Dave Wood

Now that I am firmly in my 90^th year, my life has changed considerably. i.e.  I don’t get around much anymore. I can’t see or hear very well; I have to type with one finger (like a real journalist!)

Fortunately, I am blessed with my virtual child bride, who drops me off occasionally for one hour to let me enjoy our gang’s heartless badinage on the bar’s east “corner of knowledge,” and when I’m home there’s the blessing of TV. Since I’ve discovered “You Tube,” which takes me behind the scenes of the witless sitcoms, the maddening game show dished out to us by the shysters and admen of Hollywood and Fifth Avenue.

And Ruth, who still drives a motor vehicle, sometimes brings me a book from the town’s wonderful library that will please my rarified taste in literature. Just now I’m perusing a weighty tome called “Toilets of the World,” By Patrick Kinsella—because Ruth knows I’m fascinated by Thomas Crapper, the British genius who invented the modern flush toilet, who has provided livelihoods for fellows like Troy Johnson and Mike Hawkins, the only fecal engineer in Christendom who goes to work in croquet whites and spotless deck shoes.

I’m also passionate about non-flush toilets inspired by my years as a rural rube (I know the difference between an in house and an outhouse!) My favorite youthful crapper was located in Rat Coulee where one squatted only a little, for the facility featured three holes, one being lower to accommodate the physiques of kids. And it was check by jowl to the hole my dad used, and we could together page through the years old Monkey Ward catalogue hunting for Hawthorne bikes and DeLousi Milking machines.

My new book is full of info about nicknames for toilets (“Billy, Bog, Cachoo, cludge, can, thunderbox”). The author also deals with “extreme” toilets around the world (biggest bowl; most remote is in a space station; most expensive is $23 million).

I was fascinated with the Irish urinal made from three sousaphone bells. Hit the bell just right and you’re home free. Strangely there’s no section on U.S. toilets, so I’m hereby adding an appendix: units I have known and loved, like the Dissmore Coulee-style loo the Hagen family mounted over and above the tiny creek that ran through their pasture. The Hagens apparently had more reason than most folks to pray for more than just a sprinkle when it rained.

The Pickle Station thunderbox in downtown Whitehall took the cake for sanitation. It was a rough-hewn, unpainted platform with no walls, a pole mounted roof that sheltered eight wooden open vats, where manager Seilor purchased cukes, brought in by area farmers. When a vat was full, he covered it with a salt and water solution, after which the cukes would bobble until a railroad tanker would come and pump it empty and haul the batch to the factory where they would be seasoned and sold at groceries.

But that’s not the whole story. At the “office” end was a room full of salt, which was Mr. Sever’s outhouse, sitting there next to the salt and vat #1 Seilor, hoboes, and, occasionally, neighbor kids could use it as well. We kids all wondered if there was any seepage but concluded there was no sense worrying about our peeing in the open vats, and so we did, every morning on our way to school.

But here’s the coupe de merde of all American outhouses: the rural Minnesota construction by a farmer from Belle Plain, Minn., who obviously had a big family. I’ll call it the “Duplex Sky Tower” of toilets. It’s been displayed in various newspapers. First, the farmer built a substantial two-story house, and several feet away a two-story outhouse. He connected the two top stories with a covered skyway system (probably inspired by Minnesota’s wonderful skyway) articulated so as to avoid seepage from the upper floor. This, in my opinion, tops anything contained in my Lonely Planet Book!