Reading the stories of other's quests for insulators prompted me to think back to the early days of my own insulator hunting. I was twelve and my friend Kurt was fourteen at the time. We were both just beginning collectors. I was the first to be bitten by the "bug", and it was just contagious enough to spread on to Kurt.

One weekend in mid-January, I took Kurt up to my grandfather's house in Bruin, Pennsylvania. (Bruin is a small town about 60 miles north of Pittsburgh.) A few feet behind the house, an abandoned rail line ran. Both Kurt and I were very interested in the insulators remaining on the poles next to the line. 

The first night there we both sat up until one o'clock in the morning (VERY late) trying to devise a system or method of retrieving the insulators. 

Bright and early Saturday morning we were up, too excited to sleep, and very eager to get out and go after the insulators. Even after the night before, we still had no plan of action. We went out to granddad's garage and looked around upstairs. There were lots of two by fours and larger building lumber, but we didn't want to build scaffolds. Old slate roofing, broken storm window sashes and plumbing pipes were of no help either.

Then, we both saw it at once. Glowing like a carbide lamp in a mine was the old twenty foot wooden extension ladder. That heavy splinter-laden beast was our ticket to the poletops. We pulled it out and dusted it off. After taking some time to free the two halves, we each began to carry one half to the railroad.

The combination of freezing weather, heavy ladders and great anticipation made the fifty foot walk from the house to the first pole seem like forever. After assembling the ladder and grabbing the goods, we decided to drag the ladder halves behind us for the rest of the way. It was rather easy. Drag to a pole, assemble ladder and climb. We took turns climbing so no one would get mad about the findings.

Altogether we climbed about eight poles and got twenty or so insulators. There were so many poles, but the only ones with insulators on were the ones near the houses in town. The more remote ones were shot down decades ago. As the sun was setting, we dragged our ladders wearily along back to the house.

That evening we were quite tired and had some pretty sore muscles, but we also had INSULATORS!!! To us, they were great -- the BEST! We never had owned any like them before. These were really special because we had gotten them ourselves -- not at a flea market or auction sale, but out of our own adventure.

The beauties sat on the fireplace mantle -- a clear Whitall Tatum No.1, some green and aqua Hemingray 42's, a green 
"B" beehive and my favorite -- a green Brookfield beehive with a 45 Cliff Street address on it.

I am now nineteen years old and have about seven hundred insulators in my collection. I still have that one Brookfield beehive, though, and I cherish it as a memory of the days gone by --- the good old days.