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Some of the cracks that must be plugged as the nation tries to keep warm are in the structure of the society itself. The poor and the old living on fixed incomes can muster no defense against rising heating bills. Stella Falco, 74, a white-haired widow who lives in a $50-a-month tenement in Providence, is tired and bitter. After five decades of working in textile mills, she receives $3,384 a year from Social Security as well as a small pension. A quarter of her income will go for heat; price increases mean a thinning out of her already poor diet. "Why should these oil people get rich while the poor people are going to freeze to death?" she asks. "Maybe I won't even be here by the time it gets really cold."
In Houston's low-income black Fourth Ward, Billy Kelly, 64, simply stays away as much as possible from his porous and weatherbeaten two-room frame house. His gas has been cut off since sum mer. When he absolutely must return home, he says, "I put newspapers in the cracks and sleep with my clothes on and put on all the blankets and quilts I can find. If you get pneumonia, that's it." In Wisconsin's Green County, two 65-year-old widows have moved into one house to save on fuel costs. In Chicago, volunteers are knitting mittens and scarves for poor children while the city's Hull House Community Center conducts weatherizing workshops for residents of the surrounding low-income neighborhood. In East Lansing, Mich., a "community tool box" provides tools necessary for home insulation. In Little Rock, Gloria Wilson, a mother of seven and the wife of a mechanic, dreads the first winter gas bill. She does not heat the living room or dining room of her seven-room home. Even so, her heat has been cut off for nonpayment five tunes in the past three years. Each reconnection has meant a higher de-posit—a kind of poor people's tax.
Efforts to help the poor involve both motion and commotion. Their effective ness is uncertain. Vermont has tightened eligibility requirements for fuel assistance money, and though Republican Governor Richard Snelling has said that "no Vermonters will suffer needlessly from the cold this winter," others disagree. Former Lieutenant Governor T. Garry Buckley, also a Republican, says, "I guarantee the regulations will result in some elderly persons freezing to death."
The Federal Government's emergency fuel bill aid, under which financial help is granted to pay heating bills, was troubled by distribution problems last year. It has been doubled, to $400 million for this winter, and the eligibility limit has been raised to $8,375 from $7,750 for a family of four. Red tape has been snipped: applicants no longer have to present a notice from their fuel dealers saying that service has been cut off for nonpayment. In addition, a hastily conceived new program will send $1.2 billion in cash grants, averaging about $150 each, to 7.3 million low-income recipients. Not everyone is happy with the programs. Legislators in Minnesota and North Dakota are grumbling that under Washington's allocation formula Southern states may receive more money than they need —while the cold North suffers.