SRHS
Steamboat Rock Historical Society
NEW BEGINNINGS
RURAL ELECTRICITY
Electricity was now lighting most towns, and Steamboat Rock was no exception. Passage of the Rural Electrification Act of 1936, provided fund allotments for each state to use for building a rural electric network. The depression made it possible for REA to attract and employ “the best and the brightest” of engineers, accountants, lawyers, and other specialists and technicians.
Ben Jaspers
One of the first farmers in the area to foresee the potential benefits of electricity for the farmer was Ben Jaspers. He had tried to get electric power for his farm and for a group of his neighbors. They planned to build a power line at their own expense to connect with the power company, but the project was quashed by the power company.
When the opportunity came to apply for an REA loan, Ben was ready. He helped organize and was elected secretary of the first board of directors of the Hardin County REC, Rural Electric Cooperative.
Ben was the first manager of the young group working practically night and day to solve problems.
The adversities of farm life; the hard work, severe weather, faltering economics, extreme isolation, all made rural America a natural situation for people to pull together to get a job done.
From barn raising, threshing rings and even quilting bees to co-op creameries and grain elevators, farm families had joined to accomplish what they could not do alone but what many could do together.
But when the idea of rural electrification through cooperatives first reached farmers, it met some skepticism. Farm families understood using cooperatives to meet their supply or marketing needs. There had already been 2 co-op creameries in Steamboat. But an electric co-op?
Fear of the unknown made farmers unsure of going into something that they could not see or hold like grain or fertilizer. After all the benefits of electricity were still a mystery. Most that it would come to be used for was still unheard of.
In spite of their skepticism, and the complexity of it all, the co-op idea, in partnership with REA, was able to catch on and carry rural families out of darkness.
As the first manager of the Hardin County Rural Electric Cooperative, the work of signing up farmers fell to Ben Jaspers and the faithful few, who saw the potential and carried the message. Once they got started there was no stopping them.
Often working without pay, they went from farm to farm and galvanized the resolve of their neighbors and friends to “get lights” on a co-op basis.
Once the word got out in a rural area that an REA co-op was being organized, the first meeting brought a substantial number of applicants.
Rural people were not universal in their demand for electricity. There were some that worried about getting in debt to the government. There were others that weren’t sure that electricity was worth the expense, $5 was a sum not to be taken lightly in the 1930’s.
Ben and his people got wiser as they went along. They found it better to have the farmer’s wife present when they talked about the benefits of electricity. They looked at her when they talked about lights to help the children study or when they described electric refrigeration. Often the wife would pay the sign-up fee before the organization had finished arguing with the husband.
Once the electric lines were in place in the countryside and the farms began to be hooked up, families quickly prepared to be turned on. Homes were wired, with fixtures hung and bulbs in place waiting.
Lights began coming on all over the countryside. The night the lights first came on on the farm was an important date, ranking with marriages and births as a day to cherish.
Washing, ironing, cooking, sewing, preserving foods and a hundred household tasks were revolutionized for the farm wife. And having good light at night changed the way the entire family lived.
Outside the farmer saw progress a bit more slowly, but was equally impressed. Dairy farmers no longer had to buy ice to keep milk cold or worry about it spoiling. Milk coolers and electric separators revolutionized milking. Electric motors cut wood, pumped water, ground feed moved grain and blew silage into the silo.
And just having light in the barn was an overwhelming improvement to the farmer.
When electricity first came to the farm the minimum rate was $3.50 per month and there were many farmers that didn’t use the minimum each month. Bare in mind that there were hardly any appliances at the time, radios still ran on batteries. Many homes had been wired for electric lights, but a few light bulbs were all that people had to use electricity for.
When the coops were first organized directors wondered how they and their neighbors were going to use forty kilowatts a month, it seemed impossible.
Their apprehensions were shortlived. Within 12 months surveys showed the following purchases of appliances by co-op members:
| Electric irons and radios: Washing machines: Vacuum cleaners: Toasters: Electric motors: Electric water pumps: | 84.3 percent 63.2 percent 48.2 percent 35.5 percent 27.1 percent 16.2 percent |
The electric iron was usually the first item to be brought home, but washing machines, stoves and refrigerators soon followed as families rushed to join the 20th century.
Without a doubt, the radio was the most desired and most influential of all of the wondrous new appliances that came to the country with rural electrification.
In the early twenties an unbelievable invention called radio, was to change people’s lives as no other had before. In home after home, Crosleys and Filches became the center of information, music and entertainment.
People could hardly believe that a person could talk in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and be heard loud and clear in Steamboat Rock, Iowa.
Yes Pittsburgh! Because the Westinghouse Company chose Pittsburgh as the place to build one of the very first transmitters in this country. It was called KDKA and everyone with a receiver could and did get KDKA at night. KDKA literally filled the airwaves; it just turned its message loose and it would travel the airways to Iowa.
Downtown, the next morning, the conversation would go, “I got KDKA real good last night,” or, “That Florida station really came in strong.” It was like bragging about miles per gallon on your new car. Some would compare lists to see how many stations or cities they were able to turn in the night before. At first I don’t think that people even cared about what they had to listen to, they were overwhelmed with the science and what it did.
