Fiction
The Art
of Plumbing
and Heatingby Gene Breaznell
It took Mike and me two whole weeks to remove the cast-iron radiators in the big Victorian house, built in the late 1800s, and replace them with modern baseboard heating. Two weeks of hell in mid-August, during a record heat wave, with no air conditioning, the only breeze from a window fan we carried with us from room to room. Correction, I carried the fan. Mike was the plumbing and heating expert. I was his unskilled assistant.
Carrying the fan was nothing compared to carrying the radiators outside and loading them into Mike’s pickup. Each radiator weighed at least two-hundred pounds, I learned when we sold the first few to Schmidt’s Scrapyard. Waiting for Mrs. Schmidt to pay us for the scrap iron, in cash through a slot in a b
