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By Root 892 0

radio in the front room that we used sparingly, and only at night, as we all sat around looking at it during 'Amos and Andy,' 'Fibber McGee and Molly,' 'Jack Benny,' or 'Little Orphan Annie,'" former president Jimmy Carter remembered. "When its power failed we would sometimes bring in the battery from the pickup truck to keep it playing for a special event." In the fully electric life, however, the sounds of other voices, music, applause, jokes, the weather, and farm reports could fill the air all the time. "The day we got our radio we put it in the kitchen window, aimed it out at the fields, and turned it on full blast," one woman recalled. "During the first week, the workers hated to be out of the sound of it." But there were also mild complaints from farm wives:

They report that their husbands are spending more time than ever in the barns experimenting with their electric milkers and coolers. A lot of men have put radios in their barns—for their own amusement, their women folks think—but the men tell me their cows give more milk to the strains of music than without it.... As a result of this modernization the wives of these farmers tell me that for the first time it is hard to get the men in to meals. They act like boys with new tool kits, always puttering around with new equipment.

For Carter's family and their neighbors, electricity changed their sense of themselves and their community. "I think the best day of my life—the one I remember most vividly with the possible exception of my wedding day—was the night they turned on the lights in our house," he recalled. "Also the bringing of the rural electric program to the farms of our Nation made it possible for us to stretch our hearts and stretch our minds to encompass public involvement in affairs that would not have been possible without the rural electric program." One Pennsylvania farmer remarked, "We felt like first-class American citizens." Another said, "Electricity changed the country way of living. That was the beginning of the change, right there. It put the country people more on a par with the city people."

Light may have been the least of it; certainly electric irons, washers, pumps, and milking machines would make a greater difference in their lives. But in the late 1930s and 1940s, when electricity finally came, it was the light they were waiting for. To see (and be seen) beyond the circumference of the kitchen table, to see into the corners of a room or into a husband's face in the evening, "was wonderful. Just like going from darkness into daylight." One farmer observed, "I'll never forget the day when they announced the electric was turned on. I waited till dark to do my chores. I had the barn all lit up like a Christmas tree. Oh, that seemed nice, especially the stable—you didn't have to look where you was goin'." The moment a house was supposed to be connected to the electric lines was known as "zero hour," and people would flip their switches on and off to make sure they didn't miss the instant of connection. The first thing some did once they were hooked up was to turn on every light and then drive down the road just to look back at their illuminated home.

For those in cities, electric light already possessed the bone-weary, jaded cast of Edward Hopper's diner in the small hours: the attendant, the couple, the lone man trapped within. How they arrived or how they will leave is a mystery. At the same time, rural men and women stood bewildered before the one bare bulb hanging from their kitchen ceilings. Some screwed corncobs into light sockets to keep "the juice" from leaking out, or they would not let go of the chain pull, believing that once they released it, the light would go out.

Sometimes people—parsimonious farm families—kept their lights on all night long: "That light in the kitchen came on, and that was the prettiest sight I ever saw. It was wonderful after all those years of oil lamps. I never expected to get it, unless I went away from here." And it was the light the linemen remembered. "Some of them wanted you to come and turn it on