Electricity is a necessity we all take for granted today, but it brought major improvements for my Mom’s family when it came to her rural Utah town. Before that time, lights at home came from candles or kerosene lanterns which caused many house fires. They had no refrigerators. How did they survive? Well, they had root cellars in their yards to store perishables. In winter, they put their milk, etc. outside in a box of some kind. Some people had iceboxes, if their community had blocks of ice for delivery. Blocks of ice were cut out of nearby frozen lakes or reservoirs and stored covered in sawdust in local icehouses or transported by railroad, then delivered to homes by the iceman.
The lack of electricity certainly limited entertainment in those days. A few families had windup RCA gramophones to play disc records. I remember my grandma telling me about dance nights. When the neighbors descended on a family’s home, took out the furniture and carpet, brought goodies and had a dance inside with fiddle music or a gramophone until the wee hours, while the kids watched or napped.
When electricity came, they could have a light in each room, and a plug in the living room to plug in the radio. This opened up a whole new world of entertainment. Of course, early radios required an antenna to get any signal.
Then everyone sat close around the set to be able to hear the shows that became so popular: “Amos and Andy,” “The Whistler,” “The Lone Ranger,” ”Jack Benny Show,” “Red Skelton,” “Bob Hope,” and “Lassie” were some programs that I remember hearing as a child. Just imagine getting the current news and music shows right in your home on the radio, it was mind boggling.
Telephones soon became available. At first each town only had one phone in at a local store. If someone got a call, they had to be fetched to the store to answer it. Later phones became available for individual homes, but you shared a line with other neighbors. It was called a party line with a special ring to identify whose phone was ringing. Listening to others’ conversations on a party line was fun. Everyone knew everyone else’s business in small rural towns, especially the town’s telephone operators.