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An
excerpt from the not-so-politically
correct 1960 US Census
Questionnaire... |
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Is this person - White, Negro,
American Indian, Japanese, Chinese, Filipino,
Hawaiian, Part Hawaiian, Aleut, Eskimo, (etc.)?
____________________
How many rooms are in your house
or apartment? (Count a kitchen as a room but do
not count bathrooms)
Number of rooms ____________________
Is there hot and cold running
water in this house or building? (Check one)
Hot and cold running water inside the
house or building......................... O
Only cold running water
inside..............................................................
O
Running water on property but not inside
building.................................. O
No running
water.................................................................................
O
Is there a flush toilet in this
house or building? (Check one)
Yes, for the use of this household
only..................................................
O
Yes, but shared with another
household................................................
O
No flush toilet for the use of this
household............................................ O
Is there a bathtub or shower in
this house or building? (Check one)
Yes, for the use of this household
only..................................................
O
Yes, but shared with another
household................................................
O
No bathtub or shower for the use of this household............................... O
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The
giant furnace in the basement boiler room of
our six-story building would crap out
occasionally and we'd be left without hot
water for a while, so of course I knew all
about washing up in cold water. But my
friend Charles Alt would always figure out a
way to get it working again. Mr. Alt
was the aged superintendent of Two-Eight-O.
Mr. and Mrs. Alt hated the "new-fangled"
television and refused to own a TV.
But they had this huge Stromberg Carlson
cabinet model radio that could tune in Tokyo
without even going to short wave and I was
often invited into the Alt's living room to
listen to Gabriel Heater's 6PM news report.
Heater, apparently, had been a radio
anchorman since the days of Marconi.
In my mind he was no John Cameron Swayze but
I trusted Mr. Alt's judgment.
Between my dad bringing at least two New
York papers home every night
(there were still about five major dailies
in the City back then)
and Mr. Alt turning me on to Gabriel Heater,
it's no wonder that I grew up to be a news
junky.
For the most part, while the quarters were
extremely close, our three-room apartment
had all the comforts of home -- including an
indoor bathroom and a black-and-white
television set in the living room near my
parents' Castro Convertible sofa bed.
Those old-fashioned steam heat radiators in
each room threw off so many BTU's that we
had to sleep with the windows cracked open
in winter. To this day I've never
lived or stayed anyplace where the toilet
flush pressure was higher than it was in our
Brooklyn apartment. And the fluoride-free
tap water tasted as pure as any bottled
spring water I've ever tried, although it
tended to run rusty whenever there was a
major fire in the neighborhood that required
extensive use of the fire hydrants.
We also knew plenty about peeing outdoors
because the last thing any of us was about
to do in the midst of a Ringalevio marathon
or a stickball game was run home to use the
bathroom.
While it was difficult for a
ten-and-a-half-year old to understand, 50
years ago, why our government needed to know
about the modern-ness of people's plumbing, it is
just as difficult for many Information Age
adults to understand, today, why we even
have to waste the money to conduct a census
anymore.
Is it the temporary jobs? Is it the extra
work and revenue for the Postal Service?
Is it a gerrymandering plot
(especially now that the Bureau of the
Census has been moved into the White House)?
Or is it
just Big Brother trying to convince us that
he hasn't been monitoring nearly every
aspect of our lives since the last census
and couldn't possibly figure out anything about us if we don't send in those dopey
questionnaires?
It's times like these when a high-pressure
flush toilet might come in handy.