The Way it Was

The Way It Was
by Abraham Lincoln

Looks so much like raw hamburger like George Myers used to eat for lunch. I was a little boy of 6 or 7 years and used to set on the porch with George and his wife, Ida, and watch the Model A's and Model T's go past on the road in front of their house.

When it was time for lunch, Ida called us in and George ate his raw hamburger and Ida ate something and gave me a sugar cookie to eat and if I still looked hungry, Ida would give me a second big sugar cookie.

Those were the days when finishing the 8th Grade was all the education anybody needed, according to George. I thought he should know because he often boasted about finishing the 8th grade and he would tell you over and over what he got from his education besides being able to recite the multiplication tables through 7 because he was 49 where he stuck as long as I knew him.

George owned two coal yards and everyone in town paid him for the coal he delivered or they picked up. The Dayton and Union City (D&U) train parked coal cars on the siding by his coal piles and George paid the Harleman brothers $20.00 to unload each coal car and throw the coal on what became mountains of fresh coal for kitchen cook stoves.

The big lumps of coal were used in heating stoves and the boys had to throw it lump by lump out of the cars onto the siding and then make a big pile of lump coal that people used to heat their homes with. When George delivered our coal, he used a scoop shovel to shovel the smaller pieces of coal through the opening in the shed but he had to carry in the big lumps of coal by hand and lay them inside the shed on the dirt floor.

Later on, when he was gone I had to use an axe like a sledge hammer to break the lumps into smaller lumps that I could carry. I was lucky to get two pieces of lump coal in the coal bucket but had to use both hands to carry the bucket into the house and set it down beside the heating stove in the living room. I could carry a full bucket of cook stove coal we used in the kitchen stove with one hand.

That coal was burned by every home in Gordon, Ohio, where we lived, in kitchen cook stoves and living room heating stoves until summer when the stoves stopped burning and houses were heated and air conditioned by opening doors and windows. If hot water was needed and you didn’t own a kerosene stove then you had to fire up the kitchen stove to heat water in the teakettle and the stove had to be hot to prepare meals three times every day.

George owned a tiny office close to the railroad tracks at the south end of Gordon along the tracks. That was where the men came to tell stories. Most men chewed tobacco so there were brass spittoons lined

Those were the best of times and the worst of times and we all remember them.