Sam Smith - When we came to Wolfe's Neck in 1946, the only electricity came from a gasoline generator my father turned on each evening at sundown. The generator provided a soft orangish glow to the pre-war bulbs, not a few of which were still working in the 1990s.
There was a phone, but it was nearly two miles away at Mr. Banter's house. That's as far as the mail got as well. When someone called my father, Mr. Banter would drive down to tell him and my father would rush out to the car and we would wait to hear what had been happening far away. Mr. Banter and his wife already knew since they had sat in their kitchen listening. Add the two drives and that was about eight miles a phone call.
When we finally got a phone, it was a hand crank model with more than a half dozen neighbors on the same line. To call a someone on the same line, you turned a small crank that rang a bell. Your neighbors each had a different code - such as two long rings and one short - but for more distant calls you contacted the operator overlooking Main Street who might well tell you that the person you were seeking had just walked into the Red & White and that you'd better try later. Dial service didn't come in until the 1950s annunced by a letter from the phone company upon which my mother scrawled, "Alas."