Swamping on January 5, 1966

My mother kept an unpretentious practical diary. She recorded important events in life on the farm, keeping more of a farm log book than what most people would call a diary. I’ve read several years of her notes in the last few weeks and I haven’t seen a single entry in which she expressed a single thought or impression. She stuck to the facts.

Her entry for Wednesday. January 5, 1966:

Northeaster. 15 mph wind- drifting and snowing turning to sleet. No school. Loni here. Marv working at coal yard. Temp 20 degrees at 7am- 24 degrees at noon. Roads slick.

Loni is my youngest Waschke cousin. She may have still been toddling in 1966. She usually spent her days with my aunt and uncle at their heating oil and coal business in Bellingham, but when the weather was bad, and business was hectic, she often stayed with my parents during the day.

My uncle Arnold, my cousin Loni’s father, and his family lived next door on Waschke Road. When the northeaster blew, his business boomed.

His coal and oil trucks ran all over Whatcom County in the northeaster. My cousin Dave is almost exactly the same age as I am. If I was working at the coal yard, so was he. When the weather turned bad and school was cancelled, the two of us often helped my uncle by riding as helpers with his regular truck drivers.

They called us swampers.

On the oil trucks, we would root around in the drifting snow looking for the tank inlets and help drag the hoses. When the furnace was in the basement, the tanks were almost always buried and protected from the cold. But when the furnace or oil stove was at ground level, the tanks had to be suspended on stands several feet above the ground, so gravity could feed oil to the burner. The tanks and the feed lines were exposed to the cold. In a northeaster, the oil in the tank and feed could get cold enough to thicken and freeze up. The solution was to top off the tank with stove oil instead of furnace oil. Stove oil was lighter, as thin as diesel fuel, and would not thicken, at least at Whatcom County temperatures. If the flow was already stopped, the driver and his swamper had to warm up the feed with a propane torch so the oil would flow and bleed the oil line to get it going again. Cold work.

Swamping on a coal truck was different. Delivering coal required maneuvering a dump truck as close as possible to the coal bin without getting stuck or mangling the flower beds. If you were lucky, you could unload the coal using the truck’s hydraulics and watch the coal roll down the chute. Then the swamper’s job was only to find a safe path through the snow for backing the truck and direct the driver.

Then there were “tub jobs.” Not all houses had convenient coal bins that the coal could be dumped into. Then we had to tip the coal into galvanized tin wash tubs and carry the coal to the bin on foot, more likely than not down narrow slippery stairs and over an obstacle course. During a northeaster, we would only tub in enough coal to keep the house warm until the weather turned. We couldn’t leave other customers were waiting in the cold, no matter how much fun we were having carrying tubs of coal.

A day swamping swamping in a northeaster could get long. My good-hearted uncle would not let any one’s house go cold if he could help it. We kept working until everyone who called got fuel, whether they could pay or not. It may be a quirk of memory, or short winter days, but I remember swamping more often in the dark than in daylight.

I don’t have specific memories of that Wednesday, but I checked the news of the day: Bobby Baker, Lyndon Johnson’s adviser in the Senate, was indicted for theft, tax evasion and misappropriation of funds from Johnson’s campaign funds. Politics have not changed. I guess that is a consolation.

I imagine my cousin David Waschke has many more accurate stories about the heating fuel business than I do, but my mother’s diary brought back a few memories of my own.