Aunt Marie's New Privy

by Charles Sawyer

blues4charlie@gmail.com

The old folks called it "The Old Fashioned" but to younger generations it was just The Privy. This privy was no outhouse -- you didn't have to walk outdoors to get there. It was part of the breezeway, which ran from the house to the barn, a long stretch that incorporated a milk room, a woodshed, a tool shed and space for two wagons or automobiles. It was just beyond the milk room, right across from the woodshed, It had a wooden door, with an iron latch that locked from the inside.

Indoor plumbing arrived a generation or two before ours but at an earlier time the privy was the only toilet for the three generations living under that roof. In my time we had flush toilets, upstairs and downstairs. Still, the privy got regular use, mainly because is was close to the barn. If you were working in the barn and you had to go, you didn't just stroll in the house for comfort because the smell you brought with you was intolerable, not to mention that you might track in something that would leave a smell after you returned to the barn. It was just a rule: before coming into the kitchen you stopped in the cloakroom, hung your barn coat and kicked off your boots, before entering the house proper. The cloakroom served as an air-lock between civilized and scatological living and the privy was on the scatological side.

It was a small, rectangular room, without any appointments except for the raised platform with four holes, each with a hinged cover. From right to left, hole #1 was about 8" across, right-sized for small children. There were two steps up to #1 for the kids; the higher step was hinged, opening on a space that held toilet paper rolls. Hole #2 was square, about 15" on a side, square meaning standing room only. Next, at positions 3 and 4, were two, equal-sized adult holes. If Goldilocks stopped by, she could take her pick of round holes.

Anthropologists might speculate on the implications of the pair of adult-sized holes and wonder if the social conventions at the time the privy was the only place to go when you had to go included tandem, parallel use. Did 19th century farm life include socializing while eliminating? Multi-person usage might have been a necessity, considering the privy had fourteen subscribers in a bygone era.

One summer after the war (WW II, perhaps the summer of 1946) Aunt Marie decreed a project to renovate the privy as a changing room for kids' swimming parties. Aunt Marie, my mother's sister, was a special case in the family history. She was married to a successful haberdasher with a shop on Main Street. She was childless and so she took a maternal interest in her nieces and nephews. Though she lived in a grand house in town, the farm was her childhood home and still her homestead. The privy was her privy, and still her privy, even if she lived in town with a man my mother called a "gold-plated piss pot."

Our swimming hole was a small sandy-bottom pond right behind the farmhouse. There was a wooden dock and a diving board. In those days it had clear water and a small beach at one end. Aunt Marie imagined that we would have swimming parties and that would require a place to change. She was industrious and resourceful. In her mind the privy would be the cabana of our swimming patio, if it could just be appropriately decorated.

There was no thought of retiring the privy, nailing the covers down. No, the privy would continue as the occasional relief station. So the question Aunt Marie faced was How do you decorate a shit house for kids to change into their bathing suits? You start with a coat of paint, bright color, preferably. She chose canary yellow, with green trim. But even with a color that loud, the walls needed something more, something decorative, something stylish. Aunt Marie had a ready solution: a stack of old Travelers Insurance calendars based on Currier and Ives prints. One thing you found in most homes and businesses before the age of television and the Internet was a wall calendar, hung in plain site. Calendars were everywhere, which made them an ideal advertising medium. Travelers seemed to have a lock on that market, at least in our house. Here's an example from 1942:

It was a fold-down, double-page display, the month listed on the lower page, a reproduction of a Currier and Ives lithograph on the page above. Notice the distinctive font of the numerals. They are known as non-line numerals because they go above and below the bottom and top lines. 3, 4, 5, 7, and 9 go below the line, 6 and 8 go above; only 0, 1 and 2 stay in-line. Fonts are powerful message vehicles. This font compares to the faux-gentile gesture of holding out your pinky finger when you raise your teacup. That's the key here, fake refinery. And nothing could be more appropriate for Aunt Marie's attempt to transform the privy into a more varied social space than prints by Currier and Ives with their theme of nostalgia for a pastoral age. In this case, the gone-by age was the age of the privy, an age when 14 people competed for time on one of those four holes. Perhaps that summer of '46 was devoted to papering over our dear aunt's memory of her childhood when she used the 8-inch hole, to paper it over with idyllic images of skating parties where ladies in long skirts cavorted with men in top hats, or portraits of race horses pulling sulky carts, driven by mustachioed drivers.

