One afternoon after school, I accompanied my father to the Hartford JCC swimming pool on Bloomfield Avenue, just over the line in West Hartford, Connecticut. Several days a week, after his job as a vice principal in Hartford, he served as head lifeguard from late afternoon to evening. It was cool in my youth to have the run of the pool as I so often did.
Some time before 5:30, I was in the lifeguard office playing around with the lights while my father was watching the pool several dozen yards around the corner. One of my juvenile games back then was to flip the lights on and off so quickly that no one in the pool could tell that anyone had tampered with the lights. My father was sharp, however, and after a few times, he yelled out from afar, “Jeff, stop playing with the lights,” and I immediately and permanently stopped doing so.
Now Comes the Real Fun
No more than a minute later, the lights went off in the entire pool area and only one small light from an independent power generator was illuminated. My father yelled out again, “I told you to stop playing with the lights.” I came out of the office door and looked down the length of the pool. I said, “It wasn’t me.”
We looked outside at the parking lot and saw that no lights were on. I went up the stairs, opened the door, and looked at the rest of the facilities, and all of the lights were off except for, once again, some small lights powered by emergency generators.
The lights remained off for several more minutes and my father had no choice but to close the pool. We found some flashlights and ushered people into the locker rooms. Other staff from around the center assisted people in gathering up their belongings and exiting the building.
The Proverbial “Dark and Dreary Night”
On the drive home, at once we noticed that all street lights in West Hartford and Bloomfield, and all lights that we normally would see from houses along our route were also off. The car radio was working and we learned from a local station that the entire metro area, and perhaps the whole region, had gone dark.
By the time we arrived home, we heard a newscast which reported that the entire Northeast had gone dark. This was the Great Northeast Blackout of 1965. It was the first time this had ever happened in the U.S., and it was stunning. Until then, one had always assumed that flipping the light switch would result in your lights coming on.
During the blackout, families retrieved the flashlights, candles, and transistor radios. They made their homes as comfortable as possible. It wasn’t too cold that November evening, so I imagine most places in at least our geographic region were okay.
With no television, families members actually spoke to each other. People listened to the radio, took walks, or camped around the kitchen table and devoured what they could eat safely before food would begin to spoil. Such a time!
Larger Forces at Play
To this today, I succinctly remember my father directing me for a second time not to play with the lights when, indeed, on this second Tuesday in November much larger forces were at play!
Nowadays, I contemplate how long it will be before the electrical grid in some part of the country goes haywire. We’ve already witnessed massive airline transportation boondoggles; toxic train derailments, a curious string of fires at large-scale food processing plants, baby formula shortages, blatant crimes sprees in all major Democrat-run city, 5+ million illegal aliens flooding out borders, healthcare and relocation for such illegals, and depletion of our strategic energy reserves.
Also, major military bungles in Afghanistan and elsewhere, military wokiness over military preparedness, nuclear weapons brinkmanship, out-of-control funding for Ukraine, a plethora of Chinese spy balloons traversing the U.S., intensified weaponization of the DoJ and the FBI, unprecedented deficit spending, runaway inflation, adolescent and preadolescent genital mutilation in the name of ‘warranted’ sex-change operation, and so much more that is totally undesirable.
So, will our electrical grid fail somewhere? Given the current Presidential administration’s ineptitude, really, it’s only matter of time.
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