It was about 1915 when Ridgeway first received electric lights. Prior to that time we used kerosene lamps including one that could be pumped up and with a very gradual mantle gave a bright white light. The source of our electricity was a diesel engine house about a block from our house. For the first few years we had current only during the evening and morning hours--from about sun down to ten o'clock and for about an hour early in the mornings. Once we were having a nice Halloween party at our house and the lights went off at the regular time while our guests were still there. My father called the man at the power station and asked him to keep the engine going another hour for which he paid $5.00.
Kenneth later added more detail and discussed other early inventions in a taped interview, partially transcribed and included in an appendix to his and Mary's autobiographies:
For a long time we didn’t have any electric lights. We just had coal-oil lamps. A plain coal-oil lamp wasn’t very bright....but then they had another fixture that came along about that time and sit on the table. They had what they called a mantle. It was a little cloth arrangement... You’d take a match and lift the bottom of that and then it was a very fragile light mantle. You’d had to be very careful or you’d knock that candle or mantle all to pieces and have to do it all over again. It would give a nice white bright light. It was kerosene.
I must have been about 18 or 19 when we got electric lights. They had a diesel motor in a little power house. It wasn’t very far from where we lived. It was a big motor and it provided the power for that whole little town. In the summer time, it only came on about 5 or 6 o’clock in the evening and run until about 9 o’clock....My dad was in charge of the choir in the church... It would come to about 9 o’clock and he’d call the power company to run the unit another hour or something like that and it didn’t cost him more than 4 or 5 dollars or something like that.
Telephones were put in use; they had single lines. They had a number of individual house lines hooked into it and they would get that number on that particular number by getting certain rings. In other words, if they were calling you, maybe your ring would be three little short rings and then a long one. The neighbors might be two little one and two short ones and they all had a little different rings. When they’d hear a ring, there would be several of you taking the receiver off. They were going to ease drop on that conversation. [He membered first telephone call in Ridgeway at about age five.]
“We didn’t have a bathroom [when he was young]. We had to go outside to one these outside toilets and when we wanted to take a bath why we had to warm a lot of water on the big kitchen stove and we just had one of the tubs my mother used to soak our clothes and we’d just get in the kitchen there and everybody would stay over in the living room and one at a time we’d take our bath. We’d have a whole big old tub of water, real hot on the stove and then we’d just take what we wanted in that tub and dump it in the sink and the next one would come along and take their bath.
My Father got the first Ford Sedan that they had in that county. We were all so proud of that little Sedan. It was a nice little car. The gasoline tank was under the drivers seat--a square tank under the drivers seat --and when you wanted to fill the tank up you just had to get out and take the cushion off; it didn’t hold very much gas and it was one of these that you had to crank.
I remember I had to go out and crank those cars whenever I had to fill a tank up with gasoline. I was keeping the books in that agency but I also had to wait on that pump out there and was always afraid somebody would put the spark down too far when I’d start cranking that car--they all wanted it cranked, of course.
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| Man cranking a Model T Ford |
You know those automobile tires were so poor and they were high pressure tires that we actually would have--there was no guarantee on them at all--and we actually had examples of where somebody that lived out in the country, not more than ten miles, would have one of those new tires blow out before they got out there and there was no guarantee at all. He just had to come back and buy a new tire. It was terrible.
Early Employment
My first job in Ridgeway was at a food store during the summer vacation from school. In the rear of the building they had an area where fresh cream was brought in for sale. I was trained to reserve the cream, take a sample, test it in a tube that was rotated in a hand cranked machine, then record the cream content and make a simple written report that the patron took to the store owner to receive payment. Eggs were also delivered at the same door and after checking for broken eggs, I recorded the count for the patron to turn in for payment.
The store owner had a roaster for reshelled peanuts that was operated at intervals during the day to keep a supply of freshly roasted, salted and buttered peanuts for sale. During my first day of work, I was surprised to have the proprietor say, "Kenneth, you may help yourself to the peanuts if you would like them." It wasn't until that evening when I had a terrible stomach ache that I discovered there was no better way to teach me to be very moderate in my indulgence at the peanut roaster.
During the summer of 1914, I worked at the Winkler and Young Cafe in Ridgeway. They served hot meals and fountain dishes. They had an ice storage shed in which they stored large blocks of ice cut from a pond, and stored in sawdust that would keep the cafe supplied with ice all summer for making ice cream. Sometimes when I was tending the fountain, a party of school kids from Bethany, our county seat, would come in and try to "show off" by ordering a fountain dish I had never heard of. I would mix up a conglomeration of ice cream and syrups and take it to them. They would say, "What is that? I ordered so-and-so." I would reply, "That is the way we make it here," and leave.
The cafe had a large mechanical organ with various sound effects that was operated by coins, that was terribly noisy. I worked from about 6 in the morning (when I swept the place) to about 9 or 10 in the evening--and midnight on Saturday for $1.00 a day plus meals.
During school vacation in 1915-16, I worked in the bank for my father as a book keeper for the canceled check statements of individual depositors. We had an adding machine but all the ledger and individual statements were maintained by hand writing. It was about this time that Father purchased a "Grandfather" clock that Father much later in life willed to me and which I shipped from San Jose, California to our home in Washington, D.C. after Father's death. It still keeps good time.
Kenneth added more detail about his work at the bank in tape-recorded interviews, which were partially transcribed in the appendix of his and Mary’s autobiographies:
My father was a cashier of a bank that he had organized there, the Commercial State Bank. He would get me down there. First he’d let me do the janitor work--sweep out the place in the summer time and on Saturday. Later on he let me do the book work and we didn’t have anything but a simple adding machine--no book keeping machine--and everything would have to be written out longhand.
If a person made a deposit you’d go get their little book and when they’d come in with a check, you’d had to get the book and write it out again and that was a pretty slow way to work. Then I got so when the war came along in 1917 and the assistant cashier joined the army, my father said I could take over the books. So I was being real careful in getting them all added up.
For several weeks the books were nicely balanced, and one day, it was the Fourth of July, they had a big celebration there going up and down the streets, and my Dad said I had to go down there and get those books in balance. The books were off 10 cents and I couldn’t find that 10 cents. I worked and I worked and went over the figures and went over the figures and finally I went back and ran the tape on the figures on the day that the other young man finally closed the books and I found that 10 cents. It was his fault. But my Dad said, “If you’re going to be a banker, you’ve got to get your books all balanced and don’t be trying to get some special favors here.”
High School Graduation
In 1917, I graduated from the Ridgeway High School--there being twelve in the class: six girls and six boys. I was president of the class and played a piano solo during the graduation exercises.
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