Aunt Marie was a strong and complicated personality and it's foolish to suppose I could understand her motives from 60+ years hence. She occupied a special place in the constellation of people descended from John Jordan whose farm still bears his name 75 years after his death. Marie was the oldest of four children born to Catherine Jordan, herself one of seven siblings who lived their entire lives under the same roof. [Catherine, it should be noted, was the only one of the seven to marry.]

But back to the privy and its decorations. There was no shortage of calendars. Each calendar had 12 prints, 16"x 11". The prints from two years' calendars would cover an area 5 feet wide, 6 feet tall. Five or six calendars would be all Marie needed to cover every square inch of wall space in the cramped space of the privy. That's what we did. Only the ceiling was left bare. The effect was overbearing. The privy became a chamber of the idyllic past.

Looking at Currier and Ives prints today, the impression is how very quaint they are, but it was not always so. In their day, these prints held a place occupied by newspaper photographs in a later age. They documented great events, like battles and great fires, and they fixed in the public mind an idea of America that still has a purchase on our minds today. Some of them remind us of embarrassing mythology, like this one called "Washington at Mount Vernon" but could accurately be called "Founder of Our Nation Inspects His Chattel."

Of the roughly 70 images I pondered as a child, some of them when perched on the little hole, only one lives in my memory with clarity. It had the title "Life of a Hunter: A Tight Fix". No wonder it left an enduring imprint in my brain, just look:

You couldn't dream a better title than "A Tight Fix". The image catches this man in a moment of mortal peril. What happens in the next 20 or 30 seconds will tell if he lives or dies. The remnants of his rifle lie scattered in the snow. His comrade takes aim at the bear. His jacket is wrapped around his left arm, like cloth armor. In his right hand he holds the hope of avoiding annihilation. We don't know what happened in the minutes leading up to this, how his musket was shattered; and we can only imagine what happens in the seconds after this frozen moment.

As a boy of 5 this image overpowered me; it is the kind of image that can give a boy a hollow feeling in his stomach and a cringing feeling in his groin. It makes mortal peril tangible. It may bring bad dreams, night terrors, and the like. Lucky I didn't wake up screaming about the bear.

The lithograph is made from a painting and it stands apart from all other Currier and Ives images. No other Currier and Ives has this stop-action, photographic quality. In this respect it anticipates the world of photojournalism. It began as an oil painting by Arthur Tate. What came as a surprise was discovering that this is not the only depiction of the hunter's life by Tait, and not the first. This Tate painting never made it to a Currier and Ives lithograph.

In 1858, Arthur Fitzwilliam Tate (1819-1905) painted his first picture titled The Life of a Hunter: A Tight Fix. After being singled out for praise at the National Academy of design that Spring, the painting was purchased for $500 and was not seen again until 1967 when it was discovered at the Elks Lodge in Redlands, California. The painting is now in the collection of Richard Manoogian.

After initially being well-received, the painting stirred up controversy with the press and art critics who claimed that Tait did not acknowledge that he had assistance on the canvas and who also criticized the composition and design. Following all the publicity, Currier and Ives commissioned Tait to paint a second canvas of the same subject afterwhich this lithograph of 1861 was made. The second canvas was also exhibited at the National Academy of Design and its present whereabouts are unknown.

The lithographic stone which was used to produce Life of a Hunter. "A tight fix". was accidentally broken and no more than a dozen impressions of the print are known to have survived. The print quickly became one of the most valuable lithographs of the time and, as with the first Tait painting, attracted both interest and scrutiny. One of the more interesting criticisms came from a professor who claimed that Tait's composition was borrowed from an illustration in a biography of Daniel Boone. The same charge of plagiarism has been made against the first canvas in 1858 when a critic claimed that Tait had taken his composition from the widely read Davy Crockett almanacs. [Note: the print sold for $34,500 in January, 1995.]