First published 29 September 2006
It was sunny and warm the day the men in uniform came to take Big Bertha away. You couldn’t have asked for better weather to see the old girl off after such a long and faithful tour of duty.
Big Bertha was our furnace or, if you want to use the correct home-heating terminology, our boiler. And this was her retirement day.
First installed in 1946, she had a sixty-year career of keeping people warm and comfortable through chilly springs and falls, brutal winters and damp, foggy Halifax summers.
She was an impressive sight, our Big Bertha, and every time you looked at her you couldn’t help but imagine what a high-stepper she must have been in her day.
Constructed of sturdy cast iron walls – her clothes, as the men in uniform called them – Big Bertha was a furnace not to be reckoned with. She went about her job with a professionalism and work ethic you’d expect from a furnace of her generation. There was never any whining or complaining with Bertha. She just got down to business.
True, at times, she could be a little louder than you liked but the noise was more than made up for by her reliability. Big Bertha never let you down. And when she was all fired up, she radiated the most lovely warmth which was hard to resist in a basement with no radiators.
Her design was simple, no bells and whistles, but that was a good thing because it meant fewer things to go wrong. And year in, year out our Big Bertha earned an efficiency score that would have made a boiler half her age proud.
Back in ’46 Bertha burned coal. She had little hinged door on the front that opened for manual re-fueling with a small shovel. It was probably some time in the mid-fifties that she was converted to oil. And Bertha adjusted well.
When I first moved in, I must admit to feeling a little intimidated by this scary looking old frump in the basement. Would she rise to the challenge of my young family?
The man in uniform certainly thought so. He showed me her sterling service history and assured me that while Bertha may not have been the prettiest boiler you ever saw, she was certainly dependable, hard working and in good form.
The only thing to watch, he warned, was the ceramic chamber which would eventually crack and collapse. And when this happened it would be game over for old Bertha.
Well, it was in August when we had the bad news. It was just an annual check-up and there was no indication of anything wrong. Bertha was having a nice summer break.
The man in uniform opened the little hinged door and took one look, and I knew by the expression on his face there was nothing he could do. Bertha’s chamber was cracked. If we left it, it would collapse and we’d be without heat.
And if that happened to happen during a cold snap in January, well, you know, frozen pipes and all that. Big Bertha’s time had come.
Retirement day crept up sooner than expected. That morning I went down to look at Big Bertha for one last time and realized just how much I was going to miss her steady presence in my house. It was the end of an era.
The men in uniform got to work straight away, loosening her bolts, stripping her of her cast-iron clothes and carrying her out in pieces small enough to fit through the doorframes. It wasn’t the dignified end I would have wanted for Bertha, but I guess endings are often undignified and unpleasant. It’s a fact of life.
It didn’t take long, not much more than an hour, to take apart sixty years of faithful, dutiful service.
Her replacement is one of these bright young things, half the size and probably a quarter the weight. She’s sexy, insulated and with an efficiency rating of 85%, as good as it gets, I’m told.
I’m sure we’ll have long and happy relationship with the new girl, but something tells me she’s not going to outlive Bertha’s sixty years. They don’t make ‘em like Big Bertha any more.
glethbridge@herald.ca
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