December 1976
It's Christmas Eve day and
the weather is miserable. Raw, rainy and cold. A great day to
stay warm and cozy inside. Unless of course dependable electricity
is still on the to-do list and so is dealing with an infestation
of some yet-to-be-named bug family cohabitating in the chimney.
And also the day an electrician, John Matz, came looking for
a job. Another coincidence? First Bill Hopp the plumber and now
an island in dire need of electricity is visited by someone who
just got fired and knows how to light up an island. And while
he may be able to maintain a power company, water company and
sewer company, he does not fix generators. But he knows someone
who does. That would be a character named Bill Beech, a Merchant
Marine veteran of the Second World War's Murmansk Run who still
totes a government issue 45 caliber.
Count in Bill Raynor, groundskeeper
and beer drinker extraordinaire, and more than half the Magnificent
Seven is accounted for already. Yet, all the credit does not
simply go to people. Special recognition also has to be paid
to the generator shack itself - home to three generations of
broken down machinery. Why? Well, in 1924 one of the first U.S.
"full diesel" engines developed by Fairbanks Morse
without foreign patents was tested, sent to the railhead at Boca
Grande and then the 25-thousand-pound engine was transported
by boat to Useppa to replace a tired old steam engine that had
been working hard at providing electricity to the island.5*
According to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers the
#208 Fairbanks-Morse Y-VA Engine Diesel (1924) housed on Useppa
is the "earliest (perhaps only) existing example of early
high-compression, cold-start, full-diesel engines developed in
the United States for isolated or rural power generation machinery
before widespread electrification was available."
5* American Society
of Mechanical Engineers
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