Christmas 1990, my wife and I were traveling home on Christmas day, and ended up eating 7-11 hotdogs for lunch.
Ah, right - I’m old enough to remember when coal was carried in like that.
Actually, coal has more or less disappeared these days, come to think of it. I could find logs for burning easily enough, but I don’t know where I’d go to buy coal.
j
Right. In the 50s, in New York, coal trucks were a regular feature of the neighborhood. That’s why Frosty the Snowman’s eyes were made out of coal, and bad kid’s stockings were filled with coal. You could get lumps from your basement, or find chunks on the street that had fallen off the coal truck.
Coal clinker, the ash from furnaces, was also readily available and often used to make cinder pathways, or you might strew it on the ice on the sidewalk in front of your house in the winter for traction.
That reminds me. In connection with limited opening hours, 7-Eleven was a big deal when it came along since it was open earlier and later than anyplace else: The numbers were originally because they opened at 7 AM and stayed open until 11 PM. Now that they are usually open 24/7 the name is meaningless. It used to be that the only place you could get a coffee in the middle of the night or very early was the all-night diner or donut shop (the latter being the origin of the idea that cops are particularly partial to donuts, since they would hang out there when on night patrol.)
Coal. Being from late 1950s Los Angeles I’d read of the stuff as a kid but never seen it.
In the early 1980s in the Midwest I went to an abandoned industrial site and among other things found a small pile of sorta shiny sorta black sorta rock near what had been a loading/unloading zone for the plant. Brought a hunk home then took it to work the next day.
Showed my amazingly weird find to somebody from the northeast. He had a good laugh at my expense. Yup. Coal. Either totally exotic or utterly commonplace depending on when and where you grew up.
So what do kids use for snowman eyes these days if they can’t get coal? The alternative used to be shoe buttons, but then shoes don’t usually have buttons any more either.
Probably rocks.
Anything vaguely round will do.
Buttons (not from shoes)
Bottle caps
coins
Pogs
poker chips
checkers
I hadn’t heard “clinker” used for complete coal ash (although I see that’s the definition that pops up when I check the online dictionary). At Sturbridge Village, the workers in the blacksmith shop only use “clinker” to refer to unburnable stony matter found in the coal ash (the ash includes lots of other material, as well). They prefer to use charcoal, which still generates ash, but doesn’t have big hard stony lumps in it.
Clinker is not just stones but minerals that are formed in the furnace when the coal is burned. It’s not exactly ash. It’s more properly slag.
This is what the clinker from our coal furnace looked like.
My grandfather rigged a wire that ran from his bedroom to the damper on the furnace in the basement so he could make it burn hotter without going downstairs.
This is how some of the raw milk I’ve bought came. The cream solidified at the top.
There is such a thing as a coal hod, though. And you can still buy them.
Some people around here do still burn coal.
A good friend of mine used to do a lot of blacksmithing, and he owned a blacksmith shop at the Bristol Renaissance Faire (about halfway between Chicago and Milwaukee) during the 1990s. At home, he had a gas forge which used a propane tank, but at the Faire, he had to actually use a coal fire; he’d buy coal from a supplier in northwest Indiana – he’d drive his pickup truck to the supplier’s facility, with a bunch of empty buckets, and have them fill the buckets until he’d reached the load capacity of his truck.
I have no idea if that supplier is still there, but I know that, more recently, he’s gotten a box of coal (maybe 50 pounds or so) shipped to him by a blacksmithing supply company.
Personally, I would call that a coal scuttle.
We still have a coal chute door in the side of our 1936 house.
This set me off down another rabbit hole. When I was a kid growing in Cumberland in North West England, we had a holiday caravan a few miles away on the coast. If you were there at Easter it could be pretty cold at night; but there was a small furnace in the caravan to keep warm.
The Cumbrian coalfields extended out under the sea - in the days of mining, it was an old joke that we were digging coal out from under Ireland - and one of the consequences of this was that lumps of eroded coal would be washed up on the shore. While us kids were busy playing, often my parents would go beachcombing with a bag, picking up sea coal and driftwood to run the furnace in the evenings.
Beachcombing - does anyone do that any more? These days is it just being green and picking up plastic detritus from the beach?
j
Barbeque grill charcoal briquets
My parents’ house has the coal chute leading down to the basement. They switched to oil when I was still fairly young, but we still used the chute for tossing down wood for the furnace. I wonder how far I’d have to dig into the driveway to find clinkers? They would have been dumped there almost 50 years ago.
My wife still has a few. I seem to remember 3 plastic ones and maybe two metal. I thought they metal was zinc. Of course it might vary depending on where and when produced.
And Cinder Blocks as opposed to Concrete Blocks.
Cinder blocks differ from concrete blocks in other ways besides their hollow design. Concrete blocks are made from a slurry of Portland cement and small aggregate, such as small stones or gravel. This makes them heavier and smoother than cinder blocks, which are made from a combination of Portland cement and cinders, the dusty remnants of burned coal.
We do it all the time. Picking up driftwood, sea glass, and sometimes some shells.
That is rather nice to know.
j