Electricity and Telephone

During the 1930s and 1940s much of the country did not have either electric or telephone service. The private power and telephone companies did not provide service to areas outside of towns if the consumers were off the main link to the next town, because the cost of running the lines was much greater than they could recover from the expected revenue. Anyway, they said, most farmers, were too poor to be able to afford electricity.

Rural Electric and Telephone Cooperative were established by the Rural Electric Administration (REA), in the Department of Agriculture, in 1935 under the Roosevelt Administration. At that time only 10 percent of the farms had electricity. By 1939 the REA had helped to establish 417 rural electric cooperatives which, at that time, served 288,000 households. However there were roughly 5.5 million farms and an uncounted number of rural households that weren’t on farms. The work of the REA “encouraged” private companies to electrify the countryside as well. And, by 1939 rural households with electricity had risen to 25 percent.

With the start of WWII copper production was diverted from making cable for electric and phone line to supplying the war industries. New electric and phone lines to rural areas were not built until 1946.

Our farm was one of those that had to wait until the end of the war. No electricity meant no indoor pluming, no electric lights, and a dry cell powered radio. We did have one advantage over a lot of people. We had free natural gas from the well on our farm. The gas lights worked fine as long as you kept enough mantels on hand, they broke easily.

Dad bought an natural gas refrigerator in 1941 so we didn’t have to walk to the spring when we wanted to keep food cold.

The West Penn Electric Co. finely strung wire to our farm in 1946 and Dad hired Bill Clinger to wire the house and barn. I used to hold the flash light for him when he was working in some dark place like under the eves in the attic. Once we had electric we put in a bathroom and remodeled the kitchen with a new sink. Wow!

We also got telephone service, but dad had to pay for the wire and the poles to string the line from the neighbors to our house. Of course the line was a party line with a crank type phone. Our ring was 3 longs and a short. You knew when anyone on the line was getting a call and which family it was by the number of rings. Our neighbor, Helen, had the bad habit of listening to everyone’s calls and that used to really get Dad upset, angry even. He would answer the phone when it was our ring and then say, “OK HELEN, YOU CAN HANG UP NOW.”

To make a call to someone on your line you just used the right number of rings. To call someone of the party line you rang one long to get the operator, then you told here who you wanted to call and where they lived. She would call the operator in the town you were calling and that operator would call the person on her system. Sometimes, if the call was to a distant city, you would have to talk to 2 or 3 operators before you got to right town.