Growing up in Louisa – Who Remembers?
Weekly feature . . . by Mike Coburn
Many things that were once routine and part of everyday life for our grandparents have become obsolete and unknown to us. Likewise, our routine actions are foreign to our kids and are totally unfathomable to our grandkids. There has been no time in history where change has had a more profound effect than over the last few generations. While our grandparents were used to the ‘horse and buggy’ lifestyle, I can only imagine the difficulties they experience as part of life. Making soap, tanning hides, hunting up supper were disappearing even before my day. I’m sure it would be difficult for me to hitch up a horse to a wagon, if indeed, I could. Not just because I don’t trust horses all that much, but because I don’t know where the various straps go. The whole system is complex to me. My grandparents, on the other hand, had to struggle believing that man had landed on the moon. My grandmother thought it was black magic that a man was talking to us from a box (TV).
My grandkids won’t remember seeing a phone booth, or know anything about keeping a dime tucked away for ‘mad money.’ That’s silly in today’s world, but was important when I was growing up. Today’s kids may never have seen a flat iron, or a steam locomotive, or even an adding machine. They will not understand the need to write in longhand, and may never ride on a car’s running board. They won’t go to the theater to see a Saturday cowboy matinee. They have never heard of Roy Rogers, or Trigger, or maybe not Buggs Bunny. Today it is ‘Bubble Guppies’ and ‘Backyardigans.’ You can just guess how I know about this kids program.
Considering that most millennials communicate by texting, they may totally lose the ability to carry on a conversation. The evolution of technology has already replaced many things that were in common use during my formative years. Engineers today don’t use slide rules or manual transit levels. They get their positions from robots, satellites, and even drones. Surgeons make only tiny incisions in our bodies and use tiny cameras and tools for many operations resulting in faster healing and reduction of scar tissue. I’ve discussed the old crank telephone in earlier articles, but along with the demise of nearly all ‘land-line’ devices today, even our cell phones have morphed into tiny computers. Once the size of a walkie-talkie with its own antenna, they now fit into our pockets. There are digital apps for everything imaginable.
I remember a miraculous show when Detective Sargent Joe Friday, of TV’s (Dragnet), explained an invention that allowed police departments to send photographs of perpetrators over phone lines from anywhere in the country! This system, called facsimile (faxes) was soon in every office, and in many of our homes. Even that is nearly obsolete. Most documents today are scanned and sent over the web via email. Folks in the printing businesses are hurt because clients have stopped using paper forms and letters in favor of electronic ones.
Today, our kids take pictures throughout the day and instantly post them on the web. No one has to have film developed. In our grandparent’s day, they used ‘tin-types’ or glass plates in photography, but film, followed soon after. By the end of WWII color film and polaroid cameras became the new thing. Celluloid film became a better way to save both still and moving pictures. After the magnetic tape was replaced with electronic chips and discs, life in the recording industry really changed from analog to digital. For a time we used camcorders, but not anymore! Our phones handle it all.
Digital selfies proliferate and once again the world is smaller. At the office, I currently require bids, proposals, contracts, bonds and insurance certificates to be sent to me electronically. That helps me keep electronic records and does away with obsolete filing cabinets. No more paper records are kept. All email and text messages are added to electronic file folders. Thus, we not only have a ‘paperless’ system, but saved storage space, improved access and the ability to share data and backup those records on the ‘cloud.’
Some of us will remember that our parents depended on Western Union to handle urgent or important messages from out of town. I remember the Western Union office downtown. I don’t think I was ever in there, but there was a well-marked door next to the flower shop. The job of their delivery boys was to take their bike and a sealed envelope (yellow as I remember) to deliver messages. Some were to inform families that their sons had been ‘lost in action,’ or worse, ‘killed’ in the war. Of course, not all news was bad news. A message might contain hope, such as a missing soldier was safely found. Sometimes the message was a birth announcement, or an engagement, a wedding, a birthday greeting, or a badly needed cash transfer. Wiring money became very important to those on the road, such as eloping couples. My point is that if today’s grandchild saw a Western Union bicycle with a young man peddling up the street, they’d never notice. Back then people held their breath until he passed, sparing potentially bad news for another day.
