I wouldn’t say I grew up in a lower class family, we never wanted for anything, but looking back, I have to wonder.
We lived in the West so it never really got that cold but still, I have to question my parents’ choices for heating the house. We didn’t have central heating, or anything like that. We didn’t even have modern space heater. My parents would use the oven to heat the house in the winter. It was a regular gas oven and they would turn it on to 350 degrees and leave it running for days. They were always sure to crack a window open in the kitchen though to make sure we didn’t all die or carbon dioxide or something. And these were in the days before CO2 detectors were even invented. If the oven wasn’t enough to heat the entire house, they would use old fashioned space heaters that were basically coil wires behind a grill. The coil wires got red-hot and were rather effective, even though they were a fire hazard. I remember that we had to be careful walking around these space heaters because they got so hot that they would melt the glue under the tiles so the tiles would slip and move if you walked on them near the heater. Still, no one ever got hurt or lacked oxygen and the house never burned down and I really don’t know if our heating was any different than the way everyone else did it a few decades ago. But with central heating and space heaters now that turn themselves off if a piece of dust gets caught in them, I have to wonder how we all survived before.
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