LizzieMaine
Bartender
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- Where The Tourists Meet The Sea
One thing that just occurred to me was the relative effort and awareness that it would take to stay warm and also keep things from catching on fire. Rural homes are generally heated by wood, which requires constant stoking and feeding throughout the day, and homes in residential areas probably ran on coal furnaces. There are several comic stories and cartoons of the period about the challenges of lighting a furnace.
On the other side of the heat/fire issue, many kitchen appliances back then were not automatic, didn't even have off switches, and you would have to keep your wits about you to make sure you didn't leave the coffee pot or the waffle iron plugged in. I'm sure that smoke detectors were a ways off yet. Add to this the ubiquitousness of smoking indoors, or leaving kerosene lanterns where cows can kick them over...it seems a miracle we didn't burn down the whole country.
Kerosene stoves were very common in working class homes -- you'd have one in the kitchen and one in the living room, and that would heat the whole house if you closed off the rooms you didn't use. But they had to be turned down at night and re-lit in the morning, which meant the first person to get up in the morning would hit a very chilly floor.
Appliances with thermostats became popular in the late thirties, but the non-thermostatic models remained common well into the sixties. I still use a manual toaster, and you develop a habit of holding the power cord in one hand when you're turning the toast, as a reminder to pull it out of the wall when you're done. A lot of people used asbestos pads underneath toasters and percolators and such in case they forgot and left them plugged in.