A Rusty Old Milk Strainer:
It Has Been A Long Journey
Lowell L. Getz
While our daughter was home this past weekend,
we made a quick run to the local Walmart to pick up a
few items, passing on the way the Timeless Treasures
antique store in Savoy. Because Allison has an ardent
affinity for old household items, she turned in for a
quick look-see. Among the items on display outside the
entryway was something I had not seen in almost 70
years, an old milk strainer (Figs. 1 and 2). I dare say few
people entering Timeless Treasures would have
recognized what that old rusty funnel-shaped object
represented. But, I did and promptly entered a personal
time warp.
Fig. 1. Looking down into the rusty old milk strainer.
Fig. 2. Milk strainer positioned on a milk can as it would
have been when straining milk for sale to the
“creamery.”
Back in the days when most farmers kept a few
milk cows to provide milk, cream, and butter for the
family, as well as milk to sell for a bit of income, a milk
strainer was as common a household fixture as was the
ubiquitous rolling pin. The strainer was used to remove
particulate contaminants that had fallen into the bucket
while the cows were being milked by hand. In using the
strainer, a circular “milk pad” was fitted onto the
bottom of the strainer. A perforated plate was placed
atop the pad to hold it flat, the plate in turn held in place
by a circular ring (Fig. 3). When milk was poured into
the top of the strainer, unwanted flotsam was filtered
out as the milk flowed into the milk can below. Not a
very sanitary process, given all the dissolved
contamination that remained in the milk. Remember,
however, those days were long before the current
hygienic hyperbole.
Fig. 3. Lower right: milk pad, composed of a layer of
absorptive material sandwiched in between thin sheets
of porous paper. Lower left: perforated plate that held
the pad in place. Top: spring ring that held the
perforated plate in place.
As I looked down upon the rusty old milk strainer,
vivid memories of a long distant past came flooding
back. And, with them came the realization of just far I
have “traveled” from where it all began, a South-Central
Illinois farm in the early 1930s. The journey I have
made has taken me places that were far beyond any
comprehension I could have conjured up, or even
understood, in those very young days. Memories,
visions and other long-suppressed sensations raced
through my mind, and with them the appreciation of
how fortunate I have been. Things I long have taken for
granted were placed in proper perspective.
I have had highly successful academic and military
careers, neither of which could have been anticipated
when a milk strainer was a daily, albeit perverse, part of
my every day life. I graduated from the University of
Illinois, obtained a doctorate from the University of
Michigan and had a long academic research career,
beginning with eight years at the University of
Connecticut, followed by 28 years at the University of
Illinois. Concurrent with my academic pursuits, I
managed to fit in a military career, eventually retiring as
a Colonel in the Army Reserves. My current personal
situation is far-removed from that I experienced during
those early years.
Sight of the milk strainer carried me back in time to
the depths of the Great Depression. We lived in an uninsulated two-story farmhouse. Heat in winter was
provided by two wood-burning stoves, a “Great
Majestic” cook stove in the kitchen and a larger
“Riverside Oak” heating stove in the sitting room. In
winter, the unheated upstairs bedrooms were freezing
cold at night, as were the downstairs rooms when we
first got up in the morning. It took at least an hour for
the stoves to heat up the kitchen and sitting room once
the grates had been shaken down, firing up the banked,
smoldering wood from the night before. Even so, the
stoves barely took the chill off the room air.
On
especially cold nights, we would sit close to the sitting
room stove with our socking feet propped up on the
shiny side skirts, roasting in front and freezing on our
backside. In summer, our only relief from the stifling
heat was open windows. When this was insufficient to
allow for restful sleeping, and it was not raining, we
often slept on mattresses laid out in the yard.
We had no electricity. Light for the house was
provided by coal oil lamps, scarcely sufficient for
reading, even when sitting up close to the lamp.
Cooking was done on the wood-burning kitchen stove.
There was no running water. Drinking water was
carried, a couple buckets at a time, from a well over one
hundred yards away, down a long hill from the house.
Our wash water was obtained from a cistern that
collected rainwater from the roof. Water was pumped
from the cistern, by a hand pump, to a sink in the small
washroom off the kitchen. Water for washing laundry
and dishes and for bathing was heated on the kitchen
stove. We had a battery-powered radio, use of which
had to be limited. Battery life was short and money for
replacements was tight. An outhouse was located about
fifty feet from the back of the house. The distance
seemed much longer on cold winter nights.
Because of low farm prices during the Depression,
our net income varied from $300-$1,500 per year,
resulting in little buying power even in those days of
depreciated prices. We grew or collected most of what
we ate from an extensive garden for vegetables, cherry
and peach trees at the end of the garden, blackberries,
raspberries, dewberries, and gooseberries picked from
patches in the pasture, chickens raised for meat, fish
“logged” from the nearby Macoupin Creek, milk, cream
and churned butter from a single milk cow, and sugar
cured pork from a couple of hogs butchered during the
winter. There was little money for non-essentials or
“store-bought” meat, especially beef. We fattened “feed
cattle” for sale, but had no means by which to preserve
beef.
