtime, bank the fire by turning off the oxygen, and wait for the heat to waft up the stairs or through the open grates into your bedroom. The fire would burn down during the night and you would often wake up and see frost on your bedspread from your breathing. Then you would have to go downstairs and start the fire, stoking it with wood and coal so that when everyone woke up the house was warm.Of course, on laundry day, all the neighborhood women would rush from their homes when they heard the Express Train coming. This is why Wednesday was laundry day -- there were fewer freight trains on Wednesday which allowed you to hang clothes on the line to dry without the soot floating down from the locomotives and speckling your whites and sheets. When the train whistle blew you would have to rush out and cover your clothes if they were still wet, or take them in as quickly as possible before the rain of soot ash.Every time a train passed, it would rain soot and ash for a while. Every neighborhood had piles of tiny grains of coal soot. When the wind blew, it flew everywhere. It collected in corners and had to be swept every day. It was bad for the garden and piles of collected soot were to be found in the corner of every yard. Since most side roads and back road were still unpaved, much of this coal dust was used to fill the many potholes in the gravel roads. Everyone worked at this, even though the streets were supposed to be maintained by the city. No one waited for the Public Works department and it was often that you and your dad and neighbors could be seen grading potholes on a Saturday afternoon. After bringing your clothes back to the kitchen from the clothesline your mother would iron them with a heavy hand iron heated on the stove. In the kitchen there was a clothes dryer for damp items and dish towels. This consisted of long oaken slats that were pulled from a circular quiver and stuck straight out.Many houses still had hand pumps for the soapstone sink, but this was getting rare by the Depression. Actual plumbing was fast replacing pumps and soapstone sinks, and most houses had a real claw foot tub and a water closet, a toilet with a tank near the ceiling and long pull chain. Toilet paper didn't come in rolls but in packets like we have Kleenex today, where when you pulled one piece, another would follow. On the other hand, it was not unusual to see outhouses in the back yards of many neighbors. Some were abandoned and used to store magazines or other things, but some were still used and on the weekends your dad would help a neighbor dig a new pit and manually push the outhouse over it. The contents of the old cess pit was called "night soil" and after a year was dug up and spread over the garden and worked into the soil as fertilizer. In addition, many houses still had rough wooden horse troughs and hand pumps. You would irrigate the garden from these troughs after filling them with the hand pump, and using a heavy galvanized bucket to haul countless buckets of water. You didn’t mind – if the garden died for lack of water, you didn’t eat.On Thursday the Rag Man would come. He would call out from his horse-drawn wagon for rags and newspapers. Anyone with old rags to sell or bundles of newspapers to sell could give them to him for a penny or two. He also sold sewing needles and other sewing supplies. Rags were important items for industry and there were factories in Boston where women would strip the seams from the fabric and fashion the rags into wipers for factory use all over the city. This was still being done up until the 1980s in some cities in Massachusetts.If your mother had the money, she would tell you to get your wagon and go to the local store to get bread. Sometimes, there would be enough money for meat for Sunday lunch after church. The butcher shop was next door to the market, the butcher always wore a white, blood stained apron and a white hat. He had a giant scale with a magnifying window that seemed like advanced technology. He used a massive butcher knife and sometimes he would give you a bone for your dog. No matter what he was doing he had a cigarette in his mouth and you would sometimes have to wash the cigarette ash off the meat when you un-wrapped it. This was not seen as a problem or even unusual. The bigger complaint was that his scale was "off" or that he put his thumb on it.At the market you could get a loaf of bread for five cents, or if there was stale bread, they would sell it for two cents. If there was still stale bread or day old bread, this is what most people bought. Fresh bread was a luxury. The clerk at the counter was usually the owner of the store. If he knew and trusted you, you could buy on credit. If your dad lost his job, the credit disappeared and he wanted cash. Everyone knew who was a deadbeat. People both looked down on deadbeats and sympathized with them. Times were hard and people had kids who had to eat. The market was also one of the few places with a telephone. You certainly didn't have one at home.Later in the afternoon, if it was late summer, you and your brothers and sisters would go down to the tracks to pick the wild concord grapes, apples and crabapples that seeded themselves from decades of fruit falling from the passing trains. When you brought it home, your mother would boil and can the fruits for the winter. She used the same Ball canning jars we use today, making sure to wash the rubber rings in boiling water before sealing the boiling liquid. If the liquid wasn't boiling when it was poured into the jar, the fruits would not be vacuum packed when she sealed them and the fruit would go bad in a matter of days. If it was boiling and vacuum packed it would last well into the winter when fresh fruit was too expensive to purchase at the market.When dinner was served you ate everything that was put in front of you no matter what it was. You didn't have the luxury of not liking a particular food because you often went to bed hungry, especially towards the end of the month when the mortgage was due. The average mortgage was $43 a month. The average salary was $27 a week. You would secretly sneak some of the food on your plate onto your younger sibling's plate, not because you didn't like it but because you knew they needed it. Your sisters would clean the kitchen while you read a magazine that came in the evening mail. The subscription would have been a gift from a well-off relative because you could never afford one. Maybe it was a white Saturday Evening Post with Norman Rockwell cover, or maybe it was a Time magazine with Adolf Hitler as its Man of the Year. Or if you were really lucky it was National Geographic with a pull out map poster showing things like the Sandwhich Islands, which we now call