Change of Purpose

This site, from 2008 will be devoted to an online memoir of sorts. I will write in it as I feel the need, and there will be no obvious dating of the entries. This is entirely from personal recollections, and no claim of accuracy is made, other than this is what I remember. I encourage interaction and comments. There will always be a button at the bottom of the page to allow you to make comments. I prefer them to be made in e-mail, but if you wish you can put them in the guestbook this site shares with my other online enterprises.

Smoke of Several Varieties

When I was growing up, the slightly-sweet, pungent smell of coal smoke was an integral part of cold weather. It was in the air all around, mostly from houses across the river from us and up on the hill on the other side. Most of the people on our street had gas heat of one variety or another. Ours was, for the most part, a floor furnace. We didn't live in town, proper, but the city limit was only half a block up the street, over the bridge and across the railroad tracks. Out in the country, most folks still burned coal or wood for heat. It seems to me that more used coal, since it was abundant and cheap in that area. Wood splitting involved too much work, and a greater commitment to storage space. Coal could be delivered on a monthly basis and stored in the basement in a coal bin. Lots of houses back then had such a thing. I remember coal buckets and shovels, brooms and pokers, ash bins and ash piles outside.

There were two bridges in our town, and two stoplights. The one bridge was adjacent to the street I lived on growing up. The other was across town next to the High School/Jr. High. The distance was short enough between the bridges that many days, especially once I got to high school, that I walked the little over a mile from our house to the school. At any rate, I had to cross the bridge to get to the bus stop. The railroad tracks ran just a few yards away from the bus stop. I remember standing in the shelter to keep the chill wind out of my collar watching the old coal-fired steam locomotives growl and roar back and forth, switching the cars as we waited for the bus. Many mornings some of the more daring of us would put pennies on the rails for the train to flatten into a thin, slightly curved ellipsoid of copper. It was great fun.

I recall having more snow back then than we have today. Of course the town I'm from is about 1,000 feet higher in elevation than here in Charleston. I remember several winters when it started snowing in November and the ground was not generally visible again until sometime in March. The snow around the railroad tracks always had a layer of soot on top. When fresh snow fell, the black residue was like the rings in the trunk of a tree, providing a historical record of the various precipitation events of the season. The coal smoke from the engines was stifling, but we thought little of it at the time. The billowing black clouds of it coming from the smoke stack was somehow majestic and awe-inspiring, at least to me.

My grandfather smoked cigarettes and a pipe. Most of the other men in my family and around where I lived also smoked. My Aunt Jean and our neighbor, Louella, were the only women I knew who did. When I was growing up I associated the smell of tobacco smoke, bourbon, and Fitch hair tonic with being a man. Of the three, I still use bourbon. I remember my grandfather taking me with him sometimes to the shoe shop. It smelled of men and leather. The WWI veterans, including my granddad, would gather there to play pinoccle, and sometimes, I suspect, poker. There was an old fellow they called "Rounder." He and my grandfather seemed to be the ringleaders of this group. My grandpa lost a leg to an artillery shell in France. All his pals called him 'Peg,' which was short for 'Peg Leg.' His real name was Opha Brian, which he shortened to O.B. My grandfather was the main male influence during my childhood -- him, and my Uncle Tom, Uncle Dale, and my Aunt Maxine's husband, Dick. My dad didn't come around much, being in the Navy and all, and after I turned four, he didn't come around at all. He didn't seem to like me much when he was there. More about this at a later time.