| Good evening. I just joined up to this site a few days ago and I have enjoyed browsing the pics and stories. My name is Steve Zalimas, from Leominster, MA. I am a long time streetlight enthusiast. My favorite light source is the incandescents, then HPS.
From what I remember, I started noticing streetlights at a very early age (born in 1973 in Worcester, MA) and by age 5, I had memorized my city's entire streetlight network. I was definitely interested in lighting/electrical and that passion has been with me ever since. Back in my early years (early-mid 70’s) the Worc lights were mostly mercury and incandescent from many different manufacturers/designs. Incandescents of many configurations (radial wave, gumball, acorn globe styles) on the side streets and Merc's along the main roads. The only HPS fixtures were in the center of the city (M400A's and AE model 25’s) and maybe one here and one there amongst the Merc's dominance. Most Mercs were the M400, M400A, AE model 25, Form 400 with some Westinghouse mixed in. We also had the smaller M250 series MV’s that were replacing the incandescents on the side streets at that time. I used to stare up at the radial wave fixture (front of house) from my window in the morning and watch it blink off for the day or turn on at dusk. The light it emitted was very neat to me. I soon realized that nobody else around me had any interest in what I saw in streetlighting, so I kept this mostly to myself. As I grew up in the 80’s, I watched as my beloved radial waves were being replaced by Merc’s and that is why I have never had any real love for them. By the mid to late 80’s, HPS started moving into more territories by replacing some of the Mercs (which was fine with me since I thought the amber light was cool looking). During the time I was in High School (1987-1991) Mass Electric started a 5 year phaseout of any Mercs and incandescents towards HPS. I was able to rescue a lot of different incandescent fixtures during this time from the municipality (they took a liking to me since I was interested in lighting). Around the early 90’s, I had started a streetlight rebuilding business until I went into the AirForce in 1995. During that time I had rebuilt 200 HPS fixtures for private sales. This was the time I was able to rescue most of my incandescents that are in my collection. By the time the HPS conversion was done, 99% of Worcester was HPS consisting of fixtures from GE and AE. Just in the past few years, the Crouse Hinds fixtures (OVZ and OVX’s) were intruding on the GE M250R2’s dominance but the municipality likes going back to installing GE’s as of now.
While I was in the Active service, I still would notice lighting fixtures from time to time. It wasn’t until I got hooked on the internet (in the late 90’s) that I found out that I wasn’t the only one with a lighting hobby. Once I started browsing the web, I would find sites from Joe Maurth (Boston MA area), another site from NY, depicting lighting with funny names and others. Some recent events have caused me to look back into lighting and I found this site. So here I am, sharing my story to those with the same passion for lighting. I am still trying to memorize the proper designations to the different fixtures that are out there, commonly in the US, so bear with me if I dont get the fixture name right. Talk to you soon J Steve Zalimas
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