Cold mornings and warm thoughts

My childhood home

It’s not surprising that these cold mornings remind me of my childhood in Chicago. When I was young, we lived in a duplex built in 1893—of course they didn’t have that name for them, but it was a tall (2-1/2 stories), skinny (16 feet wide) house that shared a common wall with its neighbor. Ours was one of a string of them in our block. Story I always heard was that they were built to house people coming to Chicago for the 1893 Columbian Exposition.

Our house was heated by a coal furnace. There was a ground-level window that opened directly into the coal chute in the basement. Whoever delivered coal would just shoot in down into the chute (yes, I did that on purpose). My father, however, had the dirty jobs—he had to shovel coal into the furnace, bank the fire at night, and stoke it in the morning.

I suppose one didn’t let the furnace burn all night for fear of fire and/or asphyxiation. At any rate, if you woke up before Dad stoked the fire or, heaven forbid, you had to use the bathroom in the night, you were treated to icy cold wood floors and a house that was chilly to say the least.

The heat from the furnace came up through registers in the floor—not the rectangular grates we in Texas see with floor furnaces in older houses, but heavy registers, about a foot square. If memory serves, they were wrought iron in a design. The big deal was to lie over the register to get warm, though when the air was blowing you didn’t stay long, because it got way too hot. There was a register in the dining room, right in the path from kitchen to living room, that my brother and I both preferred. We’d take a pillow and book and try to capture the spot. This register was also close to the only downstairs phone, located in a tiny closet off the dining room, so small even I had to stop to go in there--no locking yourself in for a long, private conversation. For the life of me, I cannot remember where the other registers were, but there must have been some.

Most of the houses in Chicago in the forties were heated with coal, and oh! How my mother hated it. I imagine she was joined by almost every other housewife. Mom had dainty dotted Swiss curtains in the bank of windows in their bedroom that looked out on the park in front of our house. Before we were very far into heating season, those curtains would be dirty gray. Washing and ironing them was a major chore—no permanent press in those days. Mom used to gleefully cut out small newspaper articles that cited statistics on how many tons of soot (black coal dust) fell per square mile in a given time period.

It was probably the early fifties when Dad installed a gas furnace and boarded up the coal window. We thought we were really uptown—it was all automatic.

No wonder I laugh when Mr. Trump says he’s bringing back the coal industry.