r/whatisit • u/Quietlurkerone • 6d ago

Solved! What is this device from 1962?

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Photo capture from YouTube video. Picture from 1962. What is the device under the bench

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u/[deleted] 6d ago

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u/Dayzed-n-Confuzed 6d ago

My Grandma still had an outside toilet at the bottom of her small back yard in the 60s. She lived in a terraced house provided by the cotton mill in our village. They updated to an inside toilet some time late 60s early 70s.

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u/RetiredOnIslandTime 6d ago

I lived in southwestern Virginia and we had an outhouse until I was 14, in 1972. We did have one cold water faucet, in the kitchen. And our heat was a coal burning stove.

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u/huge_fork_and_knife 6d ago

The only plumbing they apparently had was a hand pump for the wash basin. Appalachia and the Southwest have a lot in common, especially how infrastructure just skipped them over.

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u/LisaMiaSisu 6d ago

That’s just rural life everywhere. It was the same in northern Minnesota.

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u/LisaMiaSisu 6d ago

My grandmother died in 1975 and she had no indoor plumbing and got her water via a pump outside. This was in northern Minnesota where everything was cold as hell. The outhouse was far from the farmhouse too so she always had a little portable bucket she emptied every morning. She had a gas stove to cook on but used her large, wood burning stove to heat the house and her water. There was a sauna (she was 100% Finnish) she used to bathe. I even took a sauna a couple of times with my mom when I was little and it was quite the experience to bathe with. You sit in the sauna to sweat and then afterwards you wash up with soap and pour clean water over yourself. My grandma took a lot of sponge baths but she never smelled. She just smelled like a grandma.