A case for cranking

The Best of Stubble Mulch

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A recent study found that anyone less than 18 years old had never cranked down a car window.

Hardly anyone alive today has cranked down a car window or cranked up a wall-hanging telephone.

People don’t crank anything anymore.

I suppose that’s because there just isn’t much left that requires cranking.

Electricity did a world of good when it flowed out on REA lines to the farms in the 1920s and 1930s, but it pretty much ruined the art of cranking.

Oh, sure, there may be a manually cranked pencil sharpener or a car window around somewhere, but nothing to compare with the cranks of the past.

Kids today have no role models in cranking and as a result, all now have ill-defined crank muscles. If this nation ever goes to war and a call goes out for people with cranking experience, we’ll have about as much chance of winning as a grasshopper has in a chicken coop.

I predict that in another 20 years, human crank muscles will have atrophied and will be as hard to find as left-handed lefse turners. History will record our time as the Dawn of the Crankless Age.

I haven’t rolled up my sleeves and really cranked anything since those washdays years ago. Wringer washing machines were once common in every home.

The sale of the Maytag wringer washer peaked in the late 1940s. By then, they were electronically operated, but our family still had the old fashioned, hand cranked model.

Everything in our house was used and second hand. The only new thing we ever had were kittens. There was always a fresh platoon of them, parading out of the back shed as if they owned the place. At our house, dogs came and went, but cats just seemed to accumulate.

Some of my most vivid recollections are of cranking the old used Maytag wringer, watching a never-ending column of long johns slide by. The window to my world then was the trap door of Dad’s long johns on washday.

Machines with cranks in or on them came to mean more than memories. I was so enamored with cranks that once I decided to start a collection of antiques that cranked. It didn’t work out.

At antique stores, blue-haired ladies feather-dusting carnival glass would just laugh when I asked them if they had any old cranks around. Most said no, their husband had died years ago.

My earliest memory of cranking goes back to the 1930s. Dad would take us for a ride in the country to see the dust and the grasshoppers. Our old car needed to be cranked to start.

He was out front, spitting on his hand and instructing Mom on how to adjust the magneto. Then he’d dip out of sight below the radiator.

He cranked and the car bobbed and rolled like a duck riding out a carp migration. Dried chicken droppings on the car hood broke loose and tumbled to the ground. Our little heads rolled on our little necks and Mom’s spit curls sagged on her forehead.

Then the car would sputter, fume, cough and settle down to a reasonable Richter reading.

But my recurring memory of cranking was the washday crank. It wasn’t what you’d call your class crank. While rich kids were engaged in glamour cranks like cranking cars, telephones, sausage makers or heads off protesting chickens, I was stuck with the laundry.

I’m still a heck of a crank around our house.

Just ask the kids.

If you’d like to comment, email the author at cfcecil@swiftel.net.