Sixteen Tons

 

Sixteen Tons

Mid-twentieth-century Northport, Long Island, was a melting pot of souls, a “family of sorts”. As “yutes” (think “My Cousin, Vinny”) when we weren’t getting into mischief, we were scratching to earn a few dollars to support our spending habits. It was a time when folks accepted young child labor as the norm and no one complained or cried about it.

We lived at #114 Bayview, next door to Ebie and Eddy Mulenhaupt and in the house beyond that was Mrs. Rixon, Ebie’s aging mother who was fraught with diabetes and severe disabilities. Her home was heated with coal, quite common before fuel oil became the new technology. Coal heat was dirty and cumbersome, requiring a nightly ritual called “banking” which was the process of redistributing the coal in the firebox about an hour before going to bed in order to keep the house warm throughout the night. The movie “Christmas Story” illustrated this chore rather well. As a very small child, I can remember my father “banking” our own furnace and spreading the rough coal ashes on our driveway for traction when it snowed. Back then, coal was brought in via dump truck delivering those black dusty chunks to a coal bin located in the cellar. I can still hear the clatter of the coal chute in my “minds ear”.

Widowed and frail, old Mrs. Rixon relied on me to haul her heavy coal twice weekly. The year was 1956, I was just ten and the song, Sixteen Tons dominated the airways, so much so that I knew all the lyrics.

My experience in Mrs. Rixon’s coal bin was dark, dirty and dusty. There was no electric lighting so I used a flashlight to see well enough for shoveling coal into those buckets. I would then carry them to a place alongside the furnace in another part of the cellar. At the close of each coal shoveling event, my nostrils were black from breathing in the coal dust and Mrs. Rixon gave me a Princely thirty-five cents and a Mounds candy bar, valued at ten cents. Today (in 2026) that same Mounds candy bar retails for about $2.50 at Walmart, representing 2500% inflation, a number that staggers the mind.

A whole lifetime has now passed so quickly and, seventy years later here I am at 80. Probably older now than Mrs. Rixon was then, this sobering thought gives me pause. Considering the cost of a Mounds candy bar that continues to rise with the economic tide, I’m reminded of those song lyrics from so long ago. “St. Peter don’t you call me cause I can’t go…...I owe my soul to the company store”. Good night Mrs. Rixon, wherever you are.