My Mom did the laundry on a washboard in a large
round galvanized washtub (which also served as our
bathtub), wringing out the pieces by hand, including
heavy overalls, and hanging them to dry on an outdoor
clothesline. These weekly tasks were hard on her
hands, especially in the cold of winter. Because I was an
only child, the duties of washing the evening dishes and
other kitchen utensils fell upon me. They were washed
in an 18-inch diameter wash pan, the water heated on
the cook stove. The order of washing was—glassware,
silverware, pots and pans, and last of all, the everpresent milk strainer. By the time I got to the strainer,
the water was cold, exacerbating the onerous task of
removing the film of milk, as I struggled to keep the
strainer in the barely larger wash pan. My young mettle
was tested each night before the strainer was washed
and dried. I never complained. That simply was the
way of life in those days. My lot was not unique. The
only thing different was that many families had a
daughter who washed the dishes and had to contend
with the annoying milk strainer.
As the economy recovered following World War II,
money became more available for non-essential
commodities and life became a bit better. My parents
moved twice after the war, each time to houses more
modern than the one before. By then, the Federal REA
(Rural Electrification Act) had extended electricity to
remote farms. Electricity now lighted our house.
Although exceptionally dim by today’s standards, the
incandescent light fixtures were a vast improvement
over coal oil lamps. We purchased an electric radio,
which we could listen to as much as we wanted. We
acquired a coal oil kitchen stove and coal replaced wood
for the sitting room stove. My Dad bought my Mom an
electric ringer washing machine, actually one that
originally had been powered by a gasoline engine,
which had been replaced by a small electric motor. Still
we did not have running water and hot water was
heated on the kitchen stove. Laundry continued to be
hung to dry on an outside clothesline. There also
remained the outhouse with its cold winter-night
journeys. And, the cumbersome milk strainer continued
to be washed by hand.
After high school I was fortunate to be able to
attend the University of Illinois, the first in my family to
go to college. Although there were the new tribulations
of writing reports and studying for exams, the dorms
had “indoor plumbing.” No more cold winter trips to
the outhouse. Washing the milk strainer also was a
thing of the past. Both distressing annoyances began
fading from my mind, accelerated by increasing
demands of college life.
After graduating college, I married and moved to
Massachusetts to go on active duty in the Army. There
we lived in modern apartments. No trips to the
outhouse and no milk strainer to wash, both of which
became distant memories. When my tour of duty was
over, we began graduate work at the University of
Michigan, where, for the first two years, we lived in
apartments. All the time we were living in the
apartments, we did our laundry in a small portable
washer, wringing the items by hand and hanging them
to dry on an outdoors clothesline.
After two years in apartments, we purchased a
small, winterized cabin north of Ann Arbor, where we
lived the next four years. The house was heated by a
fuel oil space heater that was barely able to warm the
house in winter. We bought an electric ringer washer,
but still had to dry the laundry on an outdoor
clothesline. Thoughts of trips to the outhouse and
washing the milk strainer became even more remote.
Upon moving to our first academic position at the
University of Connecticut, we lived in an apartment for
four years. There for the first time we had an automatic
washer and dryer. No more hanging out the laundry on
cold winter days. We then built a modest, but
comfortable, house with central heating in Storrs, in
which we lived another four years. Finally, we joined
the faculty of the University of Illinois and bought a new
much larger, more modern, house in Champaign. For
the first time we had central air conditioning.
Temperatures remained comfortable throughout the
house all seasons. In both houses we had automatic
washers and dryers. And, we had dishwashers. No
more dishes to wash by hand. From when I left the
farm, each time I moved, my lot in life improved and
memories of the outhouse and milk strainer
disappeared more deeply into the recesses of my brain.
Oh, once and awhile when socializing with friends,
we would talk about the “olden days”, back when we
were kids. None of our friends had grown up under
such primitive conditions, as I had experienced. I tried
to explain to them about winter trips to the outhouse
and struggling to wash the ungainly milk strainer. Not
sure they ever comprehended what life really had been
like back on the farm. I would go on to say that, so long
as I had an indoor bathroom (I used more descriptive
terminology, not suitable for a written memoir) and did
not have to wash the milk strainer, I would never
complain of my station in life. Except for those brief
interludes of reminiscences, however, I really did not
think of the milk strainer.
It took the sight of the rusty old milk strainer
outside the door of Timeless Treasures to give me
pause to step back and remember from whence I came.
Back then, primitive conditions on the farm, while
stressful, were simply the way people lived. Most of our
neighbors and friends’ conditions were the same as
ours. We knew no better. That just was the way it was.
To ensure I never again lose sight of my beginnings and
how lucky I have been, I purchased the old milk
strainer. Most of the rust was removed and the strainer
restored close to how it looked when a functional item
so long ago. Usage and age have taken their toll on the
strainer. It shows the wear and tear of straining
thousands of gallons of milk and years of neglected
disuse after no longer being needed. The strainer now
rests on our fireplace hearth (Fig. 4), a continuous
reminder of the journey I have made, a pilgrimage
manifested by the presence of a rusty old milk strainer.
Fig. 4. Milk strainer sitting on fireplace hearth, a
daily reminder of how far I have come in life.