Remember When: The days of felt weatherstripping

Better make a note. We don’t want to forget the weatherstripping with cold weather coming on.

Well, maybe not today. But if you were a householder or their family member 75 or so years ago, you probably couldn’t get through the winter without those felt strips.

Here’s what you did with them. You’d open up the roll, place the felt material over the cracks between the window sash and frame, cut the strip to fit and either glue it or tack it into place.

Presto! The cold air couldn’t seep in and the warm air couldn’t seep out. You’d just insulated your windows.

Of course, you couldn’t open the windows until spring, but who’d want to do that anyway? Anthracite coal (or oil or gas) cost money.

Our families of times past knew the ropes when it came time to make do in the absence of modern facilities like double-pane storm windows. So, go on down to the hardware store (probably right in your neighborhood) and grab as many feet of weatherstripping as you need. Nails or tacks too.

While there, chat with the owner for a while and he’ll remind you that maybe you should bring your manual lawn mower in for a rehab. Could get rusted in the cellar by spring, and it’s tough enough to push even when it’s working smoothly.

Summer ends Sept. 22. Are you ready? Your parents and grandparents were.

If you ever time travel back to those days you’ll probably do something else that’s passed us by – layaway for winter clothing and holiday gifts.

In a day when credit cards were about as realistic as Dick Tracy’s two-way wrist radio in the Sunday comics, you’d pile up your cold-weather needs as soon as they appeared in the store, take them to the layaway counter and set up your payment plan of so much per week.

You’d make the final payment and redeem them just in time to meet winter – and Christmas – head-on. The advantage, of course, was that you didn’t have to pay interest, just a one-time pittance for having the store hold them for you.

Probably our parents and grandparents became experts at practical measures because they had to be. They lived through depression and wartime rationing several times over. That knowledge got them through the day in a low-tech world.

If you had an icebox, as we did, lingering in front of it while looking for something with the door open would probably draw sharp rebuke from the nearest parent – something about letting the cold out because a cake of ice cost money.

Heaven help you if you left the hot water tap on and forced everyone to wait for the boiler to fill up again so they could take their baths.

Truly they were parsimonious times.

If ice melter had been invented by mid-20th century, that would be news to me. Why would you go to the store and pay for something like that when all you had to do was haul some ashes from the furnace out front and scatter them on your frozen sidewalk? Best anti-slip device ever!

But perhaps the greatest economic aid ever invented was the hand-me-down garment.

Don’t sneer. There was a side benefit.

What mom would likely have said to you back around 1950 if you’d objected to having to wear an older sibling’s school outfit from two years ago was probably good preparation for getting things right during military basic training.

And you can’t say that about today’s fashions.

Tom Mooney is a Times Leader history and genealogy writer. Reach him at [email protected] .