Today on the Rachel Maddow show she did a piece on FDR and the Tennessee Valley Authority, the project that brought electric to rural America. It really brought back memories. In 1937 we lived on a dirt road in Mercer County, PA. Okay, the County called the road “gravel” but we called it dirt, except in spring after a lot of rain and then we called it a mud road. My mother bought a new fangled kerosene lamp from Montgomery Ward in Feb. of that year. It had a metal base instead of glass and a mantle instead of a wick. A cousin of mine came home from school with me for and overnight stay the day the lamp arrived in the mail and we assembled it right away. At twilight we fired it up and my cousin said, “My God, you can see clear into the corners!”
That summer the TVA put in poles and strung the wire and we had electric lights. The following year we bought a frig.
For Christmas in 1936 an Aunt gave me a book about life in Julius Caesar’s time, 73 B.C. I think. I read the book several times and it occurred to me that the only improvements we enjoyed over the Romans of 2000 years prior were kerosene lamps. Actually they had better baths and better privies than we did.
Water had to be hauled from a spring located about 150 yards from the house. The spring was across the dirt road as well as a ditch that took care of a spring run from the neighboring property. The ditch was spanned by two 2 x 8 planks, and every winter when it iced up I would fall off the damn span into the ditch at least once. If I fell going it was not too bad but coming back with two buckets of water, was really a bitch.
I hated wash days and bath days because they required bucket after bucket of water to be hauled. We bathed in a galvanized tub once a week in winter. My mother used the tub on wash days for clothing and hung them out where they usually froze stiff.
We had it a lot better than the Tennessee Valley people and we knew it. And the Tennessee people had it better than the dust bowl and the mid west drought people and they knew it as well.