I just realized that I had forgotten my first Internet experience. I was living with my aunt in rural PA and four party lines were the only means of communication. This meant that quiet breathing neighbors could listen in to all your calls and then quickly gossip them out to the community.

Considering the picture I sent of a Santa who would certainly be hauling coal in his sacks in equal proportion to gifts I reminisced about those old times.

In posting that picture of Santa Claus I even thought that gift bags selling anthracite coal would be a marketable gimmick. Then realized that most people now a day don’t even have a familiarity with coal. As would I with Peat or dung fires of other cultures.

I DO, still remember the coal furnace in  New Jersey and PA. and I always delighted pawing through the lumps to find plant fossils – saved those and did not chuck them into the furnace. Outside coal was of course dropped down chutes to the basement below. I often had to shovel the coal into the furnaces. 

So many things have changed. I still fondly remember the traveling ice cream vendor with his welcoming siren song – to the peddling (HORSE drawn in Vancouver 50’s) guy who bought up the scrap aluminum, copper that we kids would recycle into Ice Cream treats.

More memories. A related story given to me by a friend:

I lived near Newark, New Jersey back in the 1950s.  A friend of mine lived in Brooklyn. When as most bored kids did, we made opportunity out of the strangest things. “My friends, brothers Chuck and Huck (true naming) would watch the coal man come and open shoots in the truck to let a hundred pounds of coal fall into wooden barrels. Then he would roll the barrels on their edge to a long vee shaped chute that entered the basement of the brown stone and he’d tip the barrel onto the top and the coal would slide down into the boiler room right in front of the boiler. There would be a big pile there.”

As with them, it was my job to keep the furnace stocked for the apt. complex my Dad kept in shape.

Now about once a week he would shovel out the cinders of the spent coal into barrels and set the barrels on the street for pick up. I was responsible for setting out the some 20 garbage cans from the tenants as well.

“One day someone unmentioned decided to play “coal man” so they rolled the cinder filled barrels to the steps that lead down to the basement of the brown stone next door to the one we lived in and poured the ash down the steps.
The old woman who was in charge of the building came out on the steps above and screamed at the miscreants who promptly thought it best to vanish.”

I still remember her singular black dress, black lace up shoes with about a 2 inch big square heel, and white bun pulled back into a bun. Like something out of Spain or the mountains of Sicily. Women like that you quickly learned to stay away from. Women in those days also wore hideous amounts of perfume such as lavender and lily of the valley. AARGH.”

Sadly my children will never remember the pedal powered and push cart ice cream vendors or the scrap metal gleaners that allowed us to get that extra treat. We had Dairy companies like Bordon that would deliver and the bottles were washed and returned.

I so remember that coal bin in the basement: the apartments had boilers for hot water and steam heating, and the cast iron registers in the rooms.

A generation earlier we had coal heat with forced air for heating … To the first floor, anyway. The second floor got its heat from ceiling registers on the first floor going to floor registers on the second.
They were disconnected and abandoned of course, by the time I came along, but I remember the capped off pipes for the gas lighting, too.
I also recall the brick and cobblestone streets, some still with trolley tracks in the middle. In Vancouver the asphalt was not as permanent then as it is today. HEAT spells in Vancouver would always get the streets sticky and we of course had to play with that.
Originally they were horse drawn trolleys. Later they converted to overhead electrical.

If you lived on the East Coast or East of the Mississippi, until the Dutch Elm Disease hit, there were Elm trees over 100 years old on both sides. The tree tops met in the middle and in the summer, throughout the city you could not see the sky. It was like going through a green tunnel.

Vancouver’s Chestnut trees were like that as well. They also provided great fall ammunition with their spikey seed pods.

No airline travel for most, but passenger trains stopped at the train station and most cities had a Greyhound depot in town, now long gone.

The local Oakland YMCA had rooms to rent (I actually rented one, when I was 17 and had left home. Some Y’s even had .22 rifle and pistol range the YMCA had in the basement. Course the gyms were the same and became a daily visit for me.

Back then we had the “big boy” national department stores: Sears (Simpson Sears in Vancouver), Monkey Ward’s, Hudson Bay,  W.T. Grants, J.C. Penny, and Kresge (before they became Kmart) Catalogs arrivals were huge!

Schools could be a violent place as they are now and young kids always had gangs. Speaking of nasties, I was pretty wild in Vancouver. Came from having to survive in a Polish neighborhood. Gangs were a neighborhood tradition and one of the worst weapons we came up with were woven Frisbee’s of used hacksaw blades. Gathering them up at the junk yard we happily wove them together as a square mat and threw them at each other.

Cowboy and Indian play was less in Vancouver. Equal amount of Knights fighting with swords and garbage can lids stolen from the neighbors yard and picket fence.
Other great weapon of affordable means were slingshots, easily made and electric wire staples became the ammo of final resolution. Course this was way before commercial lawn darts and other implements of achieving mayhem.

I do remember many injuries to my face and eyes. Throwing such frisbee’s did mean you get wacked every now and then – also someone once threw powdered bleach into my eyes. No wonder I have shitty eyesight.

Course the teachers and principles of that day did not enjoy having marbles and staples being shot around and if caught we were strapped. Red rubber and black rubber straps hanging out of each back pocket. Forget which was the more painful … and if you dared whine about getting stropped at school you got it again from your Dad; for being stupid enough to be caught. No molly coddling by teachers or the “you are special” type behavior from the instructors of today.

I also remember a few bombings of toilets in school and the violence between the races in Oakland in the mid 60’s.
Bruno, one of our swimmers came to the defense of another when attacked by some blacks. Ripping out an oak bannister support he broke a few bones and got some of the administration upset. Oakland Tech suspended him and I luckily migrated to a safer school in San Lorenzo. hope he got life by not getting drafted into Vietnam but he was the kind they were looking for.

The Sixties certainly were a most interesting time to grow up in.

(C) Herb Senft 12/25 2017