Winters were legitimately brutal in our hometown.
- I am the kind of dad that reminds his kids often how taxing he had it when he was their age.
I may not have walked uphill both ways to school in 5 ft of snow, however that was not so far from the truth! I lived in a small mountain city as well as attended a school with good teachers, however not the largest budget. The people I was with and I had an old boiler method to keep us warm while in the coldest weeks of the year. It was a crapshoot as to whether or not it would bring any amount of warmth to any given classroom that you end up in. Let myself and others explain. The closer you were to the boiler, the faster your room would heat up. The farther away you were from the boiler, the longer it took for your room to heat up. There were a select handful of classrooms in the building where you got the best possible scenario. If you were in a classroom next to the boiler, your room would heat up easily suddenly in the day, which would be a welcome relief, until the heat started getting rather oppressive. If you were on the opposite end of the school, you would not believe any lick of warmth from that boiler until it started getting close to dinnertime, at which point you would head even farther away from the boiler to the dinner room, which for whatever reason was on the opposite end of the school, kids in the middle of the school had the best luck, because they would get warm relatively early in the day, as well as the heat would not be oppressive as well as would remain throughout the rest of the day. Mind you, this is only when the boiler was legitimately working!