Johanna Rauhala: Illuminated Memories
Johanna Rauhala shares memories about her father’s work in San Francisco.
My dad immigrated from Finland to the United States in 1964 and worked for San Francisco PG&E as a lineman until he retired. He spent his whole working life fixing the lamps and powerlines of the city and literally lighting up our collective lives. But our family paid the price.
World War II and the grim stoicism required to survive it translated into family tension, silences and undercurrents of anger. During the 1980s floods, he worked overtime constantly. He was always tired. And there were times when he came home and told of a coworker falling down a powerline, getting electrocuted or dying.
In his things, I found a large antique-lamp with ornate filigree. It turns out my dad had converted one of San Francisco’s 1920s era “Path of gold” lamps. These had been part of Market Street’s “Path of Gold” streetlights and were modified, relocated, or removed during the 1967 transit overhaul, after the California Public Utilities Commission passed “Rule 20,” ordering all overhead lines be removed and placed underground.
It’s a beautiful artifact that he rebuilt and saved with his hands, and even decades later, actually works. My dad died last July, 2025 and I think about him daily. I think about what he tried to say through the radios and connectors he left behind, the unspoken, dark circuitry of those wartime years, the cold winters, eating toothpaste for candy, sawdust bread.
I think about the men he befriended thousands of miles from his homeland, a San Francisco brotherhood of trucks and danger, the quiet heroism of fixing things. I miss my dad. I hold leftover copper wire in my hand and feel the warmth it might’ve conducted.. And I look around now at the old fixtures he left behind and know that even years later, this late illumination is its own kind of love. With a Perspective, I’m Johanna Rauhala.
Johanna Rauhala is a retired middle school teacher and cancer survivor. She lives in Richmond.