I thought it was Eleanor Roosevelt. I was just fact checking to see what that was about, and verify it, and that's when I discovered that I was wrong.
A lot of gas station companies made a big deal about marketing their chain of stations as having the certified cleanest... but the 1st lady had nothing to do with that.
I am/was, under the notion, that Eleanor was on the road on some national tour to make a big deal about gas stations, and their bathrooms, getting with the times, and having clean, hygienic, bathrooms for kids and wives to use.
After all, us guys are animals, and most don't give a damn where we empty our bladder. Fishing, hunting, trapping, snow showing, hiking, snowmobiling? I've done it all, and when nature calls - we all know, we often are no where near a porcelain fixture
During the Franklin Roosevelt administration, with a significant push from Eleanor Roosevelt, the Works Progress Administration built 2.3 million sanitary outhouses in rural America to combat diseases like hookworm and typhoid fever.
These outhouses were an improvement on previous designs, featuring a concrete vault below ground, a sealed lid, and screened ventilation to prevent flies.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/04/business/gas-station-bathrooms-history
Conversely, or ironically, Eleanor Roosevelt High School has almost five thousand students, but bathrooms are often either closed or left in a state that simply isn’t usable. Why? Adult supervision and oversight is obviously lacking, because bathrooms - and students often using them for smoking, vaping, etc etc. So, the school found that cutting back on the number of bathrooms results in the stalls ONLY getting used for the intended functions, as the long lines and peer pressure don't let clowns screw around instead.
Very interesting tidbit about Mrs. Roosevelt. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteyou're welcome! Do you remember ever hearing about the national gas station bathroom cleanliness movement in the 30s? I thought I had posted about it, but I guess I haven't, as I looked around in the archives and found nothing
Deletereading in
Deletehttps://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/in-search-of-the-roosevelt-outhouse-in-new-england/ was informative, it mentions the stats on how the 1940 Census showed 29 percent of homes in Vermont and 25 percent in New Hampshire did not have flush toilets.
I had never noticed anything on the census pages I've looked at while working on my family tree project ever mentioning stuff like that.