The dreaded boiler-room

In September of 1949, yrs trly began school at Erlton (“EARL-tin”) Elementary, Erlton, NJ.
Kindergarten — schooling lasted 13 years, through four schools in two separate states.
Add college and it’s 17 years.
Erlton School was built in 1926, a giant three-story yellow-brick building.
The lintels over the doors at each end still said “boys” and “girls;” a reflection of prior practice.
Somewhere in an old album is a picture of me, a terrified tike in Sears corduroy pants, cowering in the schoolyard.
Tentatively about to begin his first foray into the real world.
I was five.
Erlton is a sleepy suburb of Philadelphia (in south Jersey) founded in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s by a guy named Earl.
I guess Earl was the developer.
There were a bunch of gable-roofed houses built by him sprinkled throughout the town.
The house we were in, not one of his, was built in 1940.
What brought all this to mind was mention on the radio that DeSales (“de-SALES”) School in Geneva was closed because of a boiler malfunction.
Early in my schooling we tikes were paraded down into the dreaded boiler-room at Erlton School.
There in the basement was a giant coal-fired boiler, a fiery furnace.
Inside, through the glass peephole, was a roaring flame; Hades.
The import, of course, was this was what happened to naughty children.
You got dragged to the boiler-room, to be tossed into the fiery furnace.
Not really, of course.
But that was the impression we were supposed to come away with.
Last time I visited Erlton, the school was gone.

• “We” is my family.
• “Geneva” is a small city about 30 miles east of where we live in Western NY. It’s at the north end of Seneca Lake — a long Finger Lake. A number of railroads went through it.