Business: Those Fear-of-Freezing Blues

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The heating oil run-up spurs sales of wood and woollies, and budget worries

Our Lady of Pity, a Roman Catholic church in North Cambridge, Mass., had never before seemed so aptly named. Looking ahead to the coming winter, the priests were stunned to discover that their heating-oil bill for 1979 will make even the $12,000 they paid last year look like a bargain. To cut costs, they plan to close off the 1,100-seat main sanctuary during the cold months and hold services in the church chapel and chapel hall, which together can accommodate only 500 worshipers. Explains one priest: "It is simply a question of 45 gal. an hour to heat the big church against 6 gal. for the chapel."

People throughout the nation's Northern states are already gloomily pondering similar tradeoffs. Just about now, the owners of the 16 million houses, apartments and mobile homes—more than one-fifth of the U.S.'s housing—that use oil heat are getting their first big fuel deliveries. They are discovering with a dismaying jolt that the great '79 fuel crunch has moved from the gas station to the furnace room. Since January the average price of heating oil has jumped from less than 56¢ per gal. to more than 80¢, an increase well in excess of 40%. The country's total heating-oil bill, about $10 billion last year, will rise by $4.3 billion.

This is a burdensome new "tax" that will worsen the already deepening recession by reducing the amount of cash Americans have for spending on all sorts of nonessentials, ranging from new cars and skiing holidays to Christmas presents and charitable contributions. A typical fuel bill for an oil-heated home, about $650 last year, is expected to climb to between $ 1,060 and $ 1,200 this year. In 1978 the average American worker had to labor for 19 hr. every month of the heating season to pay his fuel-oil bill; this winter he will have to work a walloping 34 hr. per month.

Homeowners are using both simple and desperate means to cut oil consumption, everything from buying flannel pajamas and woolen sweaters to closing off rooms .and even whole floors for the duration. In Agawam, Mass., Ernest Bleeck, 73, a retired sales manager, and his wife Mary, 66, spent $2,000 to build a greenhouse on the sunny kitchen side of their two-story frame house. In addition, they have placed several water-filled, 55-gal. barrels among their geraniums and lettuce plants where the sun will warm the water; then the warmth can flow into the house through the kitchen windows. The Bleecks hope to reduce the 1,500 gal. of oil that they usually burn every year by as much as 20%. Says Mary Bleeck: "If we have sun, we can practically live in the kitchen."