By: W.C. Reader

On a recent day, we spent the better part of the morning sitting in a comfortable chair while examining five coal oil kerosene lamps, which our wife had scattered in strategic places around the room. A couple of them played important roles in an early part of our life, when we were a young pre-schooler trying to come to grips with what life had to offer us while living on a small cotton farm in the 1920’s. You see, back in those days, electrical fixtures were a novelty and luxury to the city folks, something that still hadn’t made an appearance out in the rural areas. We belonged to the latter group, and were nearly seven years old before we had the experience of turning on an electrical light.

Now as we reflect on this period of our life, we were in the dark about a lot of things, especially when the sun went down. And it didn’t improve a bit when our mother whipped out one of those old kitchen matches and began lighting our lamps (both of them). Dim lighting conditions on the farm became a way of life. So we just planned our life doing early those chores which required light of a good quality and then went out on the porch to swat mosquitoes and enjoy the cool breezes before bedtime rolled around.

But wait a minute, here we are beginning to write our experiences with an object which most of you modern folks never have seen or used. It usually has a glass base, which supports a glass bowl that holds the fuel. Then a metal burner was screwed on the top of this bowl, a fiber wick ran from the top of the burner and then it descended into the fuel. Through this arrangement, the fuel was siphoned up to the top of the wick, where a flame was produced when a match was struck and touched it. Then a glass chimney was placed on top of the burner to protect the flame and keep it from being blown out by the wind. It was mother who went around lighting the lamps in the evening and then extinguishing them at bedtime. Remember how she used to cup her hand over the chimney and then blow down it to make the flame go out?

Mother also was the one who usually took care of keeping the lamps in working order. About once a week, she would go around and inspect each of them, wash the chimney, trim the wick and fill the bowl with kerosene. That was just about the long and short of it, unless the wick had been trimmed too often and needed to be replaced.

We still have several unused wicks and glass chimneys laying around the house somewhere to help us keep those old lamps in working order. The last time we used them was when Hurricane Claudette blew through here and cut off our power supply. Immediately we pulled down a couple of those old lamps, lit them, and behold! We had light (dim as it was).

And by the way, you old-timers keep in mind we spelled CHIMNEY correctly, although most of us pronounce it as CHIMLEY.

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