Displayed for years in my office at Central Arkansas Water was my family’s old metal drinking dipper. The hook on the ladle’s handle held it to the water bucket that was our source of drinking water when I was a child in the 1950s.
Family and visitors drank directly from the dipper without much concern over transmitting germs. Water was carried in almost daily from the spring that flowed from the side of a hill about a quarter mile from our home in the Lafferty community of rural Izard County, Arkansas.
My father would later install a pipe that brought water by gravity from that spring into the house. Perhaps this gave me an appreciation for water systems and it is not so ironic that I would be employed 30+ years at a water utility.
