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The Daily Progress, Charlottesville, Va., David Maurer column: Current of change lit up Nelson
(The Daily Progress Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Aug. 31--In the late 1880s businesses and a handful of private homes in Charlottesville started enjoying the benefits of electricity.
By the turn of the century, power lines created a web throughout the city. Everyone living in town could have an electrical line strung to his or her home, and most did.
Electricity was clean, cheap and necessary if one wanted to run all the newfangled products appearing on retail shelves. By 1930 everything from radios and fans to electric refrigerators and vacuum cleaners were humming and rumbling in city homes.
About the only thing humming out in the countryside were folks entertaining themselves while doing chores. Even by the late 1930s only about 10 percent of the people living in the country had electricity.
Too expensive
Running electric lines to isolated farms and villages was an expense that investor-owned power companies weren't interested in taking on. Officials dismissed the subject with a curt "can't be done."
But as more and more rural residents became aware of all the benefits electricity offered their city cousins, they started to insist that it had to be done. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt agreed.
One of the cornerstones of Roosevelt's New Deal was the creation of the Rural Electrification Administration. In the spring of 1935 his executive order brought switch-on power in the countryside on its way to reality.
Nelson County started getting the juice flowing to its farmers in early 1938. If one person is to be singled out as the major human conduit through which this was made possible, it would have to be Jimmy Gardner.
Cutting on the lights
"Jimmy would often do it all," said Greg Kelly, director of member services for Central Virginia Electric Cooperative, which brought electricity to rural Nelson County. "He would put in the poles, string the lines, connect the service, read the meters and even collect the money.
"They called connecting the service 'cutting on the lights.' Many people back then were afraid to even touch the light cord. Some folks even thought the electricity would run out of the sockets.
"Jimmy spent a lot of time going around and showing people it was safe."
Gardner was working for Perkins and Barnes Construction Co. when he moved to Nelson County in 1938. The company had won the contract to build electric lines to service rural residents of the country.
After spending nearly a year putting up poles and running power lines throughout the county, Gardner was slated to move to North Carolina to work
on another project. Lewis Bress, CVEC's first manager, knew a good man when he saw one.
Bress was able to convince Gardner that his future was with the co-op. The lineman's starting wage was $31.25 a week, and for that he had to do everything from maintaining the power lines to collecting money.
Before World War II, electricity in Nelson County cost about 5 cents per kilowatt-hour. According to CVEC, the average customer then used about 50 kilowatt-hours per month, as compared to more than 1,100 today.
When Gardner showed up for the monthly payment, many of his customers had to pay him with change they scraped together. After a day of collections, the lineman would lug a heavy sack of coins into the co-op's office.
Gardner never got tired of seeing the excitement of family members when he would turn their electric lights on for the first time. Few people understood how it all worked, but they quickly realized how this invisible commodity called electricity was changing their lives for the better.
When Gardner started working for CVEC on Jan. 1, 1939, a lot of power lines still was needed to be strung. So he hired a crew, paying the laborers 35 to 40 cents an hour, and linemen 50 to 60 cents an hour.
It took guts to shinny up a tall power pole and then fiddle with currents that could take a life in an instant. Between 1890 and the 1930s nearly half of all electrical linemen were killed on the job.
Gardner had proven his courage time and again as a lineman. In October 1942 he joined the Navy to show he had what it takes to be a good sailor as well.
Perhaps his most exciting wartime experience came while serving as an electrician onboard a patrol craft in the northern Pacific. On one brutally cold day off the Alaska coast his ship helped sink a Japanese submarine.
The lineman's adventures at sea abruptly ended in September 1944, when he was sent home on leave. He hadn't been home a day before being informed that power lines were down along the James River.
Without a second thought the returning sailor spent his entire leave helping to restore power to homes and businesses affected by the outage. Gardner proved to be so vital that county officials convinced the Navy that the people of Nelson County needed him more than it did, and he was honorably discharged.
Gardner went back to work for CVEC and, by the late 1950s, everybody in Nelson County who wanted electricity had it. Then on the night of Aug. 19, 1969, Hurricane Camille turned the electrical infrastructure of the county into so many broken poles and wires.
Gardner immediately went to work to restore power. He was tireless in his efforts, grabbing catnaps when he could and only taking the time to bolt down a sandwich or meal when his energy started to flag.
The lineman with the ready smile was probably bone-tired when an official car pulled into a parking space that he had just run another vehicle out of so a power truck could use it.
He pulled open the door and in no uncertain terms told the occupants where they could go after they moved the car.
Then in a moment of chilling clarity Gardner realized he was lambasting the governor of Virginia -- Mills Godwin. He apologized for his outburst and then told the governor he still had to move.
Gardner retired from CVEC in 1977 after nearly 40 years with the co-op. Before his death in 2007, he was thought to be the oldest lineman in the country.
It is the fortunate person who can leave something of lasting worth behind when they leave this world. What Gardner left behind can be seen, felt and heard every time someone flips a switch in Nelson County.
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Copyright (c) 2008, The Daily Progress, Charlottesville, Va.
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