The Back-up Generator

Grammy and Her "New" Farm House

and Farm in the Mid-1930's 

     A basement was put under our small farm house during the fall of 1950. I do not know whose idea that was but we certainly needed the space. It was quite a process for our little old house built in 1867 by Peter Woodson, the original homesteader of our land.

     The house was raised on concrete blocks and tall blue house jacks. After the dirt underneath was dug out, new concrete block walls were built with a number of glass block windows on the four sides to let in some light. Lastly, the house was lowered carefully onto the new basement walls after the mortar had dried.

     It took about a week to complete the basement. During that time, we continued to live in the house perched in the air on a few flimsy-looking metal jacks about 6-inches in diameter. I had nightmares about the whole thing caving in one night while we were all asleep in bed!

     I was particularly obsessed with the weather that week. I was worried that if we had a bad storm with strong winds and a "gully-washer" (rain), a frequent occurrence in the Midwest, we would all be goners. We had no television or weather alert system. So I was the weatherman, gazing at the clouds, checking wind strength and direction, always assessing whether or not danger lurked on the horizon.

      When the basement was finished and the house was safely positioned permanently on the new walls, our extra space was ready for use. For our family, it was quite a big deal!

     A new entrance built on the east side of the house allowed us to go downstairs to the basement or alternatively into the kitchen through a "mud room" where we left our boots and coats. I loved the basement smell, a combination of new concrete and musty earthiness, a smell I still enjoy today.

     In the months that followed, we placed two chest-type freezers in the basement. During the winter, we no longer needed to freeze and store meat outside in a big wooden box. Before the convenience of freezers, uneaten meat remaining in the box as spring thaw approached was canned in Mason jars and stored in the cellar we called "the cave".

     Daddy and Uncle Frank installed a new electric water pumping system in one corner of the basement. Water was pumped from the ground under the windmill for the livestock. Thereafter, the windmill wheel 30 feet in the air above whirled impotently in the wind. We continued to haul water by bucket into the house from a faucet in the yard until several years later when water was finally piped into the kitchen. We never did have a bathroom in the house.

     We replaced the old pot-bellied stove in the living room with a two-burner, under-the-floor furnace with a big grate in the living room. When it was very cold outside, we kids would run into the house and immediately stand on the hot grate to warm up. The burners and controls were accessed through the basement. The furnace burned heating oil stored in a huge 50-gallon drum behind the house that was uncomfortably close to the outhouse, it seemed to me.

     Our farm was connected to REA (Rural Electrification Administration) electric lines for the first time in 1945. We actually had "power", as it was euphemistically called, before many of our neighbors because we were on a feeder line, a main line of the power grid for our region. The next year, Uncle Frank wired all the farm buildings and the farm yard.

      Uncle Frank understood the new thing called electricity and his area of expertise was power line transmission. I don't remember that we had many power outages, but Uncle Frank was a cautious man. One day, he brought us an army surplus gasoline-powered generator that he hauled on a trailer behind his car.

     By then, we were relying on electricity for watering the livestock, for freezers that stored much of our food, and for the furnace thermostat that regulated the house heat. Uncle Frank believed that a backup generator was needed in case REA electrical transmission failed. Somehow he and Daddy managed to move the heavy, cumbersome thing down the stairs into the basement.

      The generator was at least 6 feet long, about 3 feet wide, and perhaps 3 feet high. When placed on the 2 foot high frame that Daddy and Uncle Frank built, it was taller than I was. To give our new generator a final loving touch, Aunt Opal made a fitted cover for it of soft lavender velveteen on her treadle sewing machine.

      The generator was as loud as a tractor and smelled of gasoline fumes whenever Uncle Frank and Daddy periodically started it up to make certain it was in good working order. The fumes were expelled from the basement through an exhaust pipe out of the one regular glass window so we were not asphyxiated in the house above.

     The thing the generator generated most was not fumes or electricity, but laughter. With its size and shape, its rounded top, and lavender velveteen cover, the generator looked just like a closed coffin. Our generator became the source of much local humor because, initially, only our family knew what it really was.

     Very practical and serious though Uncle Frank usually was, he shared with Daddy and Grammy a wicked sense of humor. Occasionally, one of our friends or neighbors would come to our house. Daddy would lead his unsuspecting visitor down into the basement for some reason or on some pretense.

    He never ever acknowledged the presence of the generator but carried on conversation as if nothing was out of the ordinary. Visitors would peer furtively into the shadowy southwest corner of the basement at the bulky object standing there. Seldom did anyone actually ask what it was. Daddy, Uncle Ferris, and all of us had many laughs over our visitors' reactions as Daddy reported them to us at the supper table.

     We had had a lot of funerals in our family during those years as the older generation began to pass on one by one. We figured that probably our friends and neighbors were counting tombstones in the cemetery, trying to guess who we could have stored in our basement.

     The generator in the end turned out to be a source of amusement and a great insurance policy. During our years on the farm, we never had a power outage of such length that we actually needed the generator to produce our own electricity.