Back in the year 1965 my father and I went up the avenue to purchase a used kerosene stove! I didn’t use my car at the time as the stove was too big to fit in it. So back then we used a stove like this to warm up the living room, so we walked up and carried it all the way home! twenty blocks at the time it wasn’t too big and weighed about 30 pounds, but it took the both of us to carry, it was a very awkward stove to carry 20 blocks …

Once we connected the stove me or my brother would walk around the block to the gas station, to buy a five gallon jug of kerosene oil and, you had to place it upside down in the rear of the stove, there was a wick that would ignite and the kerosene would drip down to keep it lit. It was a common heating device at the time and was legal to use as hard as that sounds, as it gave off carbon dioxide in the room and I still can remember the odor of the stove when it was on. There were no carbon dioxide detectors in those days, so we were lucky as I recall the times.

The heat the stove put out was only good for a small area, as we had small rooms then. But it helped back in those cold bitter days of winter! So depending on how much you used, we would bring back the bottles for a refill till the next time the kerosene cost if I recall, $0.25 cents a gallon at the time in the 1950’s, increasing to $0.50 cents in the early 1960’s.

I think there are different laws depending on where you live as to their use, because of the possible fire risks, I think they do sell modern one’s these days for use but much safer then the old one’s, the whole building I lived in and the connecting buildings were all the same back then, so this memory has it’s good and bad versions to it, in as far as it’s use, but that’s the way it was.