Greetings, my fellow Thrifty Kilowatters!
Little did I know that when I stated on my last post
"Seattle was once known, in certain circles at least, as the city with the most electric stoves per capita. That was also because of my employer, but that deserves its own post"
that I would get a groundswell of almost a dozen souls wanting that theoretical post. So here it is.
First, cast your mind back to that time when electricity was new, or at least new-ish. Now put yourself in turn-of-the-centuryish Seattle: It was a dreadful place, full of con men and corporatists and all sorts of other nasty bores who were there to basically separate naive gold rush people from their money before sending them north to Alaska to die.
But there was also a good solid voting bloc of rather sensible people, recently radicalized by the great Seattle fire (look it up) who felt rather strongly that some sort of power needed to be wrestled from the Denny's, Mercer's, Boren's, Yesler's, and all the other current street names who were then the people who ran things. So they came up with a bright idea: They should build a dam up in the mountains that would provide both clean drinking water (which was another huge issue, after they decided that they could both poop and drink in Lake Washington, with disastrous results) AND power the street lights.
The powers that be grumbled a bit but, sort of like the current health care plan, they went along with it, thinking that it still gave them all sorts of leeway to inflict their own particular, very expensive and eastern-backed brand of electricity upon the people. But they hadn't counted on a spunky Irishman named JD Ross.
Ross was called a "Socialist" in his day. God only knows what he'd be called these days. But he took the fledgling little street lighting department in all sorts of interesting ways: As a city department, it was required to put street lighting in every neighborhood - including those neighborhoods where the private power company had decided that it wasn't worth their wire to offer residential service. The private company was strictly into providing power for the downtown merchants and the wealthy folks in the hills surrounding downtown. But City Light figured, once the wires for street lights were there, why not start picking up some extra income by hooking folks up? And since they were essentially a non-profit, why not charge very competitive rates?
This put the eastern power conglomerate in an awful snit, and they went to the papers to whine about it, but low cost power is low cost power, so Seattle City Light became more than just a streetlight provider.
So things went on: The private power company decided that they needed to compete, so they started offering residential service in the "lesser neighborhoods". City Light decided that, as long as they were downtown, they should offer power to the downtown merchants. Redundant power lines were strung all over town, and it was a huge mess.
But we were talking about stoves, weren't we? Let's get back to them.
Legend has it (and I love legend) that an electric stove salesman had come to town, and was quite downhearted: No one had wanted his new-fangled stoves (it was still the era of the Ye Olde Stove) so he went to visit JD Ross, hoping to unload his boxcar of stoves. Ross, the great marketer, came up with a brilliant idea. City Light would sell the stoves, and install them for free, and finance them on easy terms, payable on your light bill.
Well, you would have thought the earth had shifted on its axis: The idea that you could buy an ELECTRIC STOVE (roughly the contemporary equivalent of a Bentley, stove speaking) get your house wired for free, AND make easy payments, was too good to resist. People signed on as if there was no tomorrow.
To accommodate all this wild growth, Ross claimed stake on the upper Skagit River valley, proposing to build three dams there. The conservatives went wild, clenching their jaws, getting their panties in a righteous bunch, and generally behaving like the little children they inevitably are. They mounted a mayoral candidate, who fired JD Ross. The people recalled him. They threw all manner of glamor fits, but it didn't matter: Cheap electric rates and cheap appliances (along with free appliance repair) won the people of Seattle over, and finally in 1951, City Light won the right to be the monopoly provider of electricity in Seattle and surrounding areas.
(It should be noted that, in addition to the cheap electrical rates and high-quality appliances, City Light created a "Home Economics" department that consisted of lovely ladies who gave cooking classes and stately in-home instruction. Plus, JD Ross came up with an absolute extravaganza of a weekend tour of the Skagit electrical project, complete with expansive meals, exotic zoo islands visited on a boat cruise, and a lavish electrical pageant to compliment the already lavish Ladder Falls. The man knew how to sell.)
All of this made Seattle the town with the most elecric ranges per capita. Appliance sales (and the lovely Home Ec ladies) lasted until the late 1970's. Free appliance repair continued until the early 1990's, when it was determined by some dreary legal decision that it gave government an unfair advantage to offer such a fine service, so it was discontinued.
So that, my fellow thrifty kilowatters, is how Seattle came to be known (in certain circles) as the city with the most electric stoves per capita.
RIP, JD Ross (who, along with his wife Maude) is interred on the side of a mountain in the City Light company town of Newhalem in the Skagit Hydroelectric Project. I fire up my Frigidaire double ovens on "Broil" to salute you.
