OCR Text |
Show Chatter Box Dear Suzy, "If winter comes can spring be far behind?" is a fair and reasonable reason-able question at this time, and one that many of us would like to have answered. But it seems this year that winter came, spring has made a few weak passes and then winter has returned to us with all its fury, cold and snow. Every time one thinks that it is about time to get the old spring clothes out of the moth balls, Old Man Winter Win-ter bores in again and sends us shivering to the fire side where we warm our hands and other parts of the body about the hearth. That is if we are lucky enough to have a hearth. So many of us have changed from the old fashioned and messy way of keeping warm to the clean and efficient oil burning burn-ing heaters, so now when we back up again one of these new fangle heaters we wish it would give us a swift kick for ever changing over, as the cost of oil is so high we can't keep warm as all the time we are thinking about the expense. It just goes to show what happens hap-pens when we get talked into a mass changeover. We all get busy with the new style heaters and forget that it is a plan to have us all using oil and then whoop the price up to the point that one has to have an income in 5 figures to buy enough oil to keep warm. Of course the oil isn't taxed as yet, but now that the special session of the legislature is meeting it won't surprise me at all to have them set a lusty tax upon said oil. They will, in their usual fashion, argue long and loud that there should be a big tax on oil for heaters as it is breaking down the roads. The large trucks making deliveries de-liveries are tearing up the road, the consumers then tear up the road to the bank to make a deposit de-posit to cover the amount of oil they had delivered, and then the consumer figures it is better to take long walks on the roads so as to keep warm than to go on paying through the nose for deliveries deliv-eries of oil. All this, our legislators legisla-tors will argue, is causing more traffic on the roads than the vehicles ve-hicles that are paying the tax. I see where the Carbon county coal miners are petitioning that the company remove the oil-burning heaters from their homes and replace them with the old-fashioned coal burning ones. It looks crazy and selfish on the surface, but I think they are on the right track. If they get the coal heaters back they are sitting pretty. They can carry enough coal home from the mines to keep the fireside warm for their flock. Then they have the ashes to carry out, which will help keep them warm, soot to clean out, the little woman has a lot of house cleaning to do, such as washing woodwork, curtains, and rompers for the kids, which will keep her warm and busy, and the kids will keep warm playing with the coal in the buckets. Oil heaters have none of these advantages advan-tages to after. It makes our population pop-ulation lazy, because all they have to do is buy some oil, turn on the stove and give it a light. The oil does the rest, and then all the patron pat-ron has to do from then on with all this spare time the oil heaters heat-ers have given him, is to shove his nose to the grindstone right up to his ears to get enough money to keep the ever-empty stoves supplied sup-plied with the wherewithall to heat up a porous house. I may sound bitter about all this and I guess I am. We read the ads where we are all wrong about our heating. We should warm the ceiling, ceil-ing, warm the floor, warm under the windows where the cold air filters in, in fact we should do everything, ev-erything, according to the experts to make ourselves uncomfortable. In the good old days, before OBH (oil-burning heaters) the most satisfaction sat-isfaction in cold weather was to come into a room that contained a nice large coal stove and then back up to it and warm up that part that seems to get so cold, and then feels so good when it is being be-ing warmed up. It didn't matter if the ceiling was cold, the floor frigid, frig-id, the windows leaking air like a 1910 auto tire, if one could just warm up ones posterior, all was well and cozy. Then when things got so pleasant in that area that one felt a change was needed, one drew up a chair, put his feet on the stove and left them there until un-til the smell of burning rubber from the heels rjf ones shoes drove one out of the room, only to return and repeat the whole process. Those were the days, the days before efficiency took over, and the days before the mass production produc-tion of oil heaters for an unsuspecting unsus-pecting and gullible populace to gobble up like proverbial hotcakes. It seems like Americans will buy anything that is said to be efficient, ef-ficient, keep colds down in winter, win-ter, and especially one that will reduce re-duce labor. Little does the public think about the pleasant benefits of the old, nor do they suffer from less colds, and the reduction in labor is offset by the extra, labor required to keep the new gadgets operating. My big regret about the newfangled new-fangled oil heaters is that the cost of operation can't be deducted from ones income tax. If it could we would have the government in the : hole worse than it is now. Politicians Politi-cians could use "free oil" as a campaign cam-paign promise and sweep into of- : fice by overwhelming majorities. The politicians should recognize this laten and unused campaign ; plank, and it won't surprise me if : they do. When they get to changing the ; calendars I hope they take March : 15 out of it. It seems to come three ; times a year now, Toots. On sale now in our Floor Covering Cover-ing Dept: Inlaid linoleum $1.50 to $2.75 per sq. yd. Pattern goods by : the yard 60c to 92c per sq. yd. 1st grade rugs $5.95 to $19.95. D Stevens & Co. Adv. 1 ; t |