Cigarette Smoke Covered Sewing Machines
I remember the ranch house that my Grandma lived in Colorado. It had a coal “Warm Morning” stove in the main room for heat (there wasn’t a parlor) and a wood cook stove in the kitchen. She used to let me try to run the shaker on the Warm Morning that shuffled the ashes and small clinkers down into the ash pan. I wasn’t strong enough to do it very well, but she’d let me try. Whenever either door was opened (top one for putting in more coal, bottom one for removing the ashes) some smoke would escape into the room. It was just part of having coal heat. During use (winter) the stove never cooled completely off, so the doors were opened regularly with smoke in the stove, and a little smoke always got out. I can see why folks were so glad to get electric or gas heat back in those days!
She had regular electricity so the only time she used oil lamps was during an outage. As a side note, she did have the old bare wires going around the wall just below the ceiling on porcelain insulators (long since disconnected, of course), from the first electrical service to the house. I’m trying to think of the name for the porcelain tubes that went through the wall for the bare wires to come in from outside....
CD in Oklahoma