Why is there a moon on the outhouse door? Do you prefer Monkey-Ward or Sears?

I usually don’t talk about disgusting things, but you brought it up! Yeah, I was raised with an outhouse, until I was ten years old.(1955). The kids in the family had to dig the outhouse holes. The outhouse was mounted on skids, so it was moved by hooking a rope to the bottom and skidding it over the next hole. The two and three holer outhouses were not for community use like every one likes to chuckle about, but was simply because there was more room beneath. You chose the hole with the most space beneath it. There was a bag of lime in the corner with a tin scoop beside it. If flies were being attracted, you were expected to sprinkle a little lime over the accumulating pile beneath, for sanitary reasons. The outhouse was routinely washed with a hose and scrub brush, and Lysol soap. And of course, slivers were sanded smooth, and cracks were filled with Durham’s Wood Putty. The really fancy outhouses were routinely painted. All together, it was a much cleaner facility than our modern porta-potties, because it was much deeper. No splash back.

We were modern folk, we had toilet paper! It was mounted on a broomstick fastened to the wall. But, there were those special occasions that happened when there was no store bought paper available. Ah, we finally get to the questions! When no store bought paper was available, we used the Monkey-Wards book. As soon as you sat down you ripped a page out of the book and started crumpling it up and scrubbing it together, the goal was to get it as soft and nice as you could. I always thought that was why it took girls so much longer than boys to go to the bathroom, because they have so much more stuff to deal with… But, I was wrong, modern women with modern toilets still seem to take too long.

One of the things that I miss about those days, is back then there were only two choices to make; Chevy or Ford, Homelite or McCullough, Coke or 7-up, Sears or Monkey-ward. We were a Monky-Ward family.

I’m going to guess about the moon on the door; I think the moon was because, that was the way Al Capp, that wrote the ’Lil Abner comic strip always drew it. I never saw an outhouse with a moon on the door until modern days. Sorry!