I can easily remember taking my Saturday night bath in a wash tub in front of the kitchen stove when I was a young lad out on the farm. That was well before we had indoor plumbing.
My dear old grandmother was very proud and happy the day the men folks set a pump from the cistern and ran plumbing into her kitchen sink and the sparkling new bath tub. She would no longer have to make that trip out back to the ol’ outhouse on frosty cold mornings.
However, I do not remember the day when they got electricity.
That must have been achieved before I came along. Electric lights cost money to burn though, so the house was usually fairly dark of an evening before bed time. Grandma had only one dim 25-watt light bulb that hung low from the kitchen ceiling so that she could see to do her nightly chores.
If someone would happen to venture off into another room for some reason, they would light a candle or take the coal-oil lamp with them. When I asked my grandmother how come she didn’t just turn on the lights in the other rooms, she sat me down for one of her long stories.
“Rural electricity out on the farm has not really been around all that many years young’un, and old habits die hard,” she started. “When I was a child growing up, there were no electric lights. You read by the light of the fireplace after dark or maybe candles, which we made ourselves in a candle mold.
“We only had a couple store bought coal-oil lamps in the house, but we were usually too poor to buy the coal-oil. Real coal oil was actually made out of coal, but the oil we called coal oil when I was a child was really kerosene, which was made from petroleum over at the Standard Oil refinery in Sugar Creek.
“We could make ourselves a pretty fair light though if we just had a ‘possum, some lard oil, or even a skunk. A nice dead skunk of course, which hadn’t had time to advertise. From either one of these little critters, we could render oil that would actually burn in our homemade lamps.
“We would take a tea cup or a bowl of some kind and fill it about half full of sand, then imbed a little nail with the point sticking up in the middle and hooking a wick on the point , almost any old kind of rag would make a good wick. We would soak the wick in the oil and then pour the rest of it in the sand and light it. We then had a pretty good Betty lamp, much like they used back in the old country.”
