As if there wasn't enough bad news around those days, a local power plant went up in flames.
I'm not sure which early Casper power plant that was, but I suspect it was the one that used diesel engines, believe it or not, which had been in operation at that time. It had a limited number of customers, as the article makes plane, as a lot of Casperites in the then booming Casper likely weren't utility subscribers at the time, as odd as that may seem to us know. When electricity became nearly universal in homes is something I've addressed before, and I don't know when it would have become universal in a place like Casper.
Does anyone who stops in here know when it became universal in smaller western and mid western towns and cities?
Electricty was introduced for customers in Casper in 1900, so it had been around that long, but the means and methods of generating it were still in a state of flux. This article reports that the entire business district was out of power.
In other news, the Wyo Trib was accusing Nebraska of being frigid, which is odd. The Tribune was predicting permanent nationalization of the railroads, which is something we know the unions would later ask for but would not receive. And there seemed to be a boom in marrying young going on. I haven't tracked the entire article all the way through, but I suspect that was one of the interesting marriage related events tied to World War One. Chances are that couples were rushing to marry before the grooms deployed to France. Fifteen is quite young indeed, and the author of the article seemed to take that view as well, but of course less than 50% of all Americans graduated from high school at that time. This trend, however, can't be taken to mean too much, as we also earlier explored. The odd thing about this article (which doesn't actually appear to mention the war) is that it seemed to take the tone that it was nifty if a girl received a proposal that young, which would horrify most of us now (for good reason). That may reflect a true change in views, even if the marriage age really hasn't changed that much over time.
2 comments:
I don't know about electricity in towns, but electricity didn't come to my grandparents' farms in rural Oklahoma until sometime after World War Two. The REA was enacted in 1937, but I imagine it took awhile to reach everywhere due to World War Two.
And that's not long ago at all.
It's really easy to forget, in this era in which we constantly hear everything is changing (and a lot really is) that the era from 1900 to 1950 or so was fully of incredible changes. It'd be scary to endure, really.
People who grew up with the expectation of local travel being by horse and distant travel by train lived to see intercontinental air travel and own cars. Soldiers who started out in a world of everything moving by horse finished careers with trucks and airplanes. Artillerymen went from having the most lethal thing in the world to seeing that eclipsed by the atomic bomb. A culture in which all entertainment was direct and personal saw the radio, movies and then television come in. And they saw the letter yield to the telephone call.
I don't think it would have been pleasant to endure.
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