Back to the Future

 

Children love to hear stories of when adults were children themselves. Often the stories are as difficult to believe as imagining that adults were ever children, even when presented with photos as proof.

A neighbor boy who used to watch my dad doing wood carvings in our front yard in summer once asked my dad what TV shows he watched as a kid. My father, who was born in 1921 and was raised in the ’20s and ’30s, replied that they didn’t have TV when he was a child.

Our neighbor, who wasn’t old enough for school at the time, couldn’t imagine what anyone would do without TV.

My father explained that when he was a boy, there were shows on radio like the ones on TV, only without pictures, so everyone could imagine what was going on from the sound. Imagination at that level – or perhaps at all – was probably beyond the boy’s understanding.

I had a similar experience with a student when I worked in schools. Said child couldn’t imagine a TV in black and white with only 3 stations. Worse, there was only one TV in the house. He wanted to know if the cable stations were in color, and was shocked to learn there was no such thing as cable at the time.

“What if everyone wanted to watch something different?”

“My parents had the final say on what the family watched. If you didn’t like it, you could go off and play with your toys. Or that might be your ideal time to do homework.”

Add to the fact that besides the shows being in black and white, the controls were all on the set itself, with no remote. In later years, those of us who were children at that time joked that we were the remote.

It got me thinking about how things have changed just since I was a child. Okay, it’s been a very long time since I was a child – last century, as the kids now like to say.

Many things we take for granted now didn’t exist then.

My parents, both born in the 1920s, were also born at home, not in a hospital. That was something my generation in America found peculiar. Married near the end of the war, they moved into a rural suburb of Philadelphia.

Our neighborhood was relatively newly built as year-round homes when they moved in. Our street ended at the end of our property, the only house on our side of the street. There were a scattering of summer homes on stilts that were only occupied part of the year.

There was a train station within walking distance along a not-pedestrian-friendly main road, which allowed my father access to his job in the city. In bad weather he drove our car to the train station.

The village was more built up by the time I, the third and youngest child, arrived. But there were still farms nearby. The people who lived behind us had a rooster and chickens as well as an outhouse, and there were water pumps scattered throughout the neighborhood for the summer homes.

When I was growing up, we had only one car, just like many of our neighbors. My mother didn’t drive. Thursday night after dinner, we all piled into the car to go to the grocery store to shop for the week. If my mother ran out of anything between shopping trips, she’d send one of us to the local corner grocer, considerably smaller than, and eventually put out of business by 7-11, Wawa and Cumberland Farms. In those days, a parent could send their child to the store for a pack of cigarettes, and no one thought a thing of it.

The milkman – and it was a man – delivered milk to the house, the dry cleaner came to the house to deliver dry cleaning and pick up the next week’s items, Charles Chips trucks stopped at their customers’ houses to sell tins of pretzels and potato chips – the only kind of chips anyone knew about at that time – and Freihoffers’ bread had a truck  that came around to sell the variety of types of bread they made. (I never heard of bagels as a small child, and didn't actually eat one until I was well into adulthood.)  There was also a traveling huckster who sold fruits and vegetables around the town. So, the many women without cars, many of whom didn’t have drivers’ licenses, having moved from the city, where trains, trolleys and buses were plentiful, didn’t have to worry about feeding their families or getting their husbands’ suits cleaned.

Amazon, along with several grocery store chains, now has a food delivery service.

But emergencies were something else.

In those days, 9-1-1 didn’t exist. Indeed, when I was a child, some people still had party lines instead of a private phone line while the telephone company built the post-war wiring and capability to give every home its own number.

But doctors made house calls. A mom without a car would have to rely on neighbors and friends with a car at the house to take them and their child to the hospital in case of serious injury. Most  people would only call an ambulance if someone were dying.

Our cuts and scrapes were treated with Merthiolate or Mercurichrome – as the names imply, containing mercury – and a bandage. We were then patted on the head and sent back outside to play. We were often told, if we came in injured, to stop crying, we weren’t dying.

Cuts and scrapes weren’t given more thought than to clean them up, stop any bleeding, and put a Band-Aid on it. This was especially true for adults.

One Saturday, my mother was playing badminton with my dad and my brothers – I wasn’t old enough to be included. It had rained the day before, so parts of the yard were muddy. She’d also been raking earlier, and the rake was still out, leaning against a tree. While playing, she slid on some mud and fell on the rake, gouging her leg.

She stopped to clean the mud off her leg, wash it and put antiseptic on the wound, followed by a bandage before she went back to the badminton game. A stupid accident, but nothing to make an issue of. No thought was given to getting a puncture wound from a muddy rake with heaven knew what mixed in. She had thoroughly washed the wound with soap and water, and it was bandaged, so she’d done what she was supposed to, as far as she knew.

In the days before synthetic drugs, the tetanus shot was made from horse blood. My mother was allergic to horses, so didn’t get tetanus shots. Now she had to get the shot before she died – early signs of lockjaw had begun – and to suffer the allergic reactions long enough for the shot to take effect before she could get any treatment for the allergic reaction. My mother was lucky to have survived.

Accidents