I'm not mad or bored or anything like that. The reason I didn't post the last couple of evenings is that I wasn't feeling well and went to bed early. It was probably from the stress of calling all over two counties trying to find somebody to come out and fix our furnace. Tomorrow I plan to extend my search out to at least one other county.
I don't remember seeing coal at our house on 51st Street. I remember that we had a fuel oil tank out in the yard, and then one day I noticed that it was gone and a natural gas meter had sprouted up against a wall of the house. I don't remember seeing it installed, I just noticed it one day and asked my parents what it was.
When we still had the fuel oil tank, it fed a small heater in the garage in addition to the main furnace in the basement of the house. I didn't know how either of them worked, I just knew that they produced heat. We seldom kept a car in the garage because it was usually filled up with some project that my dad was working on. I remember sweeping up after one of those projects and wondering what to do with the sweepings, which were mostly sawdust and small bits of wood. I had seen my grandmother in Michigan putting wood into the old fashioned range that she still used for most of her cooking, so I shoveled my sweepings into the heater in the garage. It wasn't running at the time and I didn't know how to start it up, which turned out to be a good thing. Some time later, when my dad went to start up the heater, he found all that stuff inside and decided that it was time to explain the difference between a wood heater and a fuel oil heater to me. He wasn't mad at me because I hadn't known any better, but he made sure that I would never make that mistake again. Another time he found it necessary to explain the difference between a floor drain and a garbage can. I must have been pretty young at the time, but that was my first experience with plumbing and heating technology.
My only experience with coal came much later in the army. Each barracks building had both a coal fired furnace and a coal fired water heater. Since we were training in Georgia during the months of July and August, they didn't think we needed the extensive training that they usually gave to the guys assigned to furnace detail, so they gave us a quickie course that covered just the water heaters. I must have fallen asleep because I didn't remember much of the class, but I wasn't worried because, as a former Boy Scout, I already knew how to build a camp fire.
When I went to build my first fire, I was confronted with a bunch of gadgets on the unit, and I had no idea what they were for. They didn't provide us with any kindling, so I had to go scrounge some up from the trash cans behind the mess hall. I managed to get a simmering fire started in the first heater, and then went out to look for some more kindling because I had three more units to fire up. There was no more kindling to be found, so I planned to get some coals out of the first unit and carry them on a shovel to the other three. When I opened the firebox door, there was this big poof that blew me back against the wall and thoroughly coated me with ashes and soot. Years later, I learned that a wood stove will poof like that when the fire isn't getting enough air, and then suddenly it does, but I have never seen a wood fire poof like that coal fire did. After reinstalling the firebox door, I gave up and went back to the barracks for a cold shower and some much needed rest.
Apparently I wasn't the only one who had trouble with those heaters, because we only had hot water in the barracks one time, but nobody cared because it was so stinking hot in Georgia that a cold shower at the end of the day was refreshing. The one time we had hot water, this big colored guy was on duty. It only took him an hour or so to fire up all four units, and he came back as clean as he left. When asked him about it, he said that he had done that sort of thing for a living back in civilian life and it was easy once you knew how.
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