My Family: Chapter 5

On the weekends we used the coal mine as a playground. Kids my age would play in the sand house. We were ignorant about the danger, but we could have been killed. It was a small room made out of cinders blocks. A coal car would empty sand through a chute in a window at the top of the sand  house and it filled up. We couldn't play in the house when it was full of  sand there was no room to crawl in. There was a window at the bottom of the sand house about two feet off the ground. A miner shoveled the sand out of the window into a chute which lead to the coal temple to wash the coal before it went into the coal cars. We climbed through the bottom window and play in the sand. Sometimes there was just enough room to get in the house where the miner had shovel the sand out, and other times the sand house would be half full. We are so lucky the sand didn't cave in on top of us and bury us alive or block the window so we couldn't get out.
The twelve-year old boys and girls played in the lumberyard and once built a tower out 2x4s that had three floors; we were lucky that this didn’t fall down on top of us. The lumberyard men tore it down on Monday when they started work. We only played around the mines on the weekends when the mine was not working. One time they left the fort standing for awhile, I don’t remember how long though.
Across the road from the lumber yard was circular steps that the men used as a exscape  in case of an accident.   We went over and looked down the circular steps with water at the bottom. Shirley went down and touched the water before climbing back up. I was too scare to go down the first step because the steps were only wide enough for one man at a time. There was also a big fan, as big as a house, which pumped air out of the cave so the men could breath. We would stand in front of it and let it blow on us. Sometimes it would lift us up off the ground and push us a little.
Another time, the older teenagers built a merry-go-round out of two railroad ties. They put one in the ground and the other on top with a railroad spike. One child got on each end and the others pushed them around. Everyone, who could hang on, got a turn. That merry-go-round gave us a lot of fun and lasted until we got tired of playing on it

Ronnie age 5 Bonnie age 3

Different salesman would come up the hollow to sell people stuff like ice cream - not one bar or cone but five gallons in a tub. People didn’t have refrigerators they had Iceboxes. When my parents brought ice cream it was usually on the 4th of July, we would have to hurry up and eat it before it melted all away.We ate ice cream cones all day long.
The iceman would come up the hollow once a week and all of us kids would follow behind his truck and grab the loose ice; sometimes he would chip us off a piece with his ice pick. I remember this one time a salesman came to the house and to sell Mom a set of dishes that wouldn’t break; they were called Malta Mack. He was throwing dishes across the room as proof that they would not break.

Poodie age 12  Lucille age  9

        There was a man who would bring his pony to every house, and parents would pay to get their children’s pictures taken on the pony. This one time my cousin, who was six years old, was at our house and she would put her big toe out in front of the pony’s hoof daring it step on it. She wouldn’t let up, and every time she did this the pony looked at her, it's owner finally told her to stop as she was upsetting the pony. But she went ahead and did it anyway. Well you can guess, the pony did step on her toe and the owner had a hard time getting that pony off her. It was bleeding pretty bad when he got the pony away from her. She was screaming. I know that incident made a lasting impression on her because now we've reached an older age, she asked me if I remembered the time when the pony stepped on her toe. The picture to the left was taken about three years later.