My Cousin Pat

My Cousin Pat

They say that first cousins are almost brothers
A close relationship, especially, and more so, as children
As years go by, the relationship fades, beginning with high school graduation
Then slowly losing touch with absences due to college, army service, and marriage
This is one of my remembrances of Cousin Pat

We lived on the same street, about 4 houses apart
We lived in Cleveland, but when asked, we said we lived in Collinwood
Collinwood was an enclave of mostly double homes, almost exclusively, Italian working class, as opposed to middle class

Collinwood was once a village, before being incorporated into the city, around 1900
Around the same time, many Italian immigrants settled in
It’s claim to fame, ,or notoriety, if you will, was due to a horrendous fire that killed 170 grade school kids
The knobbed doors opened inward, and when the fire caused the kids to try to escape, the crush of panicked bodies, made it impossible, to allow rescue workers to help
A law was then enacted, stipulating that school doors thereafter would open outward, and would be equipped with horizontal metal panic bar hardware

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collinwood_School_Fire


Our parents lived through the Great Depression, which they reminded their kids, was a time of job scarcity, so bad, they had to scrape for bare necessities
My father was unemployed for 6 years, and scraped by as an entrepreneur, by picking up, and then delivering coal, the main home heating fuel of the period, house to house
The truck was old, and had a metal door with a steel lever that opened a small opening in the back, so that when the bed was tipped, he could reach through the opening with a coal shovel, and manually shovel the material, through a metal 2 foot square coal chute built into every basement wall, into the customer’s coal bin
Coal bins were usually 10x10, with wooden side walls, that had a door opening on one side with a one foot high opening at the bottom, with side channels for 1x8 inch wood panels that were used to contain the resultant coal pile, which could then be removed, one by one, as the pile diminished
The homeowner would then slide a coal shovel in the bottom opening, and walk to the furnace, open the furnace door, and shovel in the coal
Meanwhile, inside the truck cab were 2 levers to operate the hydraulic raising and lowering, of the truck bed
On several occasions, upon asking, Pop allowed me to manipulate the levers
At the time I couldn’t figure out why he would seem amused about such a serious and important assignment for a 5 year old kid