Diane Young

Old Fashion Bathrooms

By Lydia Robart

We used to use them all our lives. We never used to have toilet paper them days, we used to use Sears catalogs. That was the only facility we had. When I was little, (about 7 years old), I went up to Anchorage. That was the first time I seen something flush! I got scared of it! So the outhouse was the only thing we used to go bathroom in. It wasn’t very sanitary. It had little holes where you can sit down on. But when the first toilet paper came out, it was very soft and comfortable, before when we would take that Sears catalog paper and just rub it together to make it soft, and just wipe ourselves up. (Almost all of the community of Port Graham had a outhouses), the only outhouses we have standing now is Tom’s and Sergius Moonin’s When you think of an outhouse in he comical things, ya think of a moon on a little door that opens.

We used it until 1968. Then H.E.A. got in, things started to get modernized. So you guys are lucky, when we were kids, we used to smoke a lot in’em. We never got caught I don’t know why!?! It was a hide-out thing for us.

The outhouse hole I s about 10 ft. deep, sometimes it depends on how fast we filled it up! They would dig a hole down deep, then build a small building, sort of like an “L” shape, and some were kind of big. After it filled up, they would move it and bury all the rest, and build another one next to it. Some would be burned down because of sanitation. After Alaska became a state the white man noticed we had been using outhouses, so they decided to modernize us, and that was the deal, to modernize and take our outhouses.

Our health serves would come in, (we lived right by a water place) and they would tell us about sanitation problems. They showed us films on how you can get sick from germs and bacteria from the water. Them days we didn’t have chlorine in it, them we had to carry our water. We drank spring water, we used spring for washing clothes too. Sometimes when it rained, we would put our tubs to fill water up with. Our clothes would smell springy and make them fluffier! The crazy dryers and washers now days, clothes don’t smell that good anymore!!

Volume 1