Hawaii, or showing India as a British colony. Vietnam was called French Indochina, Sri Lanka was called Ceylon, Zimbabwe was called Rhodesia and Israel was called Palestine. In the evenings you would sit around the radio for a serial program like the Lone Ranger or perhaps listen to a night ball game. The radios were made out of walnut and took up to 5 minutes to heat up and work after you turned them on. You could actually see the light from the tubes glowing from the inside. If a tube blew and your dad was handy, he could remove it and take it into town to find a replacement. Tubes did not last very long and this happened alot. There were many stores on Boston that sold nothing but tubes and radio partsDad would have a massive Boston Evening Globe or Herald Traveler or Record American. Papers were about twice the size they are today but not as thick and the Globe published up to 5 different editions per day. The Globe was the low-class rag, started by Jordan Marsh as a vehicle to publish ads for their department store, but the Irish loved its melodramatic, pro-workingman style. The Record American was the patrician paper for snooty intellectuals and the Herald was the workaday paper. In all the papers the writing was miserable and incredibly biased, the hand-set type was tiny and hard to read and the photos were as graphic as possible. Newspapers held an important role in everyday life, as a news tool, educational device and source of entertainment and the paper was used for everything from wrapping fish to wrapping toys. Midwives used the inside sections to wrap newborns because newspaper was considered sterile. It was used as insulation in the walls or even inside the clothes of drunks. It was used to make toys like hats and kites and it was saved as a fire starter for boilers and stoves.While your dad read the paper and listened to the radio, your mom would knit socks. One thing everyone needed was socks and mothers were constantly making new ones. A pair of shoes didn't last long in those days because everyone walked and chances are your shoes had holes in the bottom. At first you could use newspaper as insoles but eventually your dad might pull up some linoleum from a hidden spot in the kitchen floor and cut it to form a new sole. In any case, socks took a beating and had to be darned or replaced frequently. You were often aware that she was knitting the only birthday or Christmas gift you would get that year -- and you were happy to get it. When your dad was done with the paper, he would hand you the comics. If you read the Globe you had Mutt and Jeff and Andy Capp. In the Herald Traveler you had Blondie and the Katzenjammer Kids.On Saturday it was bath night. You had to be clean for church on Sunday so the stove would be stoked and the water heated so hot it raised blisters. At night you might share a bed with your brother in the sweltering but tiny bedroom. It was quiet then, no jets or even prop planes to mar the silence. You could hear pounding from the car shops in the distance and occassionally a night express would scream by on the tracks to Providence but there were no cars, no big trucks. Maybe the odd taxi would come down the street but mostly it was silent. You could hear the ticking alarm clock from your parent's room.If you were lucky, a neighbor had a telephone. The one neighbor with the phone was usually a civil servant who had a "good job" where he could afford the risk of owning a phone in the house. Maybe this neighbor was next door. Maybe he was 4 houses down. Most neighbors of this type were kind enough to take calls for you and the caller would have to wait while he dressed and walked to your house to get you to come take the call. Usually the phone owner would stand right next to you and listen. Getting a call was rare and gossip was good. It was not unusual to see the Western Union man in his blue uniform and hat on his bicycle riding around town dropping off telegrams. Even if you could not afford to ride on a train, you could go to the train depot to send a telegram or watch to see who did. The depot was a great place to be for all the activity that took place there. You could walk there on the way to the street car because the street car was the fastest, easiest way to get into downtown Boston unless you didn't have the fare. Then you walked.In those days, skanky bars were everywhere and you had to be careful. Many people were poor and miserable and they blew whatever money they had on booze and rotgut in gin mills where loose women who used to be schoolgirls drank and slept their lives away with grimy, down on their luck men who chain smoked cigarettes and dreamed of better days or got into bloody fights over nothing. At night, even the best street lights were weak and if you ventured outdoors at night it was common to come across a flasher or pervert exposing himself or to a drunk passed out in the gutter while other drunks went through his pockets. When the cops were needed for any reason, everyone scattered. Police were feared and respected and a beating from a cop was a daily occurrence. No one blinked, it was normal. It was expected and most people thought it was deserved. Things people call corruption today were considered normal -- free meals, gifts, petty thievery, drinking on the job and so on -- by the cops. On the positive side, the cops really protected you and hurt the bad guys and kept them moving so the grifters and muggers and perverts and other bad types did not hang around long. The cops knew everyone by name, who was good and who was bad and you kept your nose clean out of fear as well as good upbringing.If you fished or hunted, you always did so with the intention of eating your catch, not just you but your entire family. Nothing was wasted. For 12 box tops from the cornflakes box, Kellogs would send anyone a scoped, bolt action .22 rifle. You were on your own for the ammunition. It was not a toy and if you couldn't shoot you gave up -- you just couldn't waste a nickel on fifty rounds.You pretty much knew who you were going to marry by the sixth grade...you had been going to school with the same people your entire life and you knew everything about them, their character, their moods, their family situation, their prospects. That's why those marriages lasted. Even without dating you already knew everything about each other. By the time the dating started, all you had to figure out was the kissing. Everything else was known.Then the war came and everything changed so fast people couldn't believe it until here we are now, not even recognizing that it was not so long ago that horses were regular sights on the streets of Boston and that everyone in the neighborhood knew everyone else and everything about them.