We have all been sharing good time memories of winter when we were young, but there was another side to that coin! We didnt have a furnace, our house was heated by a Warm Morning coal stove. We didnt have a basement so the coal was stored outside and we used a cola bucket to carry it into the house. Sometimes we ran low on coal when the business where we bought it was closed and since we lived by the railroad tracks that were used to haul coal cars, we would take a bucket and walk along the tracks and puck up coal that spilled from the coal cars. Even though we had a chimney there was always a sooty film on everything. The house would get very cold during the night because my dad had to stoke it so that it would stay lit during the night. We also didnt have indoor plumbing, except for running water, until 1954 and I wont even begin to tell you how much fun that was in the winter! lol My mom washed clothes in a wringer washer and had to heat the water by the bucketful on the stove, and then hang the clothes all over the house to dry. On wash day it was nice and humid in there! Young people now days would be horrified if they had to live like that. There were many winters that my family didnt own a car so my dad would walk to the grocery store and carry the groceries home. We did have to walk to school, then home for lunch, back to school and then back home. I did miss a lot of days in high school when we didnt have a car and I lived 2 miles away with no school bus that stopped nearby. My neighbors werent able to give me a ride either. I did take a cab several times when it was really bad out, but that got expensive. Sorry this is so long, but I wanted to remind my fellow senior citizens that although there was a lot of fun back then there was also a lot of hard times.
Posted on: Wed, 07 Jan 2015 17:36:05 +0000
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