LAMPS AND LANTERNS

One of my most pleasant memories is sitting around the dining room table on a cold winter night, the only sounds the quiet hiss of the Aladdin lamp that sat in the middle of the table and the occasional crackling and snapping of the fire burning in the stove. My father was at his place at the end of the table, reading the daily paper (a day late, as the Milwaukee Sentinel came by mail). My mother sat at the other end of the table, patching the never-ending holes in our bib overalls. My brothers and I worked on our homework, solving arithmetic problems, studying maps for geography, or finishing a book report.

For most of my childhood, the only indoor light I knew was that made by a kerosene lamp or lantern. We had two kerosene lamps in the kitchen, one that sat in the middle of the kitchen table from late October until early April and another that hung on the east wall of the kitchen near the door to the dining room. That one had a shiny reflector behind it, designed to throw the light back into the room. The only time Ma moved the lamps was when she filled them with kerosene, which Pa bought in Wild Rose at Hotz’s hardware store and kept in the woodshed in a one-gallon can—enough kerosene to last at least a week for both our lanterns and lamps. The cost of lighting our house and barn was minimal; kerosene was about fifteen cents a gallon at Hotz’s.

In the dining room an Aladdin lamp always stood at the center of the table. Although it too burned kerosene, it produced twice as much light as the kerosene wick lamp in the kitchen. Similar to a gasoline lantern, the Aladdin lamp had no wick and instead had a mantle, a fragile little piece of clothlike material that glowed brightly when the lamp was lit. For reading, mending, and other close work, we sat at the dining room table where the light was brightest.

I had my own bedroom lamp, a small kerosene lamp with a carrying handle. It had been my grandmother’s, and I was cautioned to take good care of it and be very careful not to drop it. Of course, dropping it would do more than break the lamp; a dropped lighted lamp was likely to set the house on fire. And while a house fire anytime is a disaster, a house fire in winter is a catastrophe. When my brothers and I went to bed on a winter evening, I hooked my index finger through the lamp’s handle and led the way. The little lamp provided all the light we needed to make our way up the steep stairway and along the frigid hallway to our bedroom. I set the lamp on the dresser while we undressed for bed—the rule was, the last one in bed blew out the light.

This rule was followed downstairs as well. The last one out of a room blew out the lamp or, in the case of the Aladdin lamp, turned off the kerosene supply. When my children, who had always known electricity, were small, I often caught myself saying, “Blow out the light when you leave your room.” Their response was always, “Huh?”

Pa and I each had our own kerosene barn lantern, the kind with a wire-protected globe and a heavy wire handle that you could hang on a nail behind the cows. When Pa hung his lantern at one end of the barn and I hung mine at the other end, they provided enough light for us to milk cows by hand on dark winter mornings and evenings—but just barely enough, as many corners of the barn remained dark or in deep shadows. Having a considerable imagination, I pictured all kinds of interesting things happening in the dark corners where the dim lantern light never reached. I imagined creatures mythical and real that I had read about in school lurking there: ghosts and ghostlike apparitions, dragons, wild animals of ferocious dimensions, and more.

A few years ago, I was giving a school talk about what it was like on the farm when I was a kid. I told the children that my brothers and I did our homework by lamplight. A fourth grader held up his hand with a serious, quizzical look on his face. “Mr. Apps,” he began, “if you didn’t have electricity, how did you watch television?”

I explained that television hadn’t yet made its way to Wisconsin when I was a boy, and even if it had, we had no electricity at our farm to power a TV. Of course, that changed in 1947. By spring of that year we had electricity on our farm, and electric lightbulbs illuminated the rooms of the house with a brightness we had never known—and exposed the dust that we hadn’t realized was there. My mother, a fastidious housekeeper, cleaned for a week after electric lights arrived.

The shift from lamps and lanterns to electric power had a profound effect on my family. Several of my friends had gotten electricity at home long before we did; now I would no longer be embarrassed to invite friends over or hold a 4-H club meeting at my house. And Ma need not be ashamed to have her fussy city relatives visit. Before long an electric motor powered Ma’s washing machine, another pumped water, and still another ran a milking machine in the barn. In a matter of a few months, electricity had changed our lives irrevocably, and lamps and lanterns became symbols for our pre-electricity days on the farm.

Perhaps most significantly, electricity shortened the long, dark nights of winter. Now we walked to the barn for morning and afternoon chores with a yard light showing us the way. I no longer had to carry a lantern into the haymow so I could see to toss down hay; with a simple flip of a switch, the haymow was nearly as bright as a summer day.

But there were downsides to progress. Now we could sit anywhere in the kitchen or dining room to do our work, as the light was ample in both rooms. But I missed having family close, gathering at the dining room table as we had always done when lamps and lanterns lighted our lives.

Neither of my parents ever became quite comfortable with electricity. They kept the kerosene lamps and barn lanterns handy; when the power went out, as it did on occasion—often during storms, but sometimes for no apparent reason—the old standby light sources were ready. With the arrival of electricity to the farm, we gave up some of our self-sufficiency, something my father always considered extremely important. Now we depended on someone else to provide a basic need. It was one of the trade-offs we made when we shifted from simplicity to, as my mother sometimes called it, “that newfangled electricity.”