The wood king

It was a family member, old and hot-tempered. I knew Denise and I could deal with it, but strangers might not want to. So, we decided to put it to rest.

The Wood King has burned its last log in the farmhouse.

In the fall of 1973, during our first year at the farm, I recall the afternoon my father and grandfather wrestled the pot-bellied Wood King stove from the pump house behind the farmhouse through the front door and positioned it in front of the chimney. Everyone stood by the front door and laughed. It took up so much space and created a character in the room so unlike our more proper living rooms in Tulsa.

Each year my grandfather would apply Stove Black to it to keep the cast iron black, a practice that ended with him. Instead, like most of the rest of us, the stove became grayer with time.

Before we got a furnace, the stove was the heat source. Thin-walled stoves like the Wood King heat up fast, but don’t retain their warmth after a fire dies down. It became routine to wake up at about 3:00 in the morning to a cool house and throw a couple of logs on to get the house warmed up again until re-loading again in the morning. The sound the handle makes as it releases to allow the door to open is the sound of someone taking care of you, keeping you warm during the night.

Because you couldn’t really restrict air flow – the damper could be closed, but not as effectively as modern stoves – the amount of heat put off depended on the amount of wood in the stove. If there was plenty of wood, there would be plenty of heat. Plenty.

My grandmother was an OU football fan, and I recall that during the 1979 Orange Bowl between Oklahoma and Nebraska she was nervous about the game and kept putting wood in the stove just to have something to do with her energy. By the end of the evening OU held off Nebraska 31-24, it was 5 degrees outside and 85 degrees in the farmhouse.

Replaced by a highly efficient soapstone stove, the Wood King now sits as a prop in the bathroom -- its top a level platform for towels, its pipe opening the perfect size for toilet paper rolls -- still taking care of its people.