Our Recent State of Inconvenience

Our recent state of inconvenience (no electric range and no microwave oven due to the grease fire) brought back fond memories for Thomas and me. The first year we were married, 1963, we were college students, working for student wages, living in an up-stairs garage apartment across the street from Sewell Auditorium in Abilene, TX. To furnish our apartment we got a used bedroom suite from Thomas' family, an old hide-a-bed sofa from my folks, and a dinette table and chairs from a friend's chicken coop. (Those pieces took some amount of scrubbing to make them ready for use.) And the hide-a-bed took many strong backs to get it up the stairs to the apartment. After extended effort we finally found a used refrigerator, cheap.

Even though we continued diligently for months on end we simply could not find a stove. But we survived because we had an electric skillet, a primitive crock pot, and an electric coffee percolator. (This little electric percolator had an aluminium basket for the coffee grounds and a metal "straw" through the middle. The water was put in the bottom and it boiled up through the "straw," into the metal perforated basket. The coffee left a lot to be desired.) We seldom used it to make coffee, but it was handy for warming canned vegetables. To do that we removed the inner parts of the percolator and used the pot like a sauce pan. Now if coffee was bad in the original state of this little aluminium percolator, you can only imagine its flavor after we cooked green beans or English peas in it a couple of times.

With this sparsely equipped kitchen we had the audacity to invite 13 people for supper! These were friends coming in for the annual lectureship , a family from Montana and several college friends from Lubbock. Like Jesus took 5 loaves and 3 fishes to feed the multitude, we took an electric skillet, the electric bean pot, our little aluminium percolator to feed our multitude!