Just a Kid from Brooklyn

Coal Power When I was a young boy, our house on East 35th Street was heated by coal. As an old man looking back in time, it is a fascinating memory. What most people today call a basement my family and friends and I called a cellar. It was a large, brick-walled room, mostly below ground level and with a concrete floor. It was dark and dirty and smelled dank and dusty. It had two small windows that were located at ground level and one of the windows looked out into the darkness underneath our backyard porch. The other window and a couple of low wattage light bulbs with pull strings located on a few ceiling beams around the cellar were the only light sources in the cellar. In the middle of the cellar was a large coal burning furnace that, when fired up, warmed the entire house with hot air that rose up through the air ducts and wafted out of the hot air registers located throughout the house. There was a wooden, roughly built half wall in a corner of the cellar. It was built as a coal bin, an area to hold the coal that was delivered to fuel our furnace in the winter. Every time there was a coal delivery to our home, I rushed to the window to watch the delivery. The driver and another man would jump out of the coal truck, come to the front of the house and open the cellar door. They would set up a metal chute system from the street into the cellar. One man with an empty barrel would wait in the basement as the other man went back to the truck, retrieved a barrel, placed the barrel next to the truck and lifted a metal hatch. Coal would rush out of the truck into the barrel. When the barrel filled, the man would shut the hatch, roll the barrel over to the cellar door with what I thought was an impressive level of barrel-rolling skill and empty the coal onto the chute. The man in my cellar had his empty barrel in place and captured the coal as it slid down the chute. He would then equally skillfully roll the barrel over to the coal bin and empty the barrel. This routine was repeated until the coal bin was filled. One of my chores as a young boy was to tend to the fire. My main problem was that the cellar was a scary place particularly at night when there was no daylight coming in from the window and usually only one of the light bulbs was lit and that bulb seemed to cast more shadows than light. The furnace looked to me like a fire eating monster. The air vents in the metal door cast a flickering light from the fire that gave motion to the frightening shadows. The rounded hot air ducts protruded outward at the top of the furnace and then elbowed up to the ceiling and looked like arms on this large metal monster. When I had to stoke the fire and shovel new coal into the mouth of the furnace, I found the coal bin to possess its own dread. While shoveling coal from the bottom of the pile, chunks of coal would roll from the top of the pile down to the floor. Every time that happened, I imagined that the hand of a dead man buried under the coal would drop into view from out of the coal. I realized, of course, that this was just my imagination but imagination in young boys can be powerful. When I finished, I ran like I was being chased, up the stairs into the well lit home with my sisters and brother and parents there. The relief almost overwhelmed me. At that time, I couldn’t articulate this dread to my parents and, even if I could, I didn’t want to show them how much that dark, spooky cellar scared me.