Acid Jar

       I didn’t pay much attention to the vibration.  Until the jar fell off the wall and shattered on the cement floor of the basement.  It wasn’t a big jar, maybe a pint or quart jar.

      Mom came hurrying down the basement stairs and grabbed me by the hand.  After surveying things, she led me up the stairs.

      I could not have been more than 4 or 5 years old.  I wasn’t in school yet.  We didn’t have REA electricity yet.  We still relied on propane to cook and heat the small bathroom, on “distillate” to power the floor furnace that warmed the whole house, on kerosene to run the refrigerator, and on a 32 volt DC electric system to power lights, washing machine and iron, plus I don’t know what else. 

      In the basement was a wall of square glass jar batteries that measured about twelve inches square by a little over two feet high.  They stored power from a wind charger mounted on a thirty-foot galvanized angle iron tower about thirty feet east of the back porch to the house. 

     When the wind blew, as it often did, we had power.  The batteries kept the power going for a while when the wind died down.  When the batteries started to falter, Dad had a “light plant” in the shop he could start up and provide some limited amount of power.

      That all went away in the early 50’s.  The REA in the form of Mountain View Electric Association came to us in the early 1950’s.  Again, I hadn’t started school, so that had to be prior to 1953.

      A few things I remember about getting 110-volt electricity:  A narrow-front-end International tractor with a “Farmhand” mounted on it.  The Farmhand was a little different than the one we had.  It was triangular, with the main frame anchored to the back of the tractor and angling to a point in front of the tractor where a giant auger dangled like a great stinger on a bee.

      The tractor/auger combination was used to drill the holes for the line-bearing poles.  All this stuff, equipment, poles, cables, were huge in my eyes.  My attention must have wandered, for I do not remember how they lifted the poles into the holes, or how they tamped the soil back into the hole to anchor the posts, nor how they hung the wires except for one thing.  I remember guys climbing the wooden poles.  How?

      It seemed amazing that someone could mount a pole without a ladder.  When the pole-climbers were on the ground, a thick leather belt dangled from their waists.  I don’t think I ever got close enough to one of them to eye the hooks on their sturdy boots.  I do remember that after the climber got off the post, there were these divots in the pole with lots of chances to get stickers from the splinters the divots left.  The creosote the poles were treated with was also a repellant.

      The folks anticipated the advent of 110 volts into our lives.  They bought a few new appliances.  The one thing I remember for sure was the mangle iron Mom used to iron the sheets.  (Yes, they did iron the sheets in those days!  The mangle resides in the basement today.)  Our neighbors to the north, the Pratts, got live power sometime ahead of us. For a while, the mangle resided in the Pratt’s living room where Mom went to iron sheets and other stuff.

       Another “appliance” was a hair clipper which replaced the old scissor-squeezer clipper Dad used to cut our hair.  He had to squeeze the  handles together to make one set of teeth cross the other set of teeth.  Painful jerks of my  hair were guaranteed with the manual clippers.  (Maybe that’s where I learned to dread a haircut, which I still do, a little bit.)

    So it was that one time I was in the barber chair up at Pratt’s when an airplane landed on the “windmill road” east of our house, and I had to miss it all because I was in the chair and couldn’t see out the window.  That disappointment aside, the electric clipper was a great improvement over the manual clipper, even if we had to go to Pratt’s to use it.

     I also remember Milton White spending some time helping Dad wire the house, the old red barn, the shop, and the milk house.  The cable was the old black cloth (I think) wire treated with some kind of black stuff that left you with dirty hands after you handled it.

      The outlets and probably the lights in the shop, and some of the circuits in the house,  are still using that original wire.  There was supposed to be a wiring inspector who came to see that things were done according to Hoyle before the power could finally be turned on. 

      Dad had to provide access to all wiring, which included attics in the shop and the house.  I remember a plank “walk” he installed in the old red barn so the inspector could get up among the rafters and look at the wire.  I don’t think an inspector ever turned up.  Dad wasn’t too happy about going to all that trouble and not having it used.  On the other hand, there was no rejection of the job, no “punch list” that had to be completed before the power could be switched on.

     I don’t remember changing light fixtures or installing outlets.  I suppose I was shuttled out of the way somehow while all that was going on.  I don’t remember doing without lights during the transition from 32v DC to 110v AC.   

    I do not remember the first time the power came on.  I find it strange that I can remember many of the details of preparation but not the climactic event.

     One event I do remember, trying to pull some of the black wire, which was coiled up in the basement waiting to be installed or left over from the installation, up the basement steps.  I was a little more than half way up the stairs when the wire snagged somewhere and refused to go any farther.  In my impatience (something I have never cured), I gave the wire  mighty jerk.  The wire jerked back, I lost my balance and tumbled backwards down the wooden steps not covered in carpet remnants then. 

 

 

    Why was I trying to drag the wire upstairs?  I must have had some project in mind.  I had to be rescued from a coil of wire and comforted from my traumatic experience.    

     I also remember when the jar fell off the shelf with a crash.  Mom led me upstairs by the hand, very concerned, not letting go of me while she yelled out the back door to Dad who was welding in the shop.  Putting two and two together, I figure his welding caused the batteries in the basement to vibrate, which rattled the jar off the shelf.

      The jar contained acid used to replenish the batteries.  Mom inspected me.  I was pretty sure I suffered no injuries.  Nothing hurt.  I was free and clear.  Later, Mom found holes eaten into my jeans and my shirt.

     I have no recollection of the battery bank being removed.  I vaguely remember a jar or two crashing on the basement floor and the broken glass being picked up and put in the trash.

    Mom used one of the two surviving jars for pickling a few times.  She would put the cucumbers in the brine, put a plate on top of it all, and weigh the plate down with a good-sized rock which we had rescued from the roadside where the maintainer had pushed it.  The jar would sit for some time on the basement shelf before the pickles were canned.

    The jars sit, empty now, where they have sat for a long time, probably longer than they served in a battery “pack.”

         The etched and deteriorated spot on the basement floor is the only other reminder of that spill 70 years ago.