From Oil lamps to the Internet Revisited by Walt Barrett © 2010

Every year around my birthday I like to republish this blog about my early life during the great depression, and the years following. I hope that the younger people, especially, take a lesson from my experiences. This year I am turning 77, and life has been an interesting ride to say the least. One thing I have learned for sure is that you should not ever depend on the government to ever solve any of your problems. In spite of my early hardships I have managed to make the very best out of what was once a terrible situation. How your life turns out is entirely up to you my friend!
Walt

Part one.
I want to give you a little background of why I think the way I think. I always say that if you want to see the future all you have to do is look back. I’m sure that my views will not win me many friends in those circles that swirl around up there in the rarefied atmosphere of the wealthy.
I was born in hard times. It was May 1933 when we were pretty deep into the great depression. My first memories go back to some time in 1936, and they are vague for that year. But since 1937 I remember a great deal from then on. My parents had bought a piece of property in the country on a lake with future plans for a home they could own. They had paid fifty dollars for the land. By 1932 they had the basic shell of what I would now call a micro home constructed and it was 480 square feet with a loft that you could barely stand up in. There was a front and rear door with one window on each outside wall. Yes, I grew up in a micro home! Right about then my Dad lost his Job in the textile mill just like everyone else around here did. That’s when they had to give up their nice little apartment in the city and moved into the partially finished home in the country. There was no power, electricity, water, heat, or sewer. I lived there with them until I left for the Korean war at age 18. Now those were interesting times, and I’m sure at this point that you can see where I am going with this.
My Dad and most of his World War One buddies blamed the whole mess on the Republican President Herbert Hoover, and big business. They immediately became life long democrats. Franklin Roosevelt became the new messiah, and ushered in a whole new era for better, or for worse. One of the differences between then and now was that there was plenty of fuel to heat your home and plenty of gasoline and electricity too. The problem was that we could not afford to purchase any of it.
Now you might think that I would be really bitter about my past, and sometimes I get a twinge or two, but it’s mostly sadness when I think of how hard my parents worked, the sacrifices they made for me, and the many times they suffered during those hard times. Then there is my guilt for not really being old enough to be of any real help to them. I did manage to start working in a mill in 1947 though, and give them all the money I made. I did learn a lot about life in those days, and how to scrape by with literally nothing.
One of the saddest things that happened to my parents during the depression was at the death of my grandmother Barrett in 1929, my Dad’s older brother, A real bum if there ever was one, Collected what little insurance money there was, and took off for Staten island, New York, and started a new life for himself and his soon to be new family, leaving my Parents to pay for all the hospital bills, the funeral, and all her debts. It took them until 1950 to pay them off. My parents would rather have died than leave a bill unpaid. It really altered all of our lives. My uncle literally stole our future, and my parents were never the same. I can remember curling up under a pile of blankets, freezing cold with no heat in the middle of the winter, waiting for my dad to come home with some money earned from a terribly hard laboring job out of state, and bringing some food so we could eat. And then the meat was bad and we got terribly sick. Now that’s a childhood memory for you! It sounds like another country, but it’s not, and it’s happening again for many Americans while our government is off trying to solve the problems of the world! What the hell is that all about?

