Thoughts on a Cold Night

The dog was snoring, which woke me up, so I thought I’d go to the bathroom while I was awake. I couldn’t fall asleep right away, and I began to think of cold winter nights when I was a kid. In the 50’s, our house on Ward Street had a coal furnace. Each fall, before Halloween, dad would order coal for the winter. It would arrive in a dump truck, holding about three cubic yards of coal. The truck would pull into the neighbor’s driveway, as the coal chute was on that side of the house. The driver would run chute, much like a concrete chute to the basement window. I’d stand there and watch the coal rumble down into our coal bin, by the furnace. The driver would sweep the dust down, into our coal bin as he prepared to go. We were set for the winter. Our house being built in 1949 had only single pane glass in all the windows, which meant they would ice over when it got real cold. I mean ice a
half inch thick on the inside. November would find the onset of the really cold weather. Each morning. Mom would wake me up for school. She would start the gas oven, and open the door to get some heat into the kitchen. Then, whoever was available, often me, would go downstairs into the cold basement to stoke the furnace. That involved “shaking down the clinkers”, or coal cinders to the bottom of the furnace, to be taken out later and put on the driveway or for the trashman to pick up. Then I would get the big bladed coal shovel from the bin and get two or three shovels full of coal and put it on the burning embers. The furnace being stoked, it would be nice and toasty about the time I had to leave to catch the Loop bus. The furnace would have coal added at bedtime, at breakfast and any other time is was, as mom would say ”nippy”. I always think of that when I watch the part of
“A Christmas Carol”, where Scrooge chastises Bob Cratchit for adding coal to the fireplace n the office. On a normal winter the load of coal would the cold season. On those winters where it was unusually cold, and we ran out of coal, we would drive to Ecorse, and but several unit of packaged coal. The packaged coal would come in brown paper about one foot by one foot, by four inches thick. We would use them sparingly as they were expensive.
The guys I hung around with, had dads that were truck drivers or truck mechanics. The company they worked for hauled rolls of steel from the steel mills to the auto factories. To lock the rolls of steel on the truck bed, they used chains and lengths of rough one 4 x 4’s. when winter was long and they were out of coal, they’d saw the 4 x 4’s into two foot lengths and use them for heat. I used to help them throw the wood down into their coal bins.
At Christmas, everyone had real trees. We always got Scotch pine, The Strassers always got a balsam tree, you know, short needles. After Christmas, when everyone put their Christmas trees out for the trashman to pick up, we, Kenny and Tommy Strasser, Charlie Burkhardt, and I would collect them and take them down to vacant lots in the next block and stack them into Christmas tree forts, like log cabins, and have great snowball fights.