Historic store turns out lights

Filed: 05/06/2000

By CHIP POWER
Californian staff writer
e-mail: [email protected]

About 10 years before light bulb inventor Thomas Edison died, a man named Jim Baker opened a business on 19th Street in a booming downtown, wiring new homes and businesses to electricity and selling lamps and other modern fixtures.

He was the grandson of the town's founder, Col. Thomas Baker, and worked in the city and the outlying ranches in the early 1900s.

Remarkably, in these days of disposable electronics and world trade, Jim Baker Electrifier has operated for more than eight decades, changing slowly with the times and moving to lamp repair and other custom work as the days of hand-blown light bulbs passed.

Now, after some soul-searching, the owners have decided to permanently dim the lights at the Electrifier. They won't be turned back on by a new owner, since there was scant demand for the store.

As the Wal-Mart Age was ushered in about 20 years ago, people started buying more disposable lamps, so the store tried to specialize in repairing local residents' prized electrical possessions, such as chandeliers, and stocking up on an ever-growing number of light bulb types.

The modest store in the concrete block building at 818 19th St. now carries inventory such as batteries, replacement bulbs for "Itty-Bitty" book reading lights and lamp shades in many hues. In a sign of the times, 120 bulbs — 30 four-packs — arrive in a cardboard box from China.

The strategy worked for a while but was not a long-term solution.

"We didn't find anyone that wanted to buy it," said 73-year-old proprietor Margaret Dye, who has been managing the business with the help of a daughter, Claudia Key. Another employee has left to go into business for himself.

So the family is donating some of its rarities to the Kern County Museum, has already sold off its distinctive blinking street sign about a block from Central Park and has had people circling around, making offers on old wooden desks and fixtures.

The business is negotiating with some of its suppliers to see if it can exchange leftover merchandise for credit. After that, it may sell off the rest at auction, lease the property out, and manage it as income property.

"Making the decision was really the hard part," said Dye, who is married to Harold Dye, 78, her second marriage. Dye is a local electrical contractor also in his 70s who keeps his office at the Electrifier. Her health, namely a back that is less forgiving to jarring work, said it was time. "It's hard walking around on concrete all day," she noted.

The "Electrifier" part of the name today sounds like it belongs to a character in the World Wrestling Federation. The word is part of a bygone era, when homes moved from being lit by kerosene lamps to those illuminated by Edison's invention — or electrified.

The business has been a mainstay.

Flash back to Kern County in the early 1900s: specifically 1910, during an oil boom and rush for land and leases.

"The rush was not heralded, but as dusk fell, autos loaded with armed men and camping outfits began rolling out of Bakersfield and the west side towns," observed "The History of Kern County," (1914, Historical Records Co., Los Angeles.) "The desert hills were well sprinkled with tents, armed guards and stakes from which fluttered little ... location notices." Gushers were "drenching the county with a rain of oil."

It was in this environment that Jim Baker opened the original Electrifier downtown, a period when lumber yards sold out of supplies rapidly, equipment at oil-well companies ran dry and the city had a great building boom. Baker had been an electrician and a telegrapher. His first building, at 914 19th St., was where, according to anecdotal reports, he covered the copper roof of his business with water in the summer to keep cool. He had been associated with early streetcars in Bakersfield and had an inventive interest in rocks, collecting them and making them into useful things, including lamps.

Baker and his wife, Louise, did not have any children of their own. So by 1946, the business was purchased by Texas native Raymond Vinson, who was Margaret Dye's father. Baker died being inventive to the end, Dye said. Reportedly, he poked in a dump trying to salvage insulation from discarded water heaters to reuse. He slipped and broke his leg, contracted pneumonia and died.

Vinson had learned electronics as a Navy shipmate during World War II, the daughter said. The Jim Baker name by then had become its own hard currency, Dye said. The company had an easier time getting parts orders filled from Los Angeles supply shops during wartime when essentials were hard to get. Competing stores not as old may not have gotten preferential treatment. So the original name stuck long after Baker died.

Photographs taken at the business in the 1940s show Vinson posing in a store with parts stacked in boxes and shelves from the floor to near the ceiling, and his newish Studebaker parked outside.

"My father used to go on trips and be gone two or three days," Dye recalled. "Utility companies were not very big in those days." So if a remote business or home needed to connect to public electricity supplies, she said, they often needed to do it themselves.

By 1962, the business moved to its current location. The original building was demolished to make room for a parking lot.

Dye's first husband, Frank Stanton, worked for his father-in-law at the Electrifier. By 1967, the couple took over from Dye's father and they bought the business. Some 13 years later, Stanton died, so Dye and daughter Claudia assumed full responsibility for the Electrifier.

"It used to be a play office for me. Then I had to go to work," said Margaret Dye. "But I needed something to do. I was only 53."

Business managers recalled some of the company's work.

"There are very few people who can work on something like an old chandelier," noted Carl Saenger, manager of the American Jewelry Co. downtown. He commissioned them to take down an ornate light unit more than 60 years old to clean and rewire it. "It's one of those things that you have to have a knowledge base to attempt. Even disassembling it can be tricky," he noted, since such projects rarely benefit from schematic diagrams.

But such jobs were not that frequent. So after soldiering along for years, the family opted to call it quits.

"Right now, I'm looking for a job," said Claudia, who was arranging old photographs in a back office. The blinds were pulled shut to keep out the sun, and Dye keeps the doors locked while they go through their final countdown to leaving.

"Society today doesn't repair many things," said Claudia matter of factly with little bitterness in her voice.

Margaret Dye said she hopes the business property can be an income source for her two daughters. Her other daughter, Allene Krizo, is a psychologist in Bakersfield.

She is not leaving feeling that sentimental about boxes of wall plates and amp charts.

"After so many years at it," Dye said, "it was just time, time to let go."