Reflections on witnessing the invention of electricity and automobiles

Interviewer 2: Throughout your life, what do you think is the craziest invention that has come out? 

George: Oh, gee, invention! The first thing we had was electricity. Some places still didn't have it. Like my grandmother and my aunt—my mother’s sister—lived in the North End. They had the gas light. There was no electricity, even when I was small, and that was now coming into the 30s. That was the greatest invention, electricity. 

Then, of course, the automobile was just coming in too. By the 1930s, the automobiles were still with tires with tubes in there, like a bicycle. You had to patch them up, and there was no heat in the cars, no antifreeze. We used alcohol, and that would evaporate. So in the wintertime, we used to put the car up and the tires would get flat—that's how we used the automobile. The batteries had to have water in them, and so did the radiator, so you really couldn’t use the car in the wintertime. There were no defrosters, so ice would get on the window, and you had to put electric strips on the glass to heat up and melt the ice. Anyway, that’s how cars were in those days.

Then, of course, there was the electricity—the electric iron. Before that, we had the old metal irons that we used to heat on a stove. We used to use wood and coal to heat the stove, and we heated up these irons that were metal. Then the electric iron came out, and the same way with the toast. We used to make it by lighting the gas stove that was attached to the main stove, and holding it over the flames to toast the bread. The electric toaster came out, and it had a slice on this side, a slice on that side, and two doors that would open up—they didn't pop up in those days.

They came out with electric toasters, curling irons for the woman's hair, and a lot of other electric things. The radio had tubes and no transistors in those days. Same way with the early television. The television came out after the war, World War II, in 1948. They were small—maybe the biggest one was a foot—and square and black and white. Everybody sat around, looking at this TV. Maybe one person in the neighborhood had the first TV. And finally, the TVs got to be like 19 inches. When I got married in 1950, I bought one that was a focal 19 inch, a good one. I paid a lot of money for it, maybe 400-and-something dollars. That was a lot of money in those days, when I was making only $1 an hour, really.

When the war broke out in 1941, I had graduated high school, and I got a job in the shipyard in East Boston. It was a repair yard. I started with 62 ½ cents an hour the whole week, and I worked for $25. They took out a penny for Social Security.