By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE
Minneapolis Tribune Staff Writer
published by the StarTribune
October 3, 1948
Let's face it, gents. The melancholy days are here. It's time to put on the storm windows.
The thought of it may fill you with deep and abiding repugnance, as it does me. I have long listed the storm window as the home's top torment and its inventor as a Machiavellian fiend. In my moments of calm I realize that he may have been a benign gentleman who sought only to stop winter's march past the threshold. But when in the throes of jimmying storm windows into place I know no calm. The ghost of this inventor haunts me. I feel his scoffing presence as I strain to affix protesting sash to window frame. He chuckles as I bark knuckles, and howls as I inadvertently stick my foot through glass.
Were it not that my family's wish is my command and that I am a slave to convention, I would let my storm windows rot in the garage. I would wear red flannels, earmuffs and overcoat in all my waking hours, thumb my leaky nose at the drafts and be rid forever of a chore that converts me from an affable husband and father into a screaming despot.
I have endured this torture for some two decades, however, and deem it a solemn duty to pass along to the neophyte the pointers I have stumbled upon along the way.
LOOK 'EM OVER
Although taking off the screens and putting in the windows is enough to try a man's soul, there is more to the job than this. The screens must be inspected for holes, mended and painted. My tendency is to postpone this until spring. Come spring, I postpone it until fall.
Then look over your storm windows. The four or five that Junior has thrown his baseball through will have to be hustled off to the glazier.
You will find gaping voids in others crying for putty. Fail to install same and your window is but half efficient. I always figure to put on the putty after the window has been hung. Then I forget the whole thing.
Your screens pointed up for spring and put away, your storm windows chinked, you are set for what can be the most irksome job of all--washing the glass. But you can make of it a casual, breezy job. I line the windows up against the garage, blast them fore and aft with the garden hose, then let the law of evaporation take over.
YOU CAN'T WIN
Your windows will emerge with a few streaks, but research convinces me that there'll be streaks regardless. I've rubbed the glass with cheesecloth, muslin, winter underwear, old flannel shirts, newspapers. Look at the pane from one angle and it sparkles like a trout stream. From another it resembles a map of Minnesota rivers.
I find it expedient to bat this refuse away with my hat. Be certain to do this while the little woman isn't looking. She'll insist that you clean ledge and window frame with soap and water. Women cling to the outmoded belief that one must toil mightily to do a job well.
But the hat-fanning method accomplishes the major results and speeds progress amazingly. In all jobs around the house I give studied inattention to the little niceties. After all, time marches inexorably on. Our little stay is brief enough at best and if we louse it up with petty and tedious detail we have no time for loafing, bridge, ball games and quiz shows, the things that give life character and meaning.
Now to hang the storm windows. First, you must know what window goes where. This data is mandatory. If you've done the job on your present abode before, you have already sweat out this information and have marked the windows. We experts favor the number system and I recommend it to any layman not confused by numbers running into two digits.
OH, YEAH?
But if you're putting up the windows for the first time you might as well know you're going to suffer. The fellow who lived there last year will tell you you'll have no trouble.
"They're all marked," he'll say. "Can't go wrong."
Although many use a measuring stick to advantage, I favor the trial and error method. Feet, inches and fractions thereof irk me. If you're lucky you'll find that one in five windows fits without much coaxing. But most have a nasty tendency to change shapes and sizes during the off season. You'll have to go at these with a plane. Do so, though, with caution. Anger gets you nowhere. In my hot-headed twenties I was given to paring living room windows down to bathroom size during bursts of passion. A rule of thumb method I now use with occasional success is to assume that if the storm window is more than a quarter of an inch too large or too small it's in the wrong spot.
If yours is a two-story house, you may meet your Waterloo on the second floor. If cursed with hypsophobia to the degree that I am you'll be terror-stricken. The manly method is to lug your window up a ladder and slap it into place.
I wouldn't do that for all Fort Knox's gold. I cart it up the stairway, scuffing woodwork and dressers and swiping mirrors and cosmetics off dressers en route to my goal.
I ease the storm sash out the window. Then, with chest and stomach balancing on the ledge, I grope blindly above with my burden, seeking the moorings. Thus far success has always come before apoplexy. It would be well, if you have a small boy in the house, to have him hold your feet down, thus preventing a headlong death plunge. And, if you can reach the seventh rung of the ladder without contracting rigor mortis, by all means hang the window from the outside. It will enhance your standing in the community.
A word of caution. Don't listen to the World Series while putting up the windows.
In the ninth inning of the seventh game two years ago, tragedy struck the Boston Red Sox and me simultaneously. While St. Louis was scoring the winning run I rushed from my post of duty to the radio, and smashed the finest storm window the family ever owned.
Copyright 2014 StarTribune. Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune. No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the
express approval of the StarTribune.
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