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