Ranger Envy

I don't know what it is, but every time I go to one of the National Park Service sites, I have fantasies about becoming a park ranger. Not one of those Ranger Rick types who keep Yogi away from the pic-i-nic basket, though the nature stuff is very cool. I'm more into the stories behind the places.

Rangers have the enviable privilege of showing people the finer points of historic places, and sometimes, if you let on that you're as fascinated by history as they are, they'll clue you in on some stuff they don't ordinarily share. It might be a fact few people know, or they might let you into a room others don't get to see. In any case, I sometimes wonder if they get the urge to lie from time to time. Nothing very big, like there being a basement in the Alamo. Just something relatively plausible.

I've visited the Thomas Edison historical site in West Orange, NJ several times. It's about 20 miles from Menlo Park, where he and his 'muckers' invented the light bulb (and the town was renamed Edison in his honor). The West Orange site was where his manufacturing facility was, and where his famous research and development labs were. Touring that site, your head spins with the massive number of things invented and conceived of there, many of which are just now being reconceptualized, like the electric car. More on that another time.

After moving operations to West Orange and marrying his second, considerably younger wife Mina, he bought a house close to the office, in Llewellen Park, a still-tony and magnificent enclave of homes for the wealthy. Mina basically ran the house, which was called Glenmont; Edison himself usually slept on a cot in his library at the lab and when he was home he wasn't exactly the life of the party.

When you visit Glenmont, some of the rangers will take you beyond the usual living room/conservatory/study/bedrooms tour and let you see the inner workings of the household. That's how I got to see the cook's kitchen on a small tour. Besides me and the ranger, two folks from Ohio or somewhere were on the tour, and they kept asking ridiculous questions that only proved they hadn't been listening. You know, stuff that's so anachronistic that you have to laugh, like did Jesus ride a dinosaur, or something like that.

Well, we get to the kitchen, and the ranger points out the stove. Edison, he noted, was rarely home in time for dinner, and it was a real hassle for the help to keep a coal-fired stove going so he could have a warm meal whenever he got around to coming home. Not wanting her dear Tom to eat a cold dinner, Mina had installed the very first gas-fired stove in all of West Orange.

Somehow, the Ohio visitors weren't making the connection, so I helpfully added, "you know, that was before Edison invented the microwave oven." They nodded in acknowledgment. Ah, now it makes sense. The ranger just looked at me, raised his eyes heavenward and went on with the tour, noting that Mina lived in the house well after her husband's death in 1931.