This was a stunt to some extent. The Secretary of whatever it was (Agriculture?) didn't normally travel all over the Eastern Seaboard with Sparky and Rex and put in garden fields on common urban grounds. And he probably didn't finish the plowing here.
But on a day in which my cell phone started ringing at 7:15. . . . eell even though I know that this photograph was taken less than two months prior to Operation Overlord, in which thousands of men would die, and the same amount of time from when the Allies would take Rome, for which thousands of men had died, and three months away from the landings on Guam, it's hard for me to not look at this photo and be wistful.
Wistful isn't the way the electric companies were looking at thing a little over twenty years prior. This electric company advertisement aimed at farmers ran in the April 12, 1919 issue of The Country Gentleman.
I wonder where the electric company thought we'd been fighting? Sure, the Boy had seen a lot of the world, but it had probably been something like Camp Dix, and then on to some rural French town that didn't have electricity and where the villagers were still using privies, to some small German town that probably did but where he was told not to associate with the Boche, and then back to St. Naziere which was a rough dock town where he lived in a tent, to Camp Dix again.
"[E]lectric lights, running water, shower baths, and all that sort of thing"?
Probably no lights, shaving in cold water and showering in the same, and all that sort of thing.
He probably hadn't become that used to "city" life and he was probably sick of "army life" by this time.
Oh well. Electricity was coming on everywhere.
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