Now at this time in 2010 things are only just a little different. We are running out of fuel and the prices are going out of site! We are in another big mess that we are going to really have to fight our way out of. We are not dirt poor like we used to be, but the numbers of poor are growing rapidly. The problems facing us now are a mighty big challenge,and ignoring them like congress has for the past thirty-five years is not going to make them go away, but let’s continue on with a little more background. In 1950 while still in high school I became obsessed with solar energy. Not many people were interested in Solar at that time, but there was a scientist in Israel that was doing a lot of work in the field. His name was Dr. Farber. I had spent most of my time up until then freezing to death in the cold winters of New England because our home never had central heat. So I started to read everything I could get my hands on at the time. I never lost interest and have continued to learn as much as I can on the subject. In 1973 I started a very successful solar heating and hot water system manufacturing operation, and we did quite well for several years until that great American President Ronald Regan tore the solar system off the White House, gutted the funding for the solar programs and destroyed the solar industry. The really sad part of the problem is that those sorry bastards in congress went along for the ride! They have had thirty-five years to solve the energy problem, and have barely lifted a finger while many of us have been screaming from the peanut gallery! For thirty-five years they have pandered to Big Oil, Big Coal, Big Gas,and Big Nuke. They literally sold us out! I’m not making this up. All you have to do is look back at the facts and the record! Oh well, like the trite old saying goes, “It’s too late to cry over spilt milk.” Next time I’ll express my ideas on how we can survive this mess our government created with the help of our own wasteful practices. We have to wrap our heads around these problems now! You can’t depend on the government to solve your problems. You have to solve them yourself. That’s what made this country great!
To be continued
Walt
Part 2
I actually have very fond memories of the nineteen thirties, and forties in spite of some of the hardships we endured.
The main point I want to make is that I’m not whining. I just want to present the facts as they were for many families at the time. It will help you see the future. The second point I want to make is that in those days we had plenty of fuel available in this country. We just could not afford to buy it! There is a good side to this story, and that is that we learned how to live without electricity, central heat and indoor plumbing. We also learned how to survive on very little money. Now the money thing alone is a valuable lesson because in these times we see many people that have no idea how to budget what little money they have. My Mother had a budget book that she kept faithfully and adhered to religiously. She is the one who showed me the basic rules of business, because, living within a budget is really just a form of business, just like running a shop, or a factory, and especially a City, Town State or Federal government, and it seems that many people have forgotten that. Let’s all say it again. You can’t spend more money than you take in! We can talk about that subject more later on.
I mentioned previously that I grew up in a micro home. It was twenty feet by twenty-four feet with a sleeping loft divided into two sections, one for me and one for my parents. There were no real closets and clothing etc was mostly kept in a few bureaus with heavy coats etc being hung on salvaged clothing racks. It certainly did not kill us! It did give me the incentive to try and do better financially, now that I look back at it.
We lit the house with oil lamps for many years. They do give off a very soft glowing kind of light, and at the time I did not think about it too much. I just thought that was what everyone else used too. There was no TV, radio, electric toasters, laundry machines, dishwashers, flushing toilets etc, and the bathroom was a small closed off area where you sat in a galvanized wash tub filled with just enough water that had been heated on top of the wood fired cook stove, which also was the heating system. The toilet was in the back yard just like everyone else’s was on our street, and you used whatever paper you could find, no luxury soft tissue or anything like that! Computers were science fiction!
When my Dad managed to find work he was often gone for long periods of time, and he took some pretty terrible jobs like clearing power lines in Vermont in January while wading up to his chest at times through ice cold swamp water. He would come home every couple of weeks or so and bring some money and food. He and his fellow workers would have to ride back to Vermont in the back of a dump truck in the winter time, but he never really complained about it. He did often tell the stories though just to remind everyone how bad it was in the Thirties. My Dad lost his factory job in 1929 when the economy collapsed like it may do again in 2008.
We did not have much water because we had a shallow dug well that went dry for the entire summer. You had to drop a bucket down the well and pull it back up full of water with a rope, hand over hand. When the well went dry in June or July depending on the rain that year my Mom and I would each take a couple of those old style five gallon galvanized milk cans with the narrowed down neck and the carrying loop type handle on the side of the neck, and we would walk to a beautiful clear spring about a quarter of a mile from our home that bubbled right up out of the ground for water. My Dad had cleaned it out and sunk a large wooden barrel in it that stuck up above the ground with a cover on it to keep the dirt out. We would go there every afternoon when I returned from school and carry back the drinking water. I remember the water tasting better then, and the air smelling cleaner. We did the laundry and other tasks with water captured in our rain barrels. My Mom said it was nice soft water. She taught me a lot. We used to go picking wild berries, and in the spring we would also gather the tops from fiddle head ferns. They were like spinach and the woods are still full of them. My mom knew a lot about plants and herbs. My Dad taught me to shoot a 22 rifle by the time I was seven. I would go out in the late afternoon and shoot three squirrels for supper. We would also go to the pond and catch yellow perch, clean them, and salt them in crocks so we would have food in the winter. After school I would empty the ashes from the stove and put them on the vegetable garden. Talk about recycling. Looking back, it was not such a bad life, but would kids do it today? They might be better off if they did. By the way, there were no drugs in any schools I ever attended.
Well, enough of that for a while. Let’s take a giant leap forward to 2010. I have a vision of a super insulated but properly ventilated micro home with the actual size being based on the number of occupants. It may or may not be tied to the power grid. The electricity could be from solar, wind, or in a few rare cases small hydro, which would be really great because you could actually heat the micro home with free Hydro. Solar hot water, solar heat, a composting toilet, LED lighting, and a gray water recycling system would be a very good start. Now I would build this home on a piece of land large enough to grow a fair amount of food. I would salvage as many of the necessary materials as I possibly be could. As a matter of fact, I have already completed my micro home just to prove the point. Can you believe it! Personally, I think we need to start thinking more along these lines. My micro home is going to be for the two of us, my Wife Nancy and me. I hope to find a reasonable piece of land to put it on, but will build it here at my workshop. I intend it to be a model for others to copy. I would also consider setting up an assembly line to mass-produce them for low bucks. The trouble with all of the commercial micro homes I have seen so far is that the prices are off the wall! We need home for the not so well off folks who carry this country on their backs. Well enough for today. I just hope I can get more people thinking along the lines that I do. Not that my ideas are perfect, but the more people’s ideas we can gather now, the better off we are going to be in the future. Think about low cost building materials and smaller spaces to heat and cool, and cheap electricity. Try to save a gallon of fuel a day. It all helps.
In the meantime I have a business to run, so long for now.
Walt