Life is a journey, so it is said. My journey began a very long time ago and many of my collected memories are of things unknown to most younger people. The homesteading era in Saskatchewan was in full swing in 1910. Still surviving when I was born were a few bachelor homesteader's shacks. They had been built quickly and cheaply and contained only one room, under a shed roof and heated by a single wood and coal stove. In place of a brick chimney was a metal roof jack. Sometimes the walls were made from sod and sometimes from rough shiplap covered with tarpaper. Sometimes the interior of the single ply walls were whitewashed and sometimes they were covered with glued-on newspapers.
There were no telephones in the homesteaders' early dwellings, but there were lamps. They were fuelled by coal oil. Trimming their wicks and cleaning their glass chimneys were regular chores. Some homesteaders had lamps fuelled by "high test" gasoline. In these, the fuel tank was pressurized with a hand-pump. It took a little time to turn one on. First, a looped pipe called a generator had to be heated with flames from a number of matches . A valve from the fuel tank was opened and gasoline vapour ignited in a mesh mantle which glowed into a hard, white incandescence.
There was a softer and more elegant white light. It was produced by burning coal oil in a wicked lamp that was ringed by a mesh mantle. Victor S. Johnson (1882 -1943) was the gentleman who brought the Practicus Incandescent Burner from Germany and used it in producing what he called the Aladdin lamp. His Mantle Lamp Company was founded in 1908. Production of his lamps was in high gear by 1910. They are still being manufactured today (in China).
Aladdin lamps were, and are, beautiful creations of polished nickel or brass surmounted by a tall glass chimneys and a colourful glass shades. An Aladdin lamp is genteel. It belongs in the parlour. When a bachelor homesteader was to wed, he needed first a real house with a parlour - and an Aladdin lamp.
My grandparents' house had no electricity. They had several coal oil lamps , a gas lamp and an Aladdin lamp, which only spread its soft, comforting glow on special occasions. When I was large enough to be sent abroad without becoming lost and was wearing short pants with no holes in the pockets, I was given coins and cans and sent to the hardware store to buy fuel. The blue can was for coal oil and the red can was for high test gas. There were red and blue barrels. (This simple colour coding was useful in a pioneer society where some immigrants were unfamiliar with the English language.)
My grandparents were not the only people without electricity. For a time, some Main Street business had gas lamps. The gasoline, pressurized by a big hand pump, was in a big cylinder in a locked box outside the building. It flowed into the building through fine copper tubing called hollow wire.
I and two companions in wrongdoing owned three of the big hand pumps. They were excellent for sucking up water. We hid in the shadowed places between buildings on Saturday night and used the pumps to shoot blasts of water at people on the sidewalks, all of whom were dressed in their Saturday night finery. It was a small sin. I don't regret it.
In those primitive times, my friends and I had no sense of deprivation. Like people of later generations, we were happy sometimes and sad sometimes, but I think we had greater expectations and fewer fears.
