Listening to the Radio

I never knew my Great-Grandpa. He died 13 years before I was born. He, my Dad, and I are all named Charles. I know almost nothing about him, just some family stories that are probably apocryphal.

Great-Grandpa bought the farm that is now our ‘Home’ farm in 1916. The family story is he bought it not because it was a good farm, but because it had a windmill with an elevated tank so there was running water in the house for Great-Grandma. Sounds fanciful, but the other thing I know about him was that my Grandma told me he was very kind man. So maybe he did buy a poor farm just because it had good plumbing to please his wife.

I have the ledger book he kept his farm financial records in, starting in 1934. Here’s the first page from the ledger.

The dates disappear into the left margin, but I’m not about to hurt the ledger book to get it lay flatter on the scanner. There are entries for January 24th, then for March 7th through 28th, and then April 3rd and 7th.

There are lots of interesting things in here. One is the diversity of his farm. On this one page of the ledger he records selling wheat, oats, hay, hogs, clover seed, corn, a horse, and eggs.

Another thing is the entry for March 24th, about 2/3rd’s down the page. He sells a radio for 7 dollars and on the same day buys 7 dollars worth of refrigerator gas. This was before rural electrification, so the refrigerator would’ve been powered with propane. This was long before TV too, so the radio was the sole source of outside entertainment. This radio figures heavily in each page of the ledger. Nearly every page has an entry on it, “Radio, 5 dollars.” You can see one on this page on March 17th.

I asked my Dad about that. “Did your Grandpa buy a radio on credit? Why’s there an entry for 5 dollars every month?” I couldn’t figure it out. I couldn’t believe Great-Grandpa would buy anything on credit, the horrors of debt were pounded into me from my cradle; I assumed that had been passed down, father to son for generations. Dad said, “No, the radio was run with a battery, like a car battery, and every so often you exchanged it for a fresh battery at the hardware store. And that cost 5 dollars.”

Anyway, 5 dollars a month was crazy expensive at the time. Kind of like a 500 dollar/month tv/voice/data bill these days. Great-Grandpa must’ve really enjoyed his radio!

And on March 24th, 1934 he sold it to buy gas to keep the refrigerator going.

I think the family legends are right. Great-Grandpa must have been a really nice guy.