Ice business proved to be cool success

(It was on Sept. 30, 2000, that Erik Daarstad and I met with Bob Selle in his home to interview him for the “Sandpoint Centennial” movie.

As he walked again the paths of yesteryear, Bob felt again the excitement of his life experiences and his words reflected his enthusiasm. In his way of speaking, them became “em,” because became “cause,” and anything to be emphasized was done with a “yeah” or, if very important, “yeah, yeah.” Today, Bob shares, in his own words, about the days before the refrigerator ended the delivery of ice and fuel by a horse drawn wagon. Bob Selle died at his Sunnyside home on Sept. 1 2004, at the age of 88.)

Question: Bob, you mentioned that your Uncle John had an ice harvest business. Where was that and what is ice harvesting?

Selle: Well, he iced up the iceboxes in people’s homes and they kept the ice down on the city beach. The big icehouse was on Lake Street down in Dearborn Slough, between Second and Third Avenue.

That was all slough in those days — the water came back out of the lake, out of the river, backed up there, a big hole, wetlands, in other words. Yeah.

This icehouse was on the face of Lake Street and his office and his barn for his teams were on Lake Street, between Third and Fourth Avenue.

He also had this big house, to me as I remember being young, it was huge, huge building and they’d go down when the ice was the right thickness and cut the ice out of the lake cause in those days, see, we got winter every winter.

You could bank on it. We’d get two or three storms and I think they’d wait till the ice was about sixteen inches thick fore they’d cut cause they wanted to make about three hundred pound kegs.

I remember this real well now because my dad used to work on that and I’d go down there when I was 10 or 11 years old. They’d take a fresno (phonetic spelling) and clean the snow off of the ice. A fresno is what they pulled with a team and it was just a big bucket with a handle on it, you know.

The team pulled it and they would hold the handle and scoop up the snow. When it was full, they would dump it and then they’d go back around and get another load. They’d clean all the snow off and then they had a gadget that had spikes in it like a harrow that marked the ice and they drug that along and they would mark the ice, you see, with the team.

One way they’d make a cake of ice about, oh, I’d say about three feet long, probably about that wide and whatever the thickness of the ice was.

They marked both ways. Then they’d chop a hole to get a start and they had what they called ice saws and they would cut the ice that way.  They cut quite fast. The ice saws had rakers and cutting teeth just like a wood crosscut saw for cutting timber.

When they’d get pretty near through with a cake, why they’d just pull that up and bust it, you know, and then they’d float ’em. They’d get one out to get a start; they’d pull it out with a team.

They’d put a couple of planks down on the bottom of the ice block and then slide them up and out of there. They’d cut a great big patch, float it over, and pull em up on the sleigh.

The sleigh and the horse would take em up to the icehouse. Then they’d put em down — they’d put a layer of sawdust, a layer of ice, a layer of sawdust, until they’d fill in the whole thing. They’d fill the icehouse clear full, all covered in sawdust.

Question: Where was the icehouse located?

Selle: It was right of Lake Street between Third and Fourth, down in the Dearborn slough.

They also had a wood yard there, see. Coal, they sold coal and wood. And they had a barn that could take, I think it had probably about four teams, that would be eight horses, that’s a pretty good size barn, you know.

Question: Bob, did people come after their ice or was it delivered?

Selle: No, they had a regular ice wagon that went around town and most people had their icehouse, or their icebox, so the man could get to it without going into their house. It would be on a porch or something.

The icehouse sold coupons and the customer would just leave that book of coupons in the icebox. The coupons were for a nickel, a dime, and a quarter.

The iceman would go and check the icebox on the porch and decide what you needed until his next trip. If you needed a nickel’s worth, he’d go out and saw off a nickels worth out of the back of the ice wagon.

The kids would always follow him down the street cause he’d chip em off a little ice to suck on, you know. They had a regular route they went and they did that with a team of horses when I was real young.

They did everything with horses because when the streets would drift full, there would be ten, twelve foot drifts in some of the streets, those teams would take em — that snow was hard and the teams could walk right over it.

They pulled the sleighs up so if they had a load of coal, or a load of wood they were out to deliver, they would just go right up over those drifts like that.

Then, about in the late twenties, the weather changed so that they couldn’t depend on getting ice that way any more. My uncle built his ice plant about where the army surplus store is now and they made their own ice after that.