Donna McClanahan recalls the ‘Day the Lights Came On’
STORY AND PHOTOS by Jim McCarty
It would be difficult to find a more passionate electric cooperative supporter than Donna McClanahan. The wife of former Macon Electric Cooperative director and board president, the late Gene McClanahan, Donna immersed herself in electric cooperative issues for many years. Today, at 94 years of age, she can still recall “The Day the Lights Came On” with a memory as sharp as a barbwire fence staple.
Donna grew up in the old Ten Mile Store, which was run by her parents for a time. Like most rural businesses and homes, the store had no access to power lines for electricity in the 1930s. Instead, her dad purchased a Delco generator to provide lights for the store and a nearby dance hall.
These generators ran on a small engine and were used to charge 16 wet-cell batteries. They were expensive to operate and powered little beyond lights and maybe a radio. The family longed for something better.
“We had the little cord coming down from the ceiling with a light bulb on it,” Donna recalls of her days living behind the store. “None of the people around us had lights like that, they only had lanterns. We lived in the back of that store. I can almost still hear that thing running. It would pop and crack. It was right in the same building with us. They were noisy.”
Next to the store was a building that was used as a dance hall. “They called it the hall, and my dad ran a cord from his Delco plant over to that, so they could have lights, and they had dances every Saturday night. That was a big thing in the community. They had live bands, and they had square dancing,” Donna says.
She says her dad, Noel Belts, longed for something better than the finicky generator, which was expensive to run and prone to breakdowns. The light appeared on the horizon in the form of Macon Electric Cooperative.
“I think we got electricity to Ten Mile in about ’38,” Donna says. “Because we were close to Macon, and there was the rural school. Those little country schools, they kind of had priorities some way. They tried to get electricity to the rural schools because they said it was so important for the kids. And then we just lived half a mile north of the rural school, and we got electricity on up to the store, and that was a big day, of course. We got things to help at the store to keep pop and ice cream cold.”
She remembers seeing the co-op’s early board members trying to convince the neighbors to join the cooperative. “When we were living at Ten Mile, I can remember the guys going around on horseback out in the country trying to get $5 for membership,” she says.
It was a tough sell, because few people could come up with the required $5.
“When they got around collecting those $5 there wasn’t nothing to be ashamed of that you didn’t have it, because nobody had it,” she says. “I remember people used to say they felt about electricity like some of our people do today about going to the moon. They thought it was just a pipe dream.”
The Barter System
When she was old enough, Donna worked in the store. She says most of the transactions were paid for with trades. Customers would come in with whatever they had to trade and would wait for the tally of what the trade goods were worth before doing their shopping.
“Now we go in these supermarkets. You grab this little basket, and you just start throwing everything in that you want,” Donna explains. “Well, when the country people would come in, they’d bring their eggs and their cream, and sometimes they’d bring a chicken or two or three or four or something, but they never bought a thing till we counted their eggs and tested their cream. And then you made out their bill and at the top of it, you wrote what those were worth, and then they started doing their grocery trading. They didn’t buy any more than they had coming, because they didn’t have any money.”
She recalls her dad starting the day with pumping water by hand into a bucket, then bringing it into the store. Customers would drink from the bucket he provided using the same long-handled dipper.
“What do you think they’d say now?” Donna says, adding that the communal water bucket might be the secret to her longevity. “It was good times. We might have been poor, and we were, but we never did know it. People didn’t know they were poor, because everybody was poor. We always had plenty to eat. And the farmers around us did too, because they had their own hogs, they had their own cows, they had milk and eggs and their own meat and big gardens.”
The Electric Co-op Family
Donna met Gene at the Moody School they both attended. They moved to a farm east of Atlanta and lived for 70 years in the same house. It too was served by Macon Electric Cooperative. In time, Gene was asked to run for the co-op’s board of directors.
He would serve with distinction not only on the Macon Electric board, but also on the boards of Northeast Power in Palmyra and the Missouri Electric Cooperatives in Jefferson City. Donna did her part for the cooperatives as president of the Rural Electric Women’s Association. She traveled to meetings with her husband and learned all she could about the issues.
The electric cooperative program was like another family for the couple. “I miss it really. It was just part of our life,” she says. “If you knew Gene, anything he was in, he put his all in it. He didn’t sacrifice his family or his work, but the REC (rural electric cooperative) came third.”
There were many times when the couple had to work late to get their farm chores done before a co-op meeting. “One night I’ll never forget,” Donna recalls. “We were all packed and ready to go on one of these trips. Our neighbor called and said we had cows out, and we were up till 4 o’clock that morning getting the cows in. We worked all night, got the cows in and then we left the next morning on that trip.”
Asked if she preferred modern times or her days at the Ten Mile Store, Donna doesn’t hesitate. “Tell you the truth, I’d pick back then,” she says with a smile. “I really would. It is so mindboggling now. And TV, well, maybe some people like it. I don’t even care for TV. All you hear is the bad news. We’ve still got good news, but we don’t hear that. A lot of people are doing good things right now.”
But if she went back in time she would take electricity with her. “I don’t know that there’s very many people in Macon County that’s alive now who remembers when the electricity came,” she says.
Email Jim McCarty at jmccarty@ruralmissouri.coop.