Today, even some of our most trusted institutions are being forced to adopt new services to stay in business. Libraries moved into the electronic age by adding desktop computers (soon to go away, too) and providing clients with technical help with their research. That old card file and microfiche aren’t relevant anymore. Searches for data can be accessed on-line, but new software at the libraries are much faster and easier to use. A while back some libraries moved into renting movies, but they phased that out because we can see all we want via cable and dish networks and streaming off the web. High on the agenda these days are children’s crafts, and reading rewards. Younger people are reading e-books on-line, usually on a laptop, Kindle, or their smartphone. Are libraries obsolete? Maybe not just yet, but it will take some serious scrambling to stay attuned and be of value to the public. They are a depository of historical documents and are a museum in some ways, but as more archives are scanned into databases, access will easily be available from anywhere. Will our great grandchildren know how to do research in library books?
Likewise, retail bookstores are also struggling to add new services. This includes in-store coffee shops and a few related ‘point of sale’ products that augment declining sales. Both the library and the stores are great for book signings. These help keep traffic up, but with the whole world at our fingertips, we can see that work is to be done to find new or better services to maintain relevancy. Old ways must adapt, or fade away. Who will remember Dewey Decimal when the shelves are abandoned? For many, these are fighting words. We’ll see.
I got to thinking about the invention of the lock. It was prior to medieval times when men began to lock up prisoners and valuables by using heavy mechanical steel locks. Bankers, jailers, and janitors carried keys jangling from their belts over centuries with little real change even until our day. When I was a little boy I was fascinated by blue-collar workers that I saw with fully loaded key rings. Even though we didn’t always use them, we had locks on our doors. In colonial times, they had locks on their secretary desks, and tea, sugar, and liquor cabinets. We used keys to unlock post office boxes, bank-vault boxes, and in the twentieth century, even our deep-freezes. Our cars and trucks came with ignitions that all required keys, and even kids used a lock-chain on their bikes.
Keys have been part of life, but hang on. They are already being replaced. Some cars today pick up the electronic signal from its owner(s) to unlock the doors, set the seats, and start the engine, and climate controls. Those can already be handled by an app. There are many kinds of security software, but those will be culled to a standardized method that will live with us one way or another. Old-fashioned keys will be put on displays at the Smithsonian, or some other museum, to tell future generations about what we thought was routine. So, who, then, will remember a heavy keyring?
When I played baseball in my early life, I sometimes wondered about the calls made by umpires. As I matured and became an umpire, I saw how difficult some calls can be. Sure, an occasional mistake happened, but more importantly, because the umpire was there, the game would go on without brawls, arguments, or injuries. Consider this: Technology has made it possible that with the help of positioned cameras, (or drones) an electronic ‘umpire’ could be used to show exactly if a pitch was a ball or strike, or to make ‘out’ and ‘safe’ calls. A screen could easily flash the call and it would go in the book. Scorekeepers and umpires would effectively go away, except perhaps for one official setting in a booth that could review the call. So, putting a man in black out in the sun, dangerously close to injury, could be replaced. But would the game be the same, and when once done, who’d remember the old way?
Our kids may never have seen anyone crank a car to start the engine. For that matter even push a car to get the engine turning. I know I’ve done both many times, but back in the days when it was needed fairly often. Today, few drive a stick shift or have any idea of how a car works. I also suspect a lot fewer cars get stuck in the mud today. Many are four-wheel drive, which was a very rare thing in the past. Roads are paved better, too, unless you are going ‘mudding.’ Who remembers corduroy roads?
I remember how much fun it was to push a car out of the mud. When I got behind a car the driver would spin the wheels and cover me with mud. Sometimes there’d be two or three of us trying to help. Ha! I remember when one broke out of the quagmire so quickly that I fell forward into the mud-bath. My companions enjoyed the sight more than me. I didn’t enjoy the mud bath and facial! Who will remember pulling a car or truck out with a tractor, or a team of horses?
