This ramble started from reading an article on “Concrete Cowboy,” a Netflix movie about a Black urban horse-riding group in Philadelphia (starring Idris Elba, who’s always fun – which reminds me, if you ever get the chance, see “Beasts of No Nation” (2015), with Elba as supporting actor and the utterly stunning Abraham Attah, age 14, looking about 9, the star, about child soldiers in Africa).
Apparently, Black “urban cowboys” is a phenomenon in many American cities. That article, in turn, pointed me to a youtube short on the origin of the term “cowboy,” which started as a term for Black cowhands, then somehow spread wider. That story is fascinating. See it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkmD-vpQ4Qs
Part of what follows is a repeat from an earlier piece, but with copious additions to keep you awake.
I moved with my parents to Powelton Village in Philly in 1947, a Victorian enclave across the Schuylkill River from the Art Museum. At that time and into the early ’50s, a lot of stuff was delivered by horse and cart – including the mail to some of the narrow alleys down by the Delaware River.
Aristocrat Ice Cream had neat wagons. Can’t remember most of the other commercial outfits (maybe Abbott Dairy), but at least until the 1951 city charter broke the 64-year Republican stranglehold on city government that had led to slow strangulation, our West Philly trash was collected by horse and cart.
A line of carts trotted along, each an open metal cube with stout rings sticking up from its four corners. Some form of recycling was still in effect from WWII: One cart would take cans, the next glass, etc. (No idea when or why that recycling ceased.) The last cart was followed by a shambling fellow with a shovel, who heaved the accumulated horse droppings up into the cart. Over on Lancaster Ave., a mobile crane would hook onto the corner rings to dump each cart into an open truck.
Food garbage was collected separately. You set your little can out by the curb, and a cart from one pig farmer or another who collect it for hog food. (Sounds like an excellent environmental cycle. It was, for the pigs, I suppose, but, unregulated, it was also a major source of the continuing bouts of trichinosis circulating through the nation’s pork supply.)
Today, I still delight to the smell of horseshit.
Another unlikelihood of the time was the Curtis Publishing electric trucks. Yes, electric – each fueled by 45 car batteries secreted under the truck’s floor planks.
Boxy but oddly elegant, they crawled along the downtown streets at a maximum 12 mph, hauling massive rolls of paper to print the Saturday Evening Post and the Ladies Home Journal, or taking the finished mags to the post office. These beasts, dating back to 1912, are still running here and there around the country, long after Curtis and the Post folded. Nice article on them at:
https://bringatrailer.com/2018/01/20/worked-for-52-years-still-running-1912-c-t-4wd-electric-truck/
Odd times to look back on, when philthy Philly died at 5 pm and had no restaurants worth the bother except in Chinatown, where they were also the only places you could get a meal out on a Sunday night.
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Some total nonsense (set to the old spiritual, “Twelve Gates to the City”):
Oh, what a beautiful kitty
Oh, what a beautiful kitty
Oh, what a beautiful kitty
Four legs to the kitty
hallelujah.
There’s two legs in the front,
Two legs in the back,
Two legs to the left,
Two legs to the right,
Yet only
Four legs to the kitty
hallelujah.
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Happy Easter! And remember to celebrate the resurrection of a Jew with a big ham.
lickhaven 