Soon more and more stations came on the air and then networks, the Red and the Blue. Shortly people on both coasts and all points in between were listening to the same programs and telling and retelling the same jokes. The country was bound together as never before by such names as Amos ‘n Andy, Lum and Abler, Fibber McGee and Molly, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Terry and the Pirates, The Lone Ranger, Gunsmoke the Atwater Kent Hour, Suspense, and Ma Perkins. Aimee Semple McPherson, Ed Lynn, Walter Winchell, Fred Allen, Kate Smith, and Groucho Marks, became known in every household. The list is unending; Jack Benny, The Great Gilder-sleeve, Burns and Allen, One Man’s Family, Search for Tomorrow, and I Remember Mama. On Saturday night it was the Grand Ole Opry with Red Folly and Minnie Pearl or the National Barn Dance with Lulu Bell and Scotty. There was also the sound of the big bands and Texaco’s Metropolitan Opera.
Radio had special meaning for the farm family. Market and weather reports rapidly made it a necessity. For the homemaker there was information on clothes, diet, cooking and child psychology.
Amos ‘n Andy were so popular factories rearranged their schedules in order that workers need not miss the show.
Calvin Coolidge is reported to have advised his staff: “Don’t bother me during, Amos ‘n Andy.” The show was piped into theaters so that the audience could listen and keep abreast of this black-face comedy before the silent movie started! Amos ‘n Andy tripled the sales of a toothpaste they advertised! Radio was powerful overnight. In 1922, through the sixty national stations, Atwater Kent sold 2 million battery-operated sets.
In the beginning with crystal sets, not even a battery was necessary. The crystal set was so simple it was almost unbelievable. Essentially it consisted of a crystal diode attached to a tuning coil. Such a coil was nothing more than fine copper wire wound around a cardboard tube, maybe an inch or so in diameter. By hitching this all together, in the most elementary manner, and attaching an earphone, quite satisfactory reception was accomplished. You tuned in on a station by moving a thin strip of brass back and forth across the wire-covered tube. You could buy them or you could build your own very easily. Then came dials you adjusted and readjusted, straining to hear the words or music from some distant station.
In Ames the college’s electrical engineers were intrigued with the whole radio idea, and early in the twenties the Iowa State station, WOI, went on the air. Soon a fellow named Andy Woolfries was known throughout the state. Meanwhile down at Shenandoah two soon to be more famous nurserymen, Earl May and Henry Field, were behind microphones on their own stations, KMA and KFNF selling strawberry plants as well as providing entertainment. Earl May’s “School Time” program was heard in late afternoon. It was a bushel of corn-pone foolishness, that was quite popular. The stations and the business they represented were highly competitive and people were either “for Earl” or “for Henry.”
The Eilers, family and the Folkerts family were close friends.
When Harm Folkerts was getting married Henry Eilers called Henry Fields radio station in Shenandoah, Iowa, and had them play a song for the young couple.
Boys raced home after school to try to finish their chores before the afternoon adventure serials and shows like Let’s Pretend and Smilin Ed McConell and His Buster Brown Gang. Mothers had to get supper on the table and the family served before the announcer asked them to “return now to those thrilling days of yesteryear” while “the Lone Ranger rides again!” And don’t forget Dragnet, Gunsmoke, The Inner Sanctum, and Lights Out.
They cherished the opportunity to listen to FDR’s Fireside Chats. They had been given the chance to be part of the political as well as the social life of the day.
Later there were baseball, football and basketball games.
From the early twenties on, the radio began to fill in what we now refer to as leisure time. And difficult as it may be for us to understand, and as television oriented as we are today, radio was the national means of communication until after World War II.
When television began reaching into homes a decade later, it crept in slowly and without anywhere near the impact of radio.
1950 was the year that television became available in Iowa, and Steamboat Rock. Harold Luiken immediately installed an antenna on his Chevrolet garage. In his book he recalled, “for three weeks we had nothing but a test pattern from WOI in Ames.”
Television became a hit in Steamboat Rock. Harold Luiken and the Luiken Hardware were two businesses in Steamboat that sold TVs and installed antennas. Harold sold RCA.
Installing antennas required climbing, many times on top of very high two story houses. In winter it was a cold nasty job. If it was windy winter or summer, it could be dangerous.
Luiken Hardware carried the Philco and Sylvania brands and perhaps others. Carl Luiken delivered the TVs. He also repaired them.
Remember those test patterns that stayed on the screen for hours? That was all that was on most of the day. In the morning there was usually a news program or the like and then all we saw was the test pattern until noon when the news came on again. WOI had a kids program called “The Magic Window” sometime just before noon as well. After the noon news the test pattern came back again and then around three or four in the afternoon there was Howdy Doudy and a few others like Captain Video and his Video Rangers, Crusader Rabbit, Andy’s Gang, and Gabby Hays had a show, The Gabby Hays show came later.
Saturday mornings soon became filled with kids shows. Weekday mornings soon had the soap operas many of which moved over from radio. and then came the game shows. Very soon the afternoons began to fill up as well. Shows like Queen for a Day Art Linkleter’s House Party and Truth or Consequences were all popular.
At night many of the popular radio shows soon transferred to television. Burns and Allen, The Lone Ranger, Gunsmoke, Jack Benny, Our Miss Brooks, and I Marry Joan are but a few. New shows like Our Show of Shows with Sid Ceasar, Milton Burel, and I Love Lucy really took off and were very instrumental in developing the new medium.
Who can forget all the westerns. Roy Rogers, Kit Carson, Annie Okley, Gene Autrey, The Cisco Kid, Wild Bill Hickock, Sky King, and the earlier mentioned Lone Ranger.
Wrestling and Boxing were big hits on television. Baseball, Basketball, Football, Tennis, Golf and Bowling all came to TV. Today most have become big business because of the audience that television has been able to bring.