When we walked down the street in the old days, we saw many things that were common in towns and villages all over America. It seemed that every third corner had a small grocery store. It was during my time that these were beginning to be replaced by large supermarkets. Later we shopped in the big warehouse stores that would gobble up whole chains of smaller stores. Even those are threatened today. Food shopping is undergoing a metamorphosis as people place their orders on their smartphones. Stores will prepackage your order for pickup, or even make deliveries. In a way, this closes the circle because in the old-time grocery stores the clerks pulled the orders and sometimes delivered the goods. In fact, some of my friends were ‘delivery boys.’ Each generation will have their own memories of obtaining groceries.
But wait just a minute. If this applies to groceries, it applies to everything. Who needs shopping centers? We have online catalogues right in our hands. If I need a part for a repair, I can order it immediately. Even while I’m still bent under the hood. If I need a new outfit, easy, just pick it out and put it in the electronic ‘cart.’ If I don’t understand how to trouble-shoot something, then You Tube will show me how. If I want to know if an actor is still alive, I need only to ask. If I want the meaning or spelling of a word, I just click and know more than I could have ever known without hours of research. If you need a picture of something, then type in the name and add ‘pic’ and you’ll get a big selection from which to choose. The need for an encyclopedia is long gone. Same for an unabridged dictionary. Soon, I expect you can ask your car to look it up. They already tell us where we are and where to go.
Down the street, we see a boarded-up department store. We see an obsolete five and dime, and a host of other stores that were all replaced by the big box stores at the edge of town. For those folks who have seen how this affects the community, revenge is on the way. You no longer must go there. Your smartphone will provide the means and give you fast turnaround at very favorable prices. In places, shopping centers are being turned into offices, restaurants, centers for the arts, and even a type of ‘loft’ home. There are fewer reasons to build more strip malls. As Sears, K-Mart, and others fade away and Amazon and others like them take the lead, the physical buildings become an unnecessary expense. Who will remember the malls and the downtown’s that we knew so well?
Two small businesses that I remember in my hometown, were Erns’ and Hack’s newsstands. Hack’s was a taxi stand (Hack means cab or taxi, in England. Called ‘taking a hack’) and a bus stop, but both competed for sales of newspapers, novelties, tobacco, and magazines. Today, the newspapers of the world are available in electronic versions. Before you could do a pasteup layout and publish a paper today, the news would be obsolete. Between the electronic media, TV, radio and the web, only a few of us older folk stop to read a paper version. Even then, it is no longer for latest news, but for the obituaries, ads, coupons, comics, columns, and schedules of attractions. The William Randolph Hurst’s of the world no longer have ink in their veins, but electronic impulses. To get the latest news you only need a smartphone, or notebook. Today’s editors are frantically culling the very important from the merely important. Even then the result is that we are probably over-informed. I’m afraid, too, that much of the news isn’t news, but opinions and sensationalism. That permitted to continue kills true journalism. Too often readers are treated as if they are dumb. In fact, they are merely ill-informed, or worse, misinformed.
In many ways, living is now many times more complex. I think back to an episode of the ‘Andy Griffin Show.’ At least one episode featured Andy and Barney sitting on his porch discussing whether they might go downtown and buy a bottle of pop. They never did leave the porch as I recall, or at least not to buy pop. Few of us even have a front porch today, and fewer use them for an after-dinner respite. I suspect if we did we’d still hold a smartphone while playing some game, or texting the friend sitting next to us. Our grandkids can teach us that subject while we struggle to understand at an elementary level. I try to avoid much of the social media because I believe there’s too much data-sharing. Not only do we lose our privacy, but are subject to information overload and the stress it can bring.
The point of all this is that I don’t know what grandpa knew and don’t know what my grandchildren know or will know. Neither generation will know much about the life of the other, but I do know what I know, so and I rest in that. All I need is some private space to relax, maybe share a laugh with someone, kickback, and shut my eyes to the busyness and stresses of the day. I don’t know if great granddad worrying about an Indian attack, or gathering crops, was as stressful as reading about the absurd, immoral, and scary things that are happing across this globe, but I guess I’ll have to leave that to another generation. They didn’t have to worry about Korea or Russia throughout their day, but it’s right in front of us. I’ll be amazed, for sure, of whatever happens, but meanwhile, I’d rather just ‘sign off’ and take a nap. I’ll happily let the next generation do the learning and the worrying. I’ve paid my dues. Sweet distractions are calling. mcoburncppo@aol.com
