The Imperial Kilowatt
Uhr, E.
taken it so hard and blamed yourself. "A year before you were born I invested a large sum of money in a company called National Student Marketing. I have always been interested in helping...
...Surely McDonalds had its own generator...
...Cars are, after all, the seventh wonder of the world-completely autonomous units with heat, light, radio, and motion...
...And those who made it to the street didn't get far...
...Elsewhere, it was generally observed that candlelight is difficult to see by and fireplaces give off very little heat...
...It is too bad that my parents were too bourgeois to see that the world will only be at peace when it is united under the red flag...
...It's essential that they develop to their fullest potential--this is the only way we will ever have world peace...
...This was no one's fault...
...Your mother and I could not turn a deaf ear to our consciences, even flit meant the loss of some luxuries...
...During the commercials I plan to take a look at a book by a writer named Sigmund Freud...
...And the temperature dropped to fifteen degrees...
...Inside the rapidly chilling houses, tropical plants drooped, tropical birds shivered, tropical fish died (more from having their aerators shut off than from cold...
...Unfortunately, the plans were too advanced and the company failed...
...A company called Ling-Temco-Vought had an exciting plan to develop learning machines for school use...
...The only solution was to shut off the water and E. Uhr writes from Madison, Wisconsin...
...I hope that it is interesting...
...You couldn't buy a thing at the supermarkets...
...They came away complacently thinking the outages had been exaggerated because everyone who answered his doorbell turned out to have electricity...
...I made a large investment in their firm to support this experimentation...
...I have never regretted putting my faith in young people or trying to give them a break...
...An ecological happening...
...One stock market reverse did not dry up my sense of compassion...
...And everyone looks up at those overhead wires now with respect, and awe, and fear...
...But there were snags...
...No heat meant that while things were getting soft in the freezer they were getting hard in the pipes, and that could mean burst pipes, because of water's peculiar tendency to expand when it freezes...
...The world' s future lies in the hands of young people...
...Not without cash registers...
...When the first ice-laden lines started crashing down it seemed rather romantic...
...Tree limbs were crashing all about, eerie blue flashes from short-circuited wires lit up the sky like lightning, and the wires themselves, live and writhing, lay across the streets...
...reading in bed by flashlight...
...The roads were solid ice...
...Oil, gas, electric, coal--it didn't matter what the fuel was--they' re all connected to thermostats and blowers and God knows what else that runs on electricity, so when the current goes off, there's no heat...
...A few of them went out and bought Franklin stoves and Coleman lamps...
...Until then we had looked on the electric company as a monopolistic and polluting enemy, and the overhead grid of wires was nothing more than a nuisance to be peered through whenever we happened to look up for ornithological, meteorological, astronomical, or psychological reasons...
...October 1976 E. Uhr The Imperial Kilowatt Power corrupts...
...Nobody realized that the furnaces would all go out...
...There were no street lights or traffic signals...
...But the rewards are not always tangible...
...It took the Great Midwest Ice Storm of March '76 to make most of us realize that our daily lives, indeed our very survival, now require an uninterrupted flow of power...
...National Student Marketing failed, but it was a worthy investment, even if a loss...
...I have always been interested in helping students and this company gave them the chance to work their way through school...
...drain the pipes, which of course meant doing without water, which, it turned out, everyone would have to do without anyway because the city's pumps were all electrically operated...
...There is no way to open an electrically operated garage door manually: like electric typewriters, computers, phonographs, elevators, hair dryers, waffle irons, and television sets, they either run on current or they don't run at all...
...Many people found they couldn't get their cars out of their garages...
...The misfortunes which Nanny and I had had to face were part of events much larger than ourselves, with world peace as the goal...
...When the power finally came back on, block by block, it was like the lifting of a siege...
...When life at home became unbearable, citizens turned to their cars...
...New Windsor, N.Y...
...20 The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1977...
...Although the country's leaders have paid continual lip service to Project Independence from Arab oil, no one seems the least bit interested in the insidious dependence of the individual citizen on electric power...
...People huddled in close-to-useless electric blankets...
...I hope that you can now better understand our decision to leave New York...
...I don't regret the investment since it was a worthy project which, had it been successful, would have greatly advanced world peace...
...And there was no place to go...
...Others, luckier ones, hopped around in sleeping bags like contestants who had gotten off course in a potato-sack race...
...Even eating from a can was impossible for those who had only electrically operated can openers...
...Electric power corrupts electrically...
...The electric company made a door-todoor survey to find the extent of the damage...
...And if you happened to be out of food, tough luck...
...Because of these financial setbacks we were obliged to sell the Park Avenue apartment...
...People screamed, cheered, danced in the streets...
...The rest of the population ate it cold and raw...
...Dinner by candlelight...
...In addition to the inconvenience of no water for drinking, cooking, washing, or flushing, the pipes and toilets filled with noxious fumes and more substantial matter as the sewers, abhorring a vacuum, backed into the empty plumbing...
...Hearing my father's explanation of these past events was like having a huge stone lifted off my chest...
...The family piled in: to drive around a bit to thaw their toes, get the latest news, and maybe find an open restaurant and grab a bite to eat...
...People with gas stoves and ovens, some of them, could at least cook their food for those candlelight dinners...
...It was nearly 4:30, so I prepared an Ovaltine to take to the playroom in time for "Satellite Six," an anthology of top American cartoons shown on Channel 6, WRGB, in Schenectady...
...Though a few compassionate grocers toted up bills on the sides of brown bags, most wouldn't, even if they could do the arithmetic, because they were dependent on their machines for bookkeeping and inventory...
Vol. 10 • January 1977 • No. 4
