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Over the Back Fence By HANK HENRY Nostalgic sounds are missed W hen was the last time you heard someone beating a rug? My wife, Nora, and I were talking just the other day about how day-to-day sounds that were commonplace before World War II have disappeared as technology changed. Rug beating used to be a regular spring cleaning ritual. In those days, all of the throw rugs and area rugs in the house were brought out into the back yard, draped over a clothes line and pounded with a baseball bat or with a metal rug swatter from a hardware store. The thump of wood against rug was like no other sound, a strong but partly muffled thud. It was heavy work, and each stroke was usually accompanied by a loud grunt from the man or boy wielding the wood. Fathers and mothers would try to convince the kids that beating the rugs would get them into shape and would be just like playing baseball. It took only a few swats to convince the children that it wasn't. Another rarely-heard sound these days is the whir of a pushed lawn mower. They're still made (probably for people in large cities with postage-stamp yards) but most home lawn mowers are gasoline powered these days. The early morning tinkle of the milkman's bottles has disappeared, too. Nora's father was in the dairy business during the 1930s. He carried the bottles in wire containers which held quarts, pints and half pints. On cold mornings, the milk would freeze, and the bottles' cardboard lids would be sitting an inch or so above the lip of the bottle. Kids loved to eat the frozen cream. The conversion to paper cartons after the war was the first indication of bigger changes to come in the dairy industry. One of the changes was the death of home delivery. Like many other home grown businesses, the dairy industry after the war became a "bigger is better" battlefield, and many regional dairies were taken over by conglomerates. Along with the tinkle of those bottles, we've also lost the peal of church bells rung manually, the "oogah" horns of Model T Fords, and the hand pumped insecticide sprayer. Another sound that's just a memory is the whistle of those steam locomotives I used to hear in the 1930s when my family went to visit Grandma in east Texas. That sound was so lonesome, so melancholy, that it seemed to perfectly describe the feelings of people during the Great Depression. It sounded a little like "whooo-ee" with the tail end of the sound going down the scale. Anyone under the age of 50 or so may not be familiar with that sound. It was very distinctive, nothing like the sound made by modern diesel powered trains, which have air horns, not steam whistles. At Grandma's place we also heard pumps drawing oil out of the ground and pushing it into storage tanks. After spending lots of money on exploration in east Texas in the 1920s several oil companies made strikes so big that most of the new wells were "gushers," with oil spewing a hundred feet or more in the air before the drilling crew could cap the well. Out behind Grandma's house and barn was ten acres of pasture land. In the middle of it was a circular depression about three or four feet deep and a couple of hundred feet across. Relatives told me that was where a wildcatter had sunk a dry hole, dashing their hopes that he would find oil on Grandma's place. Many wells were brought in during that era in east Texas. The tall wooden derrick that sent the drilling pipe thousands of feet down into the earth came down after the strike, and was replaced by pumps which ran night and day. Between the sounds of the trains and the rhythmical ka-chunk of the oil well pumps, there was plenty to hear while trying to go to sleep. Sirens on police and fire vehicles have changed dramatically, too, since the 1920s. In the early days, sirens were lowered by a cable to rub against a tire to make them howl -- primitive, but it produced a piercing wail. After World War II, Europeans perfected sirens that made noise electronically, rather than mechanically, and these spread all over the world. They were more effective, with their odd mixture of siren and horn and other noises, but old-time firemen and policemen still remember those mechanical sirens with nostalgia. (Hank Henry is a retired Jackson County commissioner and a former radio and television announcer. Call him at 772-9055.) Prime Times front page Mail Tribune front page Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA