Today I am watching a video from 1960 featuring the beauty of an all-electric home, A Medallion Home.
My dad built his own all electric home for us beginning in 1975. We moved in September of 1977, the day before my first day of 4th grade, as a matter of fact. I can easily remember my night in my own bedroom. The hallway light fixtures hadn’t been installed yet and we had “pig tail” lightbulbs hanging down in the appropriate places. There were bare wires where the smoke detector was to go. And while my sister and my ceiling light fixture in our own bedrooms looked identical, one of them had a pull chain that was cut off in the very center of the shade while the other did not. I believe it was my sister’s fixture that had the pull chain. I also had to use the Nutone Central Vacuum outlet in her bedroom to vacuum my bedroom. I found this upsetting; why wasn’t I worthy of my own plug? Occasionally she would get angry with me about something and then I’d have to use the one in the hallway that didn’t allow the vacuum to reach the far reaches of the room. No one would notice.
Our family’s all electric house didn’t last for very long in that a wood stove was added a few years later because electricity prices skyrocketed in the late 1970s and the bills became a challenge. Years after I moved out on my own Dad installed a forced hot air furnace for the first floor but the second floor retained its electric baseboard heat.
