Well, for most of my growing up we used the paper kids at school tore out of their Big Chief tablets and threw away. See, first we had something to read, and some of those notes were pretty juicy. Then, we'd cut the paper into quarters. When we needed to do the paperwork after the job, so to speak, we'd fold those quarters into quarters and tear off the little corner which wasn't loose. We'd put that aside, open the paper out, and insert a finger into the resulting hole. We'd do the paperwork and then neatly fold the paper around out finger and wipe that off. Then we'd use the little folded-up triangle to clean our nails.

But the really poor folks didn't even have that. I won't go into how they did the necessary.