One day when I was at Woodie's house, he went down to the basement to tend to his furnace. I followed along. The furnace was an old coal furnace. It was a big old forced air furnace, much like the ones I saw at UD ghetto houses, those having been converted from coal to natural gas. Woodie had a small stoker hopper, which was a little bigger than a telephone pedestal. Between that and the main furnace was an auger which fed the coal to the burner grate. He took a shovel and scooped a couple loads into the hopper from the coal pile in the corner. After that, he opened a door on the furnace and took a poker and poked around the clinkers ans ash, then scooped them out and threw them in a bucket. He let that sit outside for a while, then he took the bucket out to the barn bank and dumped the cinders in the wheel tracks.
Back in the '30s and '40s, he had run a route driving a truck down to southern Ohio to a mine to pick up loads of coal, then bring it back to sell to people locally. He mentioned once in a while how terrible those company towns were, and how badly the workers got ripped off by the company. That never caused him to support a union, though, at least not that I can remember. He always swore that Ohio would always be bad off until it became a right-to-work state. I still doubt that that would have any impact. Anyway, the year before I saw the furnace, he had gone down south with his grain truck and picked up a load of coal. If I remember correctly, it cost him $750 for the coal, and he thought it would last about 3 years. I believe that once he burned that coal up, he decided that it was a good time to get a propane furnace. I think it was too much work for an 87-year-old to be going up and down stairs every day to shovel in coal. I was glad I got to see it before he got rid of it.
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