Remembering when wood for winter was 50 cents

(New column starting this week)

By Deacon Reinhart Wessing

I stood there shivering in the winter cold, wrapping myself tighter in my heavy sweater. But, hey, I was standing in our nice warm living room looking through the picture window at the cold winter outside. Just then a pickup truck with a two-wheeled trailer drove past, both loaded with firewood.

	Silver and Gold

I couldn't help remember how my parents and I hauled firewood when I was 8, 9 and 10 years old. They'd pick me up at school about 3:30, with the trailer behind our Model A Ford, and we'd drive to the farm where we got the wood. Only 50 cents a load! And the farmer said to load up the trailer real good. The trailer had sides so when we packed the wood in carefully, we got one heck of a lot of wood for 50 cents.

Now, you have to remember that this was during the Great Depression, which hit the U.S. in 1929 and lasted for most of the 1930s. Butter was 10 cents a pound, pork chops 15 cents a pound, gasoline 10 or 12 cents a gallon, and you could rent a house for $20 or $25 a month. Economically, we've come a long way since then, and none of us who lived through those times wants to go back.

Wages were low, too, so many folks lived at what today we would call the poverty level, and even below. My dad was a pensioned city fire fighter, at the early age of 37, because of serious injuries at two industrial fires. Want to know what his pension was? A mere $65.50 a month. So we had to look hard for bargains, like firewood for 50 cents a trailer load.

We hauled many loads of firewood. Our basement was very full of wood. My dad, having been a fire fighter, was very careful how it was stored, and far away from the furnace itself.

When they picked me up from school, mom always had a bag lunch for me. All growing boys were always hungry then, just as they are today. When we got the wood home, dad would toss it through an open basement window and mom and I would stack it.

At night, dad would "bank" the fire in the furnace. He would put all the red coals in the middle of the furnace's firebox, and then scoop ashes from below the firebox and heap them around the coals, to keep them "alive" longer and continue to give us heat through the night. By morning they were cold, and he got up early to restart the furnace for another day.

We didn't have a lot during those Great Depression days, but neither did anyone else. Work was scarce and wages were low. I remember being asked in 1961 by an older gentleman, "Do you have enough work to support your family?" When I answered that I did, he said, "Good, sometimes things didn't use to be so good a few years ago." When you live through those times, you never forget.

If the wood in our basement ran out before spring, there was something else to heat with that was cheap. Small pieces of coal and coal dust were compressed into bricks about 7 by 9 by 4 inches. Each brick was wrapped in a type of craft paper. It sold for a lot less than regular coal. My dad skillfully coaxed all the heat he could from each brick.

I feel for all the homeless people out in the winter's cold and I'm thankful for the shelters that make their lives a little easier. God bless all the volunteers who staff the shelters.

We have a little winter left, so stay warm and help the shelters.

(Wessing is a retired editor of The Compass and member of St. Thomas More Parish in Appleton. This column appears the second issue of each month.)