My mother remarked once that she knew that times were changing when my oldest
brother ran up with a lump of coal and said "Oh what a shiny rock!"
Thank you kindly,
Michael Matalis
Downers Grove IL
You can see my railroad photography blog at
http://www.chasingheavymetal.com/blog/
You can see my photos and my ugly mug at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/prairierailfan/sets/
On Feb 29, 2012, at 2:15 AM, dr strangelove wrote:
> Growing up in the country in Southern Illinois, we had a big cast iron stove
> in the middle of the living room. Big chunks of coal was thrown in and the
> ashes were shaken out of the bottom.
> We finally got a "Stokermatic" stove, again in the middle of the living room.
> It had a bin on the side, where you dumped in the coal. Took about 3 of those
> big plastic buckets to fill up, and yes the dust flew. It was fed into the
> firebox with an auger ran with an electric motor. There was also a blower fan
> that would blow air around the outside of the stove to circulate the heat in
> the house, ( I still had frost on the inside of my windows some mornings,
> even though they were double windows)
> The stupid thing depended on electricity to run and naturally the power would
> go out on the worst and coldest ice storms. Then you had to kind of feed it
> by hand.
> I shoveled and hauled a LOT of coal as a kid. My father got a small discount
> because he worked at the mines. Sometimes there would be a temperature
> inversion or something with the air pressure and we would wake up with the
> house full of smoke. Whey we all never died in our sleep from carbon monoxide
> poisoning I will never know. Every couple of years there would be some family
> in the region that would die from it.
> A couple years back the Mayor of Sesser complained because he couldn't even
> find enough coal to put eyes on a snowman. Pretty sad for an old mining town.
> Kelley Wright.
>
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