Electricity in our homes is so near universal today that most of us take having electricity for granted.

Many of us can hardly imagine life without electricity. But just 75 years ago, only about 10 percent of the people in the United States living outside of towns had electricity in their homes.

Electric utility companies back then usually thought building power lines into the country was too expensive to pay off.

By the time I was becoming aware that I was alive (in the early 1940s), the government-backed Rural Electric Administration (REA), was establishing rural electric cooperatives, which were building power lines out into the country, bringing electricity to farm people for the first time. For rural Pea Ridge, it was Carroll Electric Cooperative of Berryville which brought us electricity. I remember well seeing paths cleared for the “high lines” and trucks and crews setting the high-line poles out to our house in 1945.

Years later in the 1980s, I was living in Berryville and was able to meet the superintendent of the crew who had set the poles and strung the wires to our farm back in 1945.

Interestingly, just as we are having fierce political battles these days over health care for everybody, back in the 1930s there were fierce political battles using pretty much the same arguments over the REA and whether the government should be helping bring electricity to rural people as well as town people.

In 1945, ideas of the uses of electricity were just beginning to grow. Some people, when they first got electricity, used it in a minimal way, only gradually changing their ways of living. Getting electricity might just mean electric lights in the house. Many houses were wired for one light in each room, a light bulb fixture hanging by wires from the ceiling, turned on and off by a pull chain. That was the cheapest way to get lights in the house. If there was a wall outlet (or plug-in, as we called them), it might be only one per room.

Just 10 years ago I was pastor of a sizeable church in east Arkansas. The church building had been built in 1933. Although some new electrical wiring had been done to provide for air conditioning and other things, there was still only one electrical outlet in the sanctuary. Obviously that church had not adopted the electric guitars and powerful vocal amplification systems that many churches use today. People back then just didn’t imagine that they would need all the electric stuff that we feel we need today. But, little by little, folks would replace their old battery radio with an electric radio;

the old oil lamp on top of the piano would give way to an electric lamp with a flowered shade; the old hand fan would be replaced by an electric oscillating fan; Mother would get a new electric iron; then an electric mixer; and an electric alarm clock would replace the old wind-up alarm at the bedside.

Rural electricity gave us new things to learn, andnew words to use. My dad took an interest in learning what he could about electrical wiring and he became a pretty good at it. We were learning about transformers, 60-cycle alternating current, hot wires, neutral wires, ground wires, broken circuits, “dead shorts” and blowing fuses.

Many people did their own wiring, being unable to afford to hire it done.

Back in 1948, Dad’s cousin Millard Holcomb, who lived between Elm Springs and Springdale, had helped his folks, my Uncle Frank and Aunt Bessie Holcomb, in building a new house on their farm. When Millard hooked up the wiring and turned on the electricity, some lights wouldn’t turn off; some wouldn’t turn on, and some plug-ins were only live when the lights were on. He came and asked Dad to help straighten it out. I remember that we went over there one evening, and my dad and Millard spent hours going through the wiring, undoing and reconnecting wires and switches and junction boxes. I was frustrated all evening because Mother wouldn’t let me get up in the attic to help them. I just knew my 8-year-old help would be appreciated if I could only get up there.

Uncle Frank invited me to play checkers. I guess he was trying to distract me from wanting to help in the attic. They got everything fixed without me, and we left for home about midnight. I slept all the way home.

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Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history.

He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.

Opinion, Pages 5 on 10/27/2010