Transcript

Location: 1523 George St.

George Italiano: I, uh, even remember, uh, well—when growing up, we had, uh, coal—you don’t see much coal around anymore. Coal was what you heated with. And, uh, we had Yearly Coal Company, which was right over here at, uh, Clinton and, uh, Rose Street. And, uh, they would deliver the coal to us and, uh, I remember always having to get up in the morning before I went to school, I had to go down, fill the stoker and got home from school, I had to fill the stoker. So it kept, you know, you kinda—during the winter, you always had to be home a couple times a day for sure to make sure that heat stayed in the house. In the wintertime, that snow would get darker faster because both the coal and the wood heat that was going on. And oil was not all that common back when I was a kid. At that time, you’d have—with the coal furnaces—you had to empty out the clinkers. And, uh, you had a place that you took it out—you had a special a clinker barrel out in the alley for that to be picked up. The city would take those clinkers and break them up and come back down to the alley and that was your pavement down in the alley was these clinkers. It made excellent pavement as far as…it was just like gravel. But, you know, if you fell on it, like, we played in the alley a lot as kids—if you fell on that, you’d get cut up pretty easy. A lot of small cuts. But, uh, it was always crunchy no matter where you stepped. No matter how many cars would go over it and everything else, it was always crunchy.