Comment Frustration

             Maybe someone out there can help me?  It’s about comments for this blog.  First off, some of you have emailed (edithlank@aol.com) that you can’t seem to post comments at all.  And then comments don’t seem to show when one pulls up the blog, which is a shame.  They’re the most interesting part.  Take these two just in about coal deliveries:

             My guess is that the Brighton kids’ failure to recognize coal was more about place than era.  Coal was very much in use in the 50s in Peoria…my grandparents’ furnace used coal, as did our next door neighbors’ furnace.  The neighbor used to save the coal scatter tags (see Ebay “coal scatter tags”) for me to use as play money.  Just like “Christmas Story”, the roaring blazes in those furnaces scared me to death. Dannette

And then the very next comment, which also mentions the ‘50s:
             By coincidence I was researching anthracite coal not too long ago.  I was born in the 1950s.  I have no experience with coal trucks.  Surely they were long gone by then?  That was a very evocative post though.  I am very conscious of morning sounds too.  Stacy

Wouldn’t Stacy (whom I don’t know) have liked to read my daughter-in-law Dannie’s comments?  Wouldn’t you have liked to read them both?   

 

So of course I researched coal scatter tags, which I’d never heard of.  They were small disks  thrown in with the coal by delivery companies to build customer loyalty, and yes, of course they’re traded by collectors these days.  A discussion group recommends searching along railroad tracks or in old barns. 
            Meanwhile, I got to remembering one more morning sound from the 1930s – the way the whole house rumbled when my father was down in the basement “shaking out the clinkers”.  And I suddenly recalled a niche built into the furnace wall, just  to the left of the door, on which my mother placed her bean pot, to bake overnight while the fire was “banked down.”
             And for more Depression bits-- at the worst of it, when I assume the coal supply was ending  before the winter did, I remember my mother heating the house by throwing cardboard boxes into the furnace just before we were due home from school.