I well remember the first electric light I ever turned on.
It was back in 1947 that the long-awaited day finally came when electricity was extended to our little rural community of Selma, Arkansas. Comprised of a general store/post office combination, a two-room school, a sawmill, a couple of churches, and scattered houses and farms, Selma was a young boy's dream come true -- Treasure Island, Camelot and Never-Never Land all rolled into one Tom Sawyer-Huck Finn paradise. The absence of modern facilities was of little concern to me, a nine-year-old, barefoot, tousled-haired son of the soil. At that age, it's not so much the things of life that are important, but life itself -- the exhilaration, the sheer joy, of being alive and young and free.
Nevertheless, the anticipation of the arrival of such a wonder as electricity was enough to cause a thrill of excitement in our otherwise routine lives. Gradually the poles were set, the lines strung, and individual houses linked to that magic current which ran mysteriously through the drooping wires from some miracle source off yonder somewhere in the vast outside world.
Our house was wired and connected to the system one Saturday afternoon, the REA electricians finishing up just as we set out for our weekly family excursion into town. This "Sairdy-nite" ritual was as established in our regime as the regular Sunday-afternoon pilgrimage back out to the country "to visit the ole fokes" would be later after we ourselves had joined the swelling post-war migration to the city. Somehow I never questioned it, nor did I ever consider that there might come a day when all five of us would no longer pile into the pickup and journey to "Metropolis."
Mama and Daddy said they went to town to "watch the country folks parade." I don't recall what my two teenaged brothers did. But I went to meet my Selma buddies at the "pitcher show" where we sat through a fantastic double-feature -- which always included a Western "shoot-'em-up," a cliff-hanger serial and a color cartoon -- all for fourteen cents. This particular Saturday night, Huntz Hall and the Bowery Boys, Johnny Mack Brown and Yosemite Sam were of especial delight to me, tingling as I was with pent-up excitement at the mere thought of what awaited me at the house.
Even Roy Acuff and the Grand Ole Opry on the truck radio as we drove back home could not relieve the sense of urgency I felt as we seemed to literally drag along the graveled, rutted ribbon that wound around the cypress sloughs, across the luxuriant fields of cotton, up out of the Mississippi River Delta and into the hills thick with hardwoods and cedar. After an eternity we lurched to a halt in front of the yard gate, and I scrambled out of the truck and rushed into the house to be the first to turn on that magic lantern.
I will never forget that experience as long as I live. You would have thought I was lighting the National Christmas Tree.
Looking back, almost a half-century later, I am made aware of how little any of us realized then the full impact of that moment back in 1947.
Oh sure, we knew it meant that now we could enjoy all those marvels of modern living -- a "gen-u-wine `frigerator" and not an ice box (though we still called it that), a non-battery radio that wouldn't run down right in the middle of Amos `n Andy, a real-live oscillating fan, not to mention light at the flick of a switch instead of a flickering kerosene lamp. Most wonderful of all, for Mama, it meant a trip to Sears & Roebuck over in Greenville, Mississippi, to pick out a brand-new, shiny Kenmore washing machine "with a wranger `n ever'thang."
Yep, that bare little 40-watt bulb dangling from the living room ceiling on that twisted cord -- that amazing symbol of post-war prosperity -- signaled more than any of us ever dreamed. It heralded the arrival of a wonderfully new and exciting and innovative electronic age.
But, unknown as yet to any of us, that marvelous little bulb, lazily swinging back and forth like a bell, was also silently tolling the end of an era.
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Peacock Editorial Service