Name: Dennis C
Photo Added: 09/03/2011 5:28 pm
Location: Saint Louis, MO USA
This isn't what you're looking for but it's true, nonetheless.
I grew up in a large apartment building on St. Louis' west side. It was heated with coal. Once every so often, the coal truck would drive up into the side yard and dump its bellyfull of coal down the chute into the basement furnace room. It made a new mountain of black lumps, some dull black, some shiney like newly-cut glass. It was great fun, playing on that mountain, digging around in it, slidding down the side. The heat from the furnace was so hot, we sweated intensely, our faces glowed red, our noses would fill with black dust - and our clothes and hands, socks, shoes, feet, everything turned dingy gray-black from those romps in the "furnace room". Willy, the janitor who lived in a basement apartment with his family, didn't mind us running riot on the mountain. But our moms ... OMG, the paddling we'd get! You'ld think the "fire and brimstone" upstairs would deter us from ever again going back down there into the bowls of that building and diving into the that subterranian mountain of solid soot. But you'ld be wrong. The attraction was too strong, the fun too great, the adventure of romping in the forbidden furnace too compelling.
I didn't know anything about coal growing up except this: that it could be fun, make for fabulous adventures for a handful of kids cooped up on a high-rise all our lives. Our horizons were small but our adventures large down there in the bowls of The Tudor House.
I tagged this health effects - it was good mental health for us. Of course, new I know all the horrors of coal - but that can't
