Remembering the good ole days?
This week I posted some pictures of my dad to commemorate his birthday. One of the pictures was Dad, Mom and me on a night when we were celebrating his birthday. He was seated at the aluminum-legged kitchen table in front of an angel food cake and Jewel Tea china. Behind him stood my mom in a house dress partially covered with a white apron.
One of the on-line comments noted the very busy design of the wallpaper in that kitchen.
Well, we lived on a hill above the railroad yard where my granddad, three uncles and dad worked. During my youth, the trains were coal-fired steam engines which made our house and lives vulnerable to the loud whistles, the smoke, and the constant sound of trains moving in and out of that yard below.
But back to the wallpaper. My mom and grandmother were meticulous about keeping our house spotless, but their workload was tripled by coal because, well, it wasn’t so clean. Our house had a coal-fired furnace which meant that our chimney would catch fire at least once a year, and the volunteer fire company would come to make sure it didn’t burn down the house. It also meant mom covered each hot air register in the entire house with white cheesecloth to capture the coal dust.
Grandma’s drapes were lace, and every year they’d wash those curtains. She and mom had to stretch them on nail-covered boards to dry them outside.
Oh, yeah, and the wallpaper. Every room in our house was covered with wallpaper. Most of the rooms had beige or white wallpaper with subtle stripes, but the living room looked like a garden with vines and leaf-patterned wallpaper.And the kitchen? Well, as cousin Domenic noted, it was “busy.” I’m thinking it might have been covered in thousands of coffee pots.
Each spring, Mom and Dad would buy wallpaper cleaner and get out the ladders. The wallpaper cleaner was green and had the texture of an artist’s eraser. It was pliable and could be made into cleaning balls. My parents would rub the dirt off that wallpaper from top to bottom by hand with those cleaning balls. Imagine having to paint every room of your house every year, because from an energy utilization perspective, that’s how much work it took to clean those walls. By the time she had cleaned one wall, the ball of wallpaper cleaner was black from the coal dust.
Another vivid memory that I had of their cleaning challenges involved our dryer. You see, we didn’t have a dryer. We had clotheslines that were stretched between the wash house and a permanent clothes line pole.As the load of sheets and towels got heavier and heavier, they used clothes props to keep the clothes from hitting the ground.
Just hanging all of that laundry every week was a huge task, but that was only half of the challenge because every time a train blew its whistle, Mom would run outside and take the wet clothes down to protect them from the soot that would float up from the valley below. Then she would rehang them all again. When it was too cold, she would hang them in the wash house and make a fire in the Heatrola.
Mom would also roll up and drag all of the carpets outside, hang them up and then beat them with rug beaters that looked like tennis rackets. That’s how she got the coal dust out of them. At least three of them were 8’x12′ rugs.
Finally, my folks would whitewash the stones of the basement wall every few years because that’s where the washer and mangle for ironing the sheets was located, and mom wanted her work room to look clean, too.
Yeah, those were the good ol’ days.
Nick Jacobs of Pittsburgh is a Principal with SunStone Management Resources and author of the blog healinghospitals.com.