My sister sent an e-mail that Center had had no power for three days, but many were much worse off on farms and in South Dakota, with power lines and poles down from the recent blizzard. Bloomfield High School was closed for the week. My sister and brother-in-law and one son grilled and fried on the deck, outside, for hot food and played cards and Yahtzee, though my nephew was bored by the second day without television. Their wood-burning furnace didn't work properly because it depends on an electric fan. I had seen Weather Channel excerpts of the blizzards from North Dakota and Minnesota down to Kansas and Colorado, several Interstates shut down, people stranded and taken in by homes and churches. As if, after the hurricane season, people thought nature would give them a break.
When I grew up, with the power plant in Creighton then as now, we joked about our power going out whenever a bird sat on the line between Creighton and Center. So it was no great surprise and an oddly creative period when we had no electricity for two weeks during the blizzards of 1948-49. In my decrepitude now, winter keeps me in fairly easily, but I was outside in the winter almost as much as in the summer back then, and I preferred snowtime over sweltering heat to the extent of having a better winter than summer tan and frostbite at least two or three times a season. Only one family had an electrically run coal furnace then, the leading family socially, the county attorney, wife, and daughter; their immaculate basement was where we bobbed for apples or played rainy day games. Like us, the rest of the town had coal furnaces and usually basement coal bins, large floor registers to stand over before they got too hot. Likewise with stoves: Petersons and perhaps a few others had electric stoves, but Dad sold bottle[d] gas to many, and that's what our kitchen stove used. I'm not talking camping stoves with little propane or white gas tanks. Smelly Skelgas (propane) came in slender four-to-five-foot cylinders and sat in holders outside, copper gas lines running into kitchens. Consequently, we had working furnaces and stoves whereas Keith Peterson was reduced to shoveling coal manually during the day, the three of them staying overnight with various friends. They also had to rely on others for hot food, though I think Keith used a camp stove.
Sue complained in her e-mail how dark it was. Mom taught me to never, never be without kerosene lamps (now it's colored, perfumed fuel from Shopko), which I was used to on my grandparents' farm anyway. She had three, and I have three. Aladdin lamps, with the much brighter but more fragile net wicks (like net cotton condoms), came later, I think, on the farm. We never had those. But that didn't matter, because my always creative dad rigged up a headlight dangling from the dining room chandelier, connected to a car battery on the table, which headlight was as bright as anyone could wish for. We were all readers--the folks subscribed to several magazines then--and we played cards and Monopoly and did crafts, the usual hobbies. That was the winter three-deck canasta, a glorified rummy, was the craze, the only card game I did well at and so the only one I ever liked. We didn't have television then, just the wonders of imaginative radio silenced; movies were out of the question, only in theaters then, no cassettes or DVDs or Netflix or Blockbuster.
The three stores ran out of staples such as bread, milk, and eggs, the latter hoarded. The women saved starter in fruit jars, even giving some to others, the way sourdough is made now, saving some yeasty dough and feeding it to keep it fermenting for the next batch of bread. I think we had powdered milk; condensed or evaporated milk substituted just as I use those today if need be. Though we didn't yet have freezers to stock, most women canned, as Mom and Grandma did, so we had fruits and vegetables in our basement fruit cellar besides the store canned goods.
With snow up to the telephone lines, streets and roads usually impassable and blowing shut as rapidly as they were opened, who needed to go anywhere? We didn't have electricity, but we had heat, light, cooking, baking, and entertainment we were used to. And no school. We didn't have school for days and weeks, though occasionally we townies were summoned by the school bell to trudge up the hill so the superintendent didn't get behind too far on snow days. We mainly fooled around for a couple of hours and huddled over the furnace grates. I do recall we got to play with microscopes. Most of our students were rural, so I'm talking at most a dozen townies, if that, for the second-floor junior-senior high. I don't think the little elementary students were expected when few sidewalks were shoveled, and we walked in the streets after the state road graders had passed through or Dad had talked a bulldozer into opening the side streets. This is, after all, the winter when Dad was one of those responsible for seeing that stranded livestock got fed by Army weasels or airlifts dumping hay bales for the frozen animal clusters that could be spotted. We have photos of the highways, single lanes through drifts higher than cars. Even major highways had single-lane sections: we had some kind of basketball tournament at Plainview that winter, some trucks stalled on U.S. 20 in a long cut at the west edge of town, and we had to transfer from cars on the town side to a Neal bus from Creighton after sliding past the stuck trucks in order to be bused back to Center. But people expected and prepared for weather better then, chains customary (even I knew how to put those on the tires), extra blankets always in our car, candles, flashlights. People now think like teenagers: they're somehow impervious, invincible, weatherproof in their SUVs. T'ain't so, McGee.
Children, especially boys, had chores then just as farm youth always have had. In the summer I maintained the lawn and garden; in the winter I had to shovel snow, the only part of glorious winter I disliked, mainly because we had a narrow walk out to a very big cemented clothesline area, about the size of two single-car garages set lengthwise, in the back yard on the north side where drifts were highest. The big front porch and front sidewalks took a fraction of the time the clothesline did. My dog enjoyed it much more than I. I was also responsible for keeping the furnace fed and removing the ashes. (The clinkers were good for making those coal gardens, mixing salt, liquid bluing, water, ammonia, and coloring the fantasy results with food colors.) Otherwise, we made snow angels, built crude forts, ice skated on the wind-swept frozen creeks, and did plenty of sleigh riding down Schoolhouse Hill a block from me. And my dog, Jigger then, and I romped whenever Mom let me. It was a serendipitous vacation and adventure, no hardship at all, not scary like North Dakota much later when I was teaching at Minot State.
Postscript: Mom and all the other proper women were furious, given the grocery store shortages, when the first trucks into town, after the roads were finally opened, were beer trucks. Our kind of scandal. Times have most definitely changed.
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