Gaye LeBaron: Before PG&E, a patchwork of small companies brough power, light to Sonoma County
We are talking today about electricity, as a commodity. At present it is a commodity that the governor and at least one candidate for president, stumping through California, is suggesting for state ownership. Such a proposal turns up the volume on a discussion that has been gaining intensity in these troubled times: Do we want to take over Pacific Gas & Electric Co.? Is that salvation? Or a can of worms? Don’t send answers, it’s an academic question. As always, with academic questions, we look to history for answers.
But this isn’t about the recent history of our Northern California power company - not the plan for a nuclear plant on Bodega Head in the ’60s, or even the tragic loss of life and property in the fires of recent years.
This is time travel back to the earliest years of light and power in this area to get a sense of … what, confusion? Call it our age of trial-and-error. Let’s start with a headline and excerpt from a news story of 1920.
Back Here to ?Primitive Nights.
Light Ban is Almost ?a Nightmare.
That’s the headline. Here’s the ?news story:
Pitchy black darkness, which reaches down out of the sky and wraps you around with its mantle, so that you seem like an isolated atom, makes you realize just how small your are in the vast scheme of things, and how entirely dependent you have become upon the conveniences of modern times.
Electrical stores report a record business in flashlights since the order of the city council cutting out streetlights at 3:30 o’clock in the morning went into effect. …
The Press Democrat writer is telling us streetlights went off a couple of hours before dawn. It was front-page news - or perhaps front-page lament is a better way to say it.
Reread the part about how the town was “entirely dependent … upon the conveniences of modern times.”
That was 100 years ago. Electric lights were still rare in rural areas and not that long enjoyed in the “big towns” like Santa Rosa and Petaluma.
As the writer suggests, it was still a time when the only thing that could be termed disastrous that occurred when the system was turned off - or, more likely, failed - was that the streets got dark and people had to pull out their old oil lamps and candles, which they kept handy, believe you me.
Still, civilization had advanced to the point where dark streets were newsworthy. The story continues:
Our forefathers thought nothing of walking several miles through darkness in the days before electric street lighting became the rule rather than the exception, but our modern man hesitates before he will walk three blocks.
One objection, belated travelers say, is the rise and fall of curbstones in Santa Rosa. You can never tell whether you have a straight and level path across a street intersection or whether you have a drop from one to ten inches. And the curb on one side of the street is often times at a different level than on the other side.
Swathed in darkness, the pedestrian has an awful shock after reaching up for a ten-inch curb to find his foot dropping down to a two-inch curb.
It’s worse than a nightmare, they say.
But one seasoned night-traveler has solved the difficulty.
He advises walking in the middle of the street.
Try that now and you’ll quickly learn the other, more dramatic, meaning of the phrase “Lights Out!”
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IF DARK STREETS for a couple of hours before dawn could stir up such anxiety in 1920, one can’t help but make a mental list of all the present-day losses we experience when our lights go. They fretted about needing flashlights. How long are our lists of things that stop, go out, die with a whimper, become impossible today without electricity?
They fretted about streetlights. Just in the average household – not counting medical equipment - we fret about computers, landline telephones, heating systems, frozen food, dirty laundry, garage doors, hot water heaters - stop me when you’ve had enough.
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AND, LET’S FACE it; we worry about the company that provides, for a price, these electric advantages.
I dipped into the archives last week for a quick look at how, when and why PG&E came to us.
Books have been written, some on the company’s dime, some not. They agree on a basic timeline.
For this area, the year is 1905. That’s when the San Francisco Gas and Electric Co. and the California Gas and Electric Corp. merged to become Pacific Gas and Electric.
That ended 35 years of decisions and indecisions for our hometowns. In 1870s editions of the Sonoma Democrat - for which we are indebted to a close-to-home researcher, Dee Blackman whose 1970s research is a precious source for the stories of how electricity came to our towns. There were somewhere near a dozen small companies that took their turn offering to “light” Sonoma County towns, first by gas and then with electricity.
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