By Staff
When I was a young boy back in the 1930s, our old house at 501 Orchard was heated by only two of those old coal-burning stoves.
At the time, our house had no storm windows or storm doors.
On those cold, cold winter days, old Jack Frost used to do a good job on the window panes.
Sometimes the frost contained beautiful designs on the window panes before the house finally got heated up in the morning.
This was a time back then when very few people even had those wooden storm windows that were put up to take the place of the wooden screen frames used in the summer.
As a substitute for a storm window, back then you could buy at the hardware store a sort of a white waxed-like cloth material that you tacked up on the outside of the window.
It wasn't a clear type of covering and you couldn't see out of your windows.
Later on came a clear plastic covering developed that you could see through.
Wasn't it great when they came up with those combination aluminum storm and screen windows?
Also, I remember my dad used to take the raked up leaves in the fall and bank them up around the old stone foundation, keeping them up tight to the wall by some means.
This was to keep the water pipes from freezing in those old below-zero days which I can still recall.
Sometimes the leaf insulation didn't work and the frozen pipes had to be thawed out by a blow torch.
Boy, I just can't envision this, but I read the other day where scientists are now working on the problem of eliminating those unpopped kernels of old maid popcorn in your bag of the now common way of popping corn.
Now this is what I call progress.
A thought came to my mind the other day when my old growing-up boyhood friends Jim and John Luthringer (both now deceased) and I were to each get a pint of old Dowagiac Farmers Dairy great ice cream and, with the help of one of our mother's spoons, take this goodie out to the airport in John's old Model A with its yellow painted spoke wheels, sit and eat and watch the planes take off and land.
In today's fast world something like this would be just too much of a bore for kids.
As Jim and I watched these planes, did we ever dream that one day we would be the ones doing the flying and were part owners of an airplane, which we both crashed, by the the way, with no injuries.
I sometimes wonder if I would have consumed all those fried hamburgers and fried potatoes my mother used to feed me years ago if I'd have known about the cholesterol and fat content we hear so much about now. A friend told me the other day, “I plan to live forever. So far so good.”
Sure was a good year for flowering trees around town this year - especially those magnolias.