“With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” Matthew 19: 26
When Charlie wrote about our family stoves I remembered Dad’s love of electricity. He worked hard at the power plant to produce it and he made sure to enjoy its wonders. I think that explains in large part why we had the push button stove with the deep-well burner and later one of the first stoves with a self cleaning oven and a automatic magnetic pot stirrer.
Sometimes Dad’s love of electricity took him in strange directions such as the special air sanitizing humidifier that he installed in our furnace. It had an ultraviolet light and a strange tumbling cage, which made a weird creaking sound as it ran. it was a challenge for him to remove it after it rusted out within a few years.
We were also one of the first families to get the new Radar Range. However, I don’t really understand why it took us so long to get a color TV. The one we finally got was sold to us cheap by our uncle Hap. Perhaps our book-reading mother asserted herself regarding a new TV. Of course she seldom missed World of Disney and Bonanza in color.
Our home benefited from his electrical genius too. He personally wired our new house with the latest wiring and safety techniques like grounded outlets. He earned a Bronze Medallion from Interstate Power (his employer) for his high quality work and materials. Of course he grumbled that the only way to get a Silver Medallion was to put in central air which he considered unnecessary and the only way to get a Gold Medallion was to also have an electrical furnace which was far more costly to run than a gas one.
Dad loved state-of-the-art appliances and all sorts of mechanical contraptions, but what he really loved was the engineering and science behind them all. I loved to hear him explain how to make electricity to the kids when our school took field trips to the power plant. I thought I was pretty cool being his kid. Ready Kilowatt wasn’t just a stick figure Icon for the power company, he was my wing-man.
Dad’s main job at the plant was boiler operation and maintenance. He learned those skills from running his ship’s boilers in the Navy during WWII. When asked about the war his standard reply was that he never saw any action. With certain friends he’d occasionally add, “The guys up top got to see it all. I only heard thuds” He was promoted from labor to management when we moved to Clinton in 1967. He ended his career as Maintenance Superintendent for all of Alliant Energy.
I loved to go with him to fix the old pipe organ and boilers at church. I always felt like we were visiting the bowels of the Emerald City when we went in either the boiler room with the old brick boiler’s orange glow streaming from its window or the organ room with towering pipes and a giant leather bellows whooshing up and down like a bed in a funhouse. And everywhere there were pipes and valves and mechanical levers all clacking, hissing, groaning and rumbling along.
Dad loved to imagine electricity’s possibilities. Long before there were any commercial wind turbine generators, Dad imagined small wind generators on power-poles stepping up the power turning line loss into line gain. When the first behemoth windmills came out on their round pedestals Dad didn’t miss a beat. He said those wind mill pedestals would make perfect hydrogen generating plants to refill hydrogen vehicles because, after all batteries would always be an issue for electrical cars and the energy to recharge them would still come from burning fossil fuels. Hmm, I wonder if we’ll ever get there.
Even in his final years dad was full of electrical dreams and contraptions. When I last visited him his dream contraption was a full size pedal tricycle that he was outfitting with an electric generator for running a small fridge attached to the trike. He planned to pedal around the retirement complex selling cocktails to his neighbors. I’m not sure how far he got with that, but as long as he was still building it, it was keeping him out of trouble.
Dad saw unlimited possibilities in electricity and it wasn’t lost on him that it is a vital component to life and all the energy of the cosmos. Dad firmly believed in every miracle in the Bible, and I’d be willing to bet that Dad also believed that every one of those miracles most certainly somehow involved electricity.
Hey, folks, in our childhood years, much of life revolved around Interstate Power and the electric plant. On band festival day in Mason City, we would go to the power house’s garage across the street from the plant and sit on the bleachers they set up for watching the parade. I always felt very special to be one of the “few” who had that honor.
The reason we had Westinghouse stoves and refrigerators was that Interstate Power was a dealer for them. –Um, perhaps they were GE.