Fall is in the air. The other day I really thought about that while I was reading one of my mother’s journals written about 1916. On one page she wrote about the little pot bellied stove that heated the cozy back parlor of our old Chicago family home. On the next page she had made a pen and ink sketch of the stove. Oh what memories that brought back.

Four generations of our family lived in that house. Three of those generations enjoyed the little stove beginning with my grandparents who moved into the house with their eight children when it was brand new, 1896. The fourth generation missed the stove because it became obsolete when a good central heating system was installed in the early 1940s.

The little stove, used only in the cold months, spent the warm months dismantled in the basement. My grandfather was the first to have the job of setting it up each year. After he died his sons who were grown but still living at home did it. When my grandmother died my mother and her siblings inherited the home. My parents bought the siblings shares and became the owners of the home and of course the stove. Setting it up was then my father’s task.

Each fall with help from older brother, my father brought the stove, its removable parts and the necessary lengths of black stove pipes from the basement. The body of the stove and its parts were assembled and set in the center of the room on a three foot square metal pad lined with asbestos. (Yes asbestos. What did we know then?). That was the easy part. Getting those lengths of black stove pipe attached one by one from the stove up to the ten foot high ceiling, across that to the chimney and finally working the last length into the chimney hole was a major task. My father hated it.

There were permanent hooks in the ceiling to hold the wires which supported the assembled stove pipe. Getting those pipes up and across to the chimney wouldn’t seem to be a difficult task but no matter how carefully my father attached each section of pipe to the next one and lay it across a wire support, the pipes kept detaching from each other. For a reason I don’t know the pipe joints couldn’t be taped together. It took careful maneuvering to get all of them up and securely suspended in the wires. My father’s language became more and more colorful as the job progressed. The family was always more than glad to see the last pipe suspended and its end safely pushed into the chimney hole.

When the job was finished, we restored the room to order, then placed the filled coal hod with its miniature coal shovel on the metal pad next to the stove. All of that done we rested, happily knowing we were prepared to cope with anything the cold weather could bring.

This time I told the tale of the trouble it took to set up that little stove. In my next visit from the front porch I will tell tales of the comforts it gave to the family during the cold Chicago winter. Until then, keep warm.