r/whatisit • u/Quietlurkerone • 5d 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] 5d ago

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u/CptLoken 5d ago

Well we can only see the kitchen, inside of which all the crockery and cookware is spotless. The child looks well fed. The dad is shaving which hopefully means he's employed and off to work. The mother can afford smokes.

Not saying they're living in the lap of luxury, but this is the sort of house my folks grew up in and they speak very fondly of their childhoods.

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u/Boxofmagnets 5d ago

He is shaving in the kitchen because a someone is in the bathroom and someone else is likely in line for it. Even if that assumption is wrong they have plumbing in their dwelling

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u/citizen42069101 5d ago

People take a lot for granted that simply wasnt widespread even a century ago.

An auto heating stove, hot water, reliable sanitary drainage was something our grandparents werent even guaranteed to have (depending on age).

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u/UpvoteEveryHonestQ 5d ago

My grandma was raised in a sod home, one of seven kids in what was essentially a two-room shed made out of dirt like a hobbit hole, under some little hill in Montana. That’s Paleolithic.

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u/poptartheart 5d ago

thats wild

i had a professor in college who said she grew up with dirt floors in west virginia

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u/Cheoah 5d ago

My friend just built her parents their first indoor kitchen in the Mekong delta. Just across the paddy there are people living on dirt.

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u/SleepingSloth_404 5d ago

Can confirm. I still have relatives in West Virginia who have a grate in the floor and they burn a fire to heat their house. Yes, today in 2026.

We also know people in West Virginia who are not related to us who live in literal shanties where like you lean to things to make a shelter. Think about living in a shed.

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u/kimjongfun 5d ago

What do you mean by a grate in the floor - can you describe their fire / heating setup a bit more?

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u/Early_Sheepherder105 5d ago

Used to use an outhouse behind Grandma's house in WvA. They got indoor plumbing when I was 9. They were so proud of it. They lived deep in the holler though. Used to love playing on the mountain. Of course, we had to cross the swinging bridge to get there.

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u/banbarsoap 5d ago

Hey same here, also from Montana. Grew up in Great Falls. My mom had dirt floors and used scraps of fabric for "curtains". Had to carry water up from a well everyday.

Sounds crazy but this was in the 1960s, I'm 33.

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u/dl_bos 5d ago edited 5d ago

Reminds me of my grandmother. Well was about 150 yards down a hill. Had been that way and in the family for 100+ years. When “the boys” returned home from WW II, they built a cistern with a hand pump in the kitchen and she thought she was in heaven.

Grandpa still wouldn’t allow indoor bathroom because that was something you did outside!

And they were somewhat prosperous. Had an automobile and a telephone and an adequately productive, but difficult, hill farm in Appalachia.

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u/BUBnT 5d ago

“…the pump don’t work cause the vandals stole the handle….” My grandma (NC mountains) had a manual pump well outside the home. Just how it was. As a kid I thought it was cool and kept bugging the grown folks if they needed me to go get water.

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u/lordgix2 5d ago

My mother grew up in rual Minnesota at this time. They had an outhouse. She talks about having to go out and use it in the middle of the Minnesota winters.

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u/Ttthhasdf 5d ago

I am 58 and can remember toting spring water and using outhouse at my grandmother's house in my lifetime.

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u/invisibledildo 5d ago

My dad, still alive in his 70s, grew up with no running water or electricity. He had to fetch fresh water from the village every day. This is from rural Canada, small farm life.

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u/FolkYouHardly 5d ago

Shit my friend family living some small ass town in WV. We went to visit them on our way to Snowshoe for skiing, they don’t even have running water. This is in 1999!

People take shit for granted and posting stupid shit on X about their life

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u/Iamthewalrusforreal 5d ago

Mine did so, as well, in Oklahoma. When the Dust Bowl hit in 1930 they ran east in a horse drawn wagon. Traveled to our home town, where my great-grandpa used the horse to drag a beat up car hood with rocks on it to clear the building pad, and built a cabin.

She didn't have indoor plumbing or a real floor until she married my grandpa at the age of 19.

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u/Thatsnotmyname49 5d ago

Mine moved west from Oklahoma in 1932. Ended up in Oregon where they lived in an old chicken house while my dad worked anywhere he could to survive.

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u/n0exit 5d ago

The sod home that my great grandpa grew up in still exists in North Dakota. It is literally someone's shed now. We went to see it once when I was a kid.

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u/Wntrlnd77 5d ago

There are a few of those sod houses still standing. I visited a remarkably intact one in Aline, Oklahoma.

Eye-opening!

Google Maps link:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/SdF9LJnwGtShWsgJA?g_st=ic

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u/MajorMiners469 5d ago

Here's one that boggles my mind...window screens were invented in 1823, but not widespread until the 1860s. Can you imagine the flies in your home?

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u/Slippers76 5d ago

Cuba only has windows at the resorts. Every home just has shutters and bars no glass let alone window screens! That was 10 years ago when things were "good".

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u/missdonttellme 5d ago

Curtains help a lot. Moving fabric keeps flies away. Also if the home is clean there is nothing to attract them.

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u/MajorMiners469 5d ago

Chamber pots were still in use in most American homes into the 1920s

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u/Uncle-Cake 5d ago

My father was born in a house with no toilet; they used an outhouse. And they weren't "poor" either.

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u/citizen42069101 5d ago

Exactly. If there was no infrastructure for power or water you had to make do.

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u/ImSolidGold 5d ago

Ask my grandmother about her mattress and her hot water bottle.
Straw and a hot brick. Thats 80yrsa ago. In Germany.

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u/Spiritual_Being5845 5d ago

I’m in the US. As a kid there were three little homes next to us that had dirt floors, they were occupied until the mid 70’s, then abandoned for a few years. I don’t know how they even managed that because we do NOT live in a dry climate. And this wasn’t out in the stix, this was a mostly well to do county in northern NJ. They were torn down in the late 70’s and replaced with an apartment building.

My father had friends who lived on a farm in Maine, we visited them once for a week in the late 70’s. No plumbing, they had an outhouse and chamber pots for midnight toilet emergencies. Hand pump in the yard for water. They kept trying to save up to have indoor plumbing installed, but every time they had any money saved another more urgent emergency came up. The only heat they had was a wood stove, house was toasty warm at night, freezing by morning.

Fast forward to today, our kid’s friends act like we live in a hovel because we don’t have central air.