If you know the original Hall and Oates song, well, you know it’s pretty bleak. “Seven million people without hope…I feel my back up against the wall.” Hey, chill. I’m not there. Not even yet. I mean, at all. Remember, I wanted to get back here, kinda…sorta…so I tend to be buoyed by the first real indications of a change of season I’ve seen in years. Didn’t really get one in California. Or Texas. And man, that really bummed me out.
Especially Texas, where you had to turn on the air conditioner on Thanksgiving. For a kid who knew that steam heat started on October 15th as a kid in Penn Wynne, I would get catastrophically depressed. You know, no leaves falling (or burning, which really put a tang in the air before the tree huggers banned the ritual, for the greater good, I suppose) When you felt a cold tinge to the wind, leaves burning, and Lewis Jones pumping steam under the sidewalks and banging away in your radiators, it was fall. Nothing could spoil it, really, although the murder of Jack Kennedy came pretty close (Hell, the NFL played that weekend–it was only the President). It was not just one thing. It was everything. Fall in Philadelphia, and I did not dread it in the least.
That stream heat stuff was truly iconic. If you don’t know what central plant heat was (I doubt it “is” anywhere any longer), man, you missed a real marker of the age. Lewis Jones was established in 1918 as part of a centralized steam heating system that would send pressurized steam through pipes out to communities where the lines had been laid. Overbook and Penn Wynne were two places (Yeadon, PA was another), and Penn Wynne, especially was conceived as a planned community by the McWilliams and Meloney builders. It was a big deal because you dispensed with coal, which I distinctly remember from West Philly. Clean, safe (sort of, if you didn’t live near the boilers), reliable (well, not always) and modern. Steam heat. Like from “The Pajama Game” (1956), “I got steam heat, but I need your love to keep away the cold”….Ah, forget it. You are probably not old enough
I could go on forever about the glories of steam heat. Like, for instance, where the pipes ran close to the level of the sidewalk (Trent Road), the lucky owners of the homes never had to shovel the sidewalk after a snowstorm, because the snow would not stick. Honest to God. It was like a miracle. 4 feet of snow and Trent Road was clear. Now I wonder if the value of that service was capitalized into the price of homes there. Grin. What a term paper in economic history that would make to stick some smart-ass kid with. Go find that on AI. I should’ve done it myself when I was at Villanova before Lewis Jones went bankrupt in 1973. If you’re thinking the first Energy Crisis must have had something to do with it, well, yeah. But that wasn’t all.
When you’d drive down City Line Ave in Philly you’d probably see a couple of vent stacks merrily bubbling steam away into the night. You know, pipes break, especially stuff laid in the 1910s. So your product was going up in smoke, literally, which isn’t a money maker. And the ability to regulate your home temperature was, well, iffy. Our basement, where the main line came through, had this asbestos covered pipe with some ancient connector that looked like something from the Arms of Krupp. But the basement was always comfortable, even on the snowiest of days, which made for a great hang if you were practicing trumpet or reading some forbidden book–The Catholic Marriage Manual was one of my favorites. Anyway, the rest of the house was full of radiators that had a steam bleeder which you adjusted to squeals and cacophonous banging, hoping to get some reasonable mean. For about fifteen minutes, the house sounded as if Chick Webb were practicing drums, but then it calmed down. All in all, the system was oddly reassuring, because if there were noise, there was heat. And the steam the bled into the rooms–or heated air–always smelled a bit like rice cooking. So you had the olfactory angle covered too. If you get the the idea that I really enjoyed the entire production, I did. It’s another element of my childhood which is now unrecoverable, because a heat pump is a poor substitute for steam heat. Take it from me.
Of course, the steam boiler ran at very high pressure. In the aftermath of the company’s demise, reports came out that the pressure–if there was an explosion, would blow a boiler about three miles. Funny how no one one every mentioned that in the heyday of the Lewis Jones Company. You know, the past always looks pretty good when you realize you had no idea what was really going on.
And then there was the Norway Maple on our front lawn that supplied an endless variety of multi colored refugees from the summer. Damn. You could predict two thing. The Eagles would lose (from 1963 on) and a shower of red, yellow, brown, green, tan and all the colors in between would carpet our front yard. It was gorgeous, although my Mom hated the tree because it was “messy.” But I could and did spend hours look at the mottled remnants, getting high on the perfect legal smoke issuing from the pile burning, and watch the days get shorter and the sky get grayer every day. Believe me, if anything contributed to my disdain for Texas, it was the absence of Fall. In California, you could always drive up into the Sierra if you could get away from grading papers or writing lectures, and one year, we had snow on Mount Tam visible from our apartment window. Snow. Unusual, but savagely great with a good zin that you could get for $5.00 a bottle than on Solano Avenue in Berkeley. Texas had nothing to match it, and, I guess, Philly really didn’t either. But we didn’t have steam heat in Berkeley either. Hell, we were lucky to have heat half the time, but psychic income covered that, according to Governor Moonbeam.
There were always those days, sometimes in November, when God gave us snow flurries in Philly. Usually they didn’t amount to much, but there were a few very cold years in the early 1960s and snow on the ground for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception on December 8. See a Philly Catholic boy had no clue about the Guadalupe or the Virgencita or any of that–nor did the pre diversity Church require us to. It was really a remarkably insular existence, wrapped up in leaves, frosty bay windows, and the good Sisters of Mercy raining Hellfire down on our pubescent Sodom and Gomorrah–“boys let me see those hands.”
Oh, yeah, the new television season started in the Fall. That was always cool too, even if we had only three channels and the Star S[angled banner for sign off at 1:30 AM. Yeah, I snuck down to the living room to watch some times, and if I got caught, I said the radiator in my room had been whistling or banging or some other lie, simply because there was something transcendent in being up with a Test Pattern on WCAU in the Fall. Even Sunrise Semester was fun, with some poor schlub from Penn lecturing in black and white about Natty Bumppo as the House on Harrogate warmed up noisily for another day of pre-Vatican socialization.
Hell, my family was all there too. I didn’t need much more. That was Fall in Philadelphia. I miss it, honestly, even if I’m back for the final chapter. It ain’t the same. No steam heat. No burning leaves. And my family is gone.
The End.
