Electricity comes to farm house

Frog legs were profitable business

The Pitts family now had electricity for the first time. There were no plugs in the house as there had been no utilities that were made to run on a 32-volt system. About one day a week we would have to run the Delco generator for a set amount of time to keep the batteries charged up. Bill Foster told us to run the generator until it automatically shut itself off when they were fully charged.

When Dad came home for his two weeks off, he was sure proud of the electric lights in the house. One night he came to the door at the bottom of the stairs and the switch was on. He threw a fit!

"Don't you dumb boys know if the switch is on, the electricity is still going through the lines? You boys are wasting electricity."

In a few days, Bill Foster came by the house to check if the Delco Remy was operating as it should. We asked Bill, "If we screw out the bulbs, would it waste electricity?"

He said, "No."

He then explained that there was electricity in the wires at all times that the batteries were charged. It would only be used when the energy was used to burn the light. The switches only shut off the electricity to the room, unscrewing the bulb had the same effect as turning off the switch. He then said he could never make Choc believe that because he was a little hardheaded.

One was a Democrat and the other a Republican and they had been disagreeing for years.

In 1928, Al Smith from New York, a Democrat, was running for president against Herbert Hoover, a Republican from Iowa. The argument between the two friends was hot and heavy. When Herbert Hoover won, the one for Al Smith blamed all of the Depression and hard times on Herbert Hoover. The facts were that the Depression had begun two years before the 1928 election.

The outcome of the electricity issue was that the two weeks that Choc was at work, the Pitts boys would unscrew the bulbs. The two weeks he was home, one of the boys would go down the stairs and turn the switch off. It didn't take much gas to run the generator and you could buy a gallon of gas for 10 or 15 cents. Mom would keep a five-gallon can of gas in the garage. It sure did beat the coal oil lamps we had used all those years. There were high lines that ran across the place, but they supplied electricity to Pea Ridge.

Brother Felix was still digging out the roots and pulling the apple trees out on the Stroud farm for Leonard Miser. For this he would work 10 hours a day and receive $1 for his labor.

Hunting for frog legs

Brother Charles was told by Dr. Lee O. Green that he would pay him 20 cents a pound for all of the frog legs he could get.

Sugar Creek was just a short distance over the hill from the Case place. At that time there were plenty of frogs on Sugar Creek. Charles would take a flashlight and a tow sack on his back and go looking for frogs. Just at dusk he would go walking up and down Sugar Creek. He would bring the frogs home and dump them into mother's rain barrel. This didn't make her happy as she liked to use the water from it to do her laundry. The house had a cistern, but mother didn't like to use the water from it. She made Charles buy his own rain barrel, so now we had two rain barrels. We carried our drinking and cooking water from Frank Martin's spring about a quarter mile over the hill.

Charles was doing so well on his frog project that he ordered, from Sears, a miner's cap with a carbide lamp attached. When he would get ready to go on his nightly run, he would unscrew the small tank on the carbide light and put in fresh carbide and water. This formed the gas that was used to light the light. This made frog hunting a lot easier as he now could keep the light in the frog's eyes and use both hands to pick up the frogs. If the frog wasn't big enough, he would throw him back in the creek to grow some more. The big ones he would keep in his tow sack.

About twice a week he would cut off the hind legs and skin them and take them to Dr. Green's office. This seemed to be a waste of a lot of the frogs, but the dogs didn't mind. Some weeks Charles' income was as much or more than Felix's. Charles would work about 18 hours while Felix was working 60 hours a week. Charles was always known as the manipulator of the Pitts family. He always had a project of some kind going. Charles was also a trader, he would leave home in the morning with maybe a pocket knife and after six or more swaps would return with almost anything that had much more value.

Dad goes blind

One week, Dad came home and told us that while riding in the caboose of the train between Beaver and Berryville, when it went through the tunnel near Beaver, he had gotten smoke cinders in his eyes. His eyes were hurting so bad he couldn't work. When he went to the company doctor, he was told that his teeth were causing the problem. They pulled all of his teeth.

His eyes continued to get worse and he became so blind that we had to lead him around. Someone told mother that there were two doctors in Prairie Grove who were doing some wonderful things for people.

Mother got her cousin, Russell Miser, to take her and dad to Prairie Grove to see the doctors. The doctors told her it was all caused by infection. She should take Dad home, each day make a poultice by shredding Irish potatoes on a cheesecloth, and apply them to his eyes for an hour. That would pull the infection out of his eyes. The next morning when Mother made the poultice and put it over his eyes for an hour, when she took it off, it was covered with yellowish pus. In about one week, he was regaining his eyesight. In two weeks, he could read without his glasses. he reported back to the railroad and was told he had been terminated. He then came home without a job. After some time, the railroad offered a settlement. I never knew what it was.

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Editor's note: Joe Pitts (1920-2008) was a native of Pea Ridge and regular columnist for the newspaper. He began writing a column for The Times in 2000 initially entitled "Things Happen" by Joe "Pea Patch" Pitts.