Perdue has a certain difficulty in telling a story in a perfect linear fashion. Much of this is due to the plurality of origins, which to him are of equal importance; to a tendency of forgetting the need to foreshadow things which he assumes others know; and mainly because things happen to him in strange ways.
Like in 1965 or so, when he inherited maybe two dozen old law books, including maybe a dozen volumes of Opinions and Orders of the Railroad Commission of the State of Wisconsin. During the next decade they got rained on several times, and when he skimmed through them for discard, it was a signature at a time, shearing off the edges with a paper power shear and turning the pages by use of a paring knife.
An intriguing study was how the construction of one of the New York City elevated railroads was held up for a couple of years because a spur track connection led from the surface railroad to a lumber yard whose owner had powerful political connections, and the contract had no clause for future grade separations. It must have taken guts for the New York commission to order the lumber yard either to give up the spur track connection, or to arrange for a grade separation structure to the future elevated at its own expense.
Foreshadow: cases considered important enough to reprint in full in these books, generally have a number of advance summaries, maybe a paragraph each, taking some element of the text and listing it under a short definition. These are called "headnotes" and summarized at the end of the book. So if your interest is in maybe running cable television along an existing line of telephone poles, you'll find the case law listings under UTILITY POLES - JOINT USE. (This is a damned interesting study -- there are over twenty companies that erect utility poles along City streets in Los Angeles alone. I must go into this later.)
So early this year I worked my way through a book of operating statistics for Wisconsin -- railway companies, carloads of commodities, electric utilities, telephones, all sorts of crap. One fact of interest had to do with the motive power used by the thirteen or so electrical municipal street railroads -- coal, wood, oil. Three of these damn street railroads -- and why should I lie to you? -- listed their motive power as being waterwheels. This statistic volume was dated about 1905.
This is an entirely new concept to me -- a turning wheel running a dynamo which in turn energized the overhead. Kind of runs you back to a time with concerts in the park, crinoline, antimacassars, and mustard plastards, no?
Months passed. I read some more decisions -- would you believe a three-page decision in which the commission decided that pine kindling between Big Falls and Burlington should have moved at 27¢ a hundredweight instead of 29¢; and the railroad in question did not dispute the misapplied rate -- the decision, reprinted in whole, ordered the railroad to refund $7.39.
Public Utilities, their definition and their regulation, was much of my life work. I found it of interest that Wisconsin regulated the fares and services of their municipal street railways. This is not the case in California. The Wisconsin commission sometime about 1907 ordered Milwaukee to construct a line along 27th Street. My visualization of the cosmic all shows Milwaukee to have its named streets in a north-south direction, and the numbered streets of the grid going east-west on the south side. I also visualize 27th Street as being eighty feet between property lines, having twelve feet sidewalks and a fifty-six foot traveled roadway at that time.
Joyce Scrivner passed through town a couple of months ago, and I forgot to ask her about it. It's just as well -- I'd forgotten that Minneapolis is an entirely different city in another state.
But the theory of utility regulation is indeed fascinating. The City of Laramie, Wyoming, where I went to college, did not have a municipal water department. The residents all received their water free of charge from the Union Pacific Railroad, which they told me was a tradeoff between the railroad and the City, under which the railroad was exempt from City taxes.
And then my home town of Casper, Wyoming. The graveyard was a separate City department; and naturally they planted all the blacks and all the Mexicans in their separate assigned section; One wonders what will happen if somewhere in Government, the decision will be made for a retroactive integration...
So I kept reading these Opinions and Orders, and in due time came to the back pages of headnote indices. My amazement is understandable when one index was headed Twilight Zone. (See below.)
(illo: index page: Twilight Zone 939 ...
TWILIGHT ZONE
As involved in extension of lines or service. see TELEPHONE UTILITIES. 9.
Subscribers in twilight zone and free interchange of service, see RATES -- TELEPHONE, 9.)
This bounced my memory back to the statistic page, destroyed some months before, where a dozen or so towns had streetcar lines. And the motive power in three of these places had waterwheel power. Places where a man could live his life full measure, unhurried, leisurely.
Is it possible that one of those towns was named Willoughby?
#
I had not been reading these law books in any particular order, and there was but one left over. I consulted the index-digest first, and found but three entries for the twilight zone. None of the three were for Willoughby.
(illo: TWILIGHT ZONE
As involved in toll rates, see RATES -- TELEPHONE, 30.
As involved in extension of lines or service, see TELEPHONE UTILITIES, 13.
Zone of service in general, as involved in telephone rates and service,
....see EXCHANGE SERVICE REQUIREMENTS; EXTENT OF ZONE SERVICE. ...)
In California, you can tell what company owns the utility pole by the letter which precedes the pole ID number. Those owned by Pacific Telephone, for example, begin with the letter H (which, incidently, stands for Home Telephone and Telegraph, one of its predecessors.) Poles of the Los Angeles Transit Lines begin with the letter C. They ran their last streetcar eighteen years ago -- but I know where some of their poles still stand, and assume they still collect rent from the other companies using their poles.
For that matter, Griffith Park Boulevard is a public street laid out along the former right-of-way of the Los Angeles and Ostrich Farm Railway, which went out of business when a flood washed out their bridge over the Los Angeles River about 1920. I must walk that street someday, to see if any of their utility poles still exist....
Love
520 07 0328
(illo: Police Lizard (Ft. Mudge P.D.))
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Poor Fred -- I don't think his door
is completely closed.
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Data entry by Judy Bemis
Hard copy provided by Geri Sullivan
Data entry by Judy Bemis
Updated October 19, 2002. If you have a comment about these web pages please send a note to the Fanac Webmaster. Thank you.