Last summer, i had my knives sharpened by the grindstone* man who comes round in a small truck.. he has a bell that goes ding..........ding as he slowly goes up and down the local streets. My father was a butcher, and always went to a store to get his knives sharpened, (and took the ones from home too!) but i have always used the grindstone man.
*grindstone is grindst'n. with grind rhyming with wind, (moving air) not grind/wind {a clock})
Poor areas in NY (and i was poor as kid!) still had horse drawn wagons that came round to collect scrap metal (post WW II by dozen years!) and horse drawn vegetable venders. (the milk man drove a truck). in my childhood, the grindstone man had a bicycle like contraption to drive the grindstone.(which he walked about with.. something like a cross between a bicycle and wheel barrow!)
(our apartment building was heated with coal, too, for the longest time.., and i remember the days when the coal truck came to deliver the tons of coal.. we always grabbed a peice to use as 'black chalk'.
there was an ice man too, (up to about 1963) in a motorize truck, and i never knew any person that used him.. but he delivered ice to the fish store, and to one of the small 'deli's', you could by bags of ice for cool drinks, or for ice chest when you went on a picnic. (most of refriderators were very small, and you didn't get much ice)
The ice man would grind up the blocks of ice as he delivered them to the fishmonger, and we kids would all grab the sawdust covered chunks to suck on.
a food post
