Kitchens were different then, too—not only what came out of them, but their smells and sounds. A hot pie cooling smells different from a frozen pie thawing. Oilcloth and linoleum and apples in an open bowl and ruffled rubber aprons make a different aromatic mix from Formica and ceramic tile and mangoes in an acrylic fruit ripener and plastic-coated aprons printed with “Who invited all these tacky people?” And the kitchen sounds. I am not sure that today’s kitchen is noisier. But the noises are different. Today you get the song of the food processor and the blender, the intermittent hum of the reefer and the freezer, the buzz-slosh-and-grunt of the dishwasher, the violently audible digestive processes of the waste disposal in the sink. Then it was the whir and clatter of the hand-powered eggbeater, the thunk-thunk-thunk of somebody mashing potatoes, or, in green-pea season, the crisp pop of pea pod and the rattle-rattle-rattle of peas into the pan.
—Peg Bracken (b. 1918)
There one that ruffled in a manly pose
For all his timid heart, there that slow man,
That meditative man, John Synge, and those
Impetuous men, Shawe-Taylor and Hugh Lane,
Found pride established in humility,
A scene well set and excellent company.
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
Nearby Bodie was a notoriously tough camp, where “a man for breakfast” was so frequent an occurrence that the phrase “bad man from Bodie” was coined to describe those residents who were still in the land of the living. So impressive was its reputation for wickedness that once when an Aurora family considered moving to the town, the young daughter of the family finished her evening prayers with a tearful, “Goodbye, God, we’re going to Bodie.” Aurora ruffled whatever virtuous feathers it could muster and pointed scornfully. Bodie resentfully charged that the child has been deliberately misquoted—that what she had actually said was “Good! By God, we’re going to Bodie”!
—Administration in the State of Neva, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)