Living Without Electricity

Living the first seventeen years of my lifetime without all the conveniences of today was quite an experience. I am going to take you back to my childhood days to show you how it was.

Just imagine living without electricity. Everyday the kerosene lamps and lantern had to be filled and the glass globes had to be cleaned of the black soot that gathered on them when they were burning. The wick had to be trimmed off nice and square so that you got a full burn which gave the most light.

These lamps did not give off a very bright light. We had to have one hanging over the center of the table. If you were eating or trying to study, it was hard to see.

We would carry a lantern out to the barn to do chores. There were nails in the sides of the ceiling joist every little ways so that the lantern could be moved along behind the cows as the chores progressed. The lantern was never taken to the hay loft where it could possibly catch the barn on fire. If the hay for the evening feeding had not been thrown down in the daylight, it had to be done in the dark. This happened many times and it was sure scary to go to the hayloft in total darkness. It always gave me the feeling of how a blind person had to cope. It must be terrible to be blind.

There was always a fear that someone would drop or knock over a burning lamp and spill the oil all over. This would have most likely caused a fire that would have burned down our house or barn. The folks were very careful about where the lamps were set so this did not happen. At night, when we went upstairs to bed, it was usually Mother who carried the lamp and set it on a stand in the hallway so that a little light would get into each room. Then we all could see to get undressed and into bed. But before we could get into bed for the night, we would all kneel by Dad and Mother’s bed to say our prayers.

The lanterns were used for many other things. If we went somewhere at night by horses and sleigh, we had to carry a lighted lantern along to help see how to tie up the horses or to hitch them up again when it was time to go home.

It was fun to go for a ride in a big sleigh with the bottom of the box filled with nice, clean straw. To glide through the newly fallen snow on a moonlit night was great.

In the wintertime, after the ice had frozen on the ponds, many of the kids from neighboring farms would carry our lanterns out to a pond and set them around so we could have a skating party. If there was enough snow on the pond, we would play Fox and Geese. This involved making a sort of “maze” in the snow by clearing an area about ten feet in diameter in the center of the pond for the “safe area”. Around this, we cleared a couple circular paths, each about three feet wide and some twenty or thirty feet from the next one. At each quarter around the circle, a lane was cleared to connect the outer paths with the center safe area. One person was chosen as the Fox; the rest were all Geese. As long as the Geese were in the center, the Fox could not capture them.  If the Fox caught you outside the center safe area, you became the Fox. The game went on for a long time. It was good exercise and lots of fun.

If we had enough snow for sliding down hill, we would space the lanterns down the hill, and we would have fun for hours to see who could go the fastest and farthest. We used anything that would work to slide on. Some kids were lucky enough to have sleds and some even used a scoop shovel. If you took Dad's scoop shovel, you had better remember to bring it home or later you would be walking over the fields and fences to fetch it back home. We only had one scoop shovel. The best sliding hill was about a mile away, so this was a high price to pay for forgetting to bring home the “sled.”

Because we did not have electricity, we also did not have refrigeration. Some folks did have ice boxes, but because we were so poor, we did not have one. Ice had to be bought and there was no money to spend on ice. The basement was used to store things that needed to stay cold. The well-house was used to keep milk from spoiling.

For several years my mother had to wash the clothes by hand using a scrub board. I am sure you have seen these in a museum or a jug band. Mother’s first washing machine was a wooden tub that had a plunger that went up and down by moving a long handle back and forth. Some of us kids would help her do this part sometimes when we were not in school. The clothes were put through a set of rubber rollers that were turned by a hand crank. The clothes dropped into a wash tub full of clean water and were sloshed up and down with a hand plunger. After the soap was rinsed out of the clothes, they were run through the ringer once more. The clothes were then hung on several lines out in the yard to dry. Mother would then iron the clothes by using several metal irons that were placed on the top of the stove to heat them. About the time that the twins were born, she got a used washing machine that had a gas Briggs and Stratton engine. This made her job go a little faster. I can remember though that she would usually get a bad headache from the fumes of the gas engine.

It seemed like Mother was always patching or sewing with her New Home pedal sewing machine. She made most of my sisters’ dresses and she patched the holes in my bib overalls.

It was not easy being a wife and mother to a poor farm family in those days, but Mother was always cheerful and enjoyed doing what needed to be done. As I look back on my life, I think I could not have had better parents. They had a very difficult time raising six children during the Great Depression.

I can remember how Mother used to do so much baking in that old cast iron stove. This usually happened on Saturday. The kitchen got so hot from having to keep a fire going on the cook stove. Mother would bake many loves of bread and lots of sugar cookies to last for the week. She made some pies using lard and flour and fruit from our orchard or garden. Mother worked so hard to feed us all.

I remember that we had to eat everything that we took on our plates. We were always told that no food could be wasted. By the end of the week the crust on the homemade bread was getting dry and hard and, being a “bad boy”, I sometimes ate the soft part of the bread and sneakily hid the crust on a ledge under the tabletop when Mother and Dad were not looking. Well, Mom found out I was doing this when she moved the table to scrub the floor and out fell the old bread crusts. She knew who was doing it because the bread crumbs fell from my place at the table. Oh, did I ever get a scolding, and she kept a steady eye on me for a long time to see that I ate the crust and did not hide it.

The next time you lose your electrical power for a short time, just imagine how it was to grow up without any electricity. I would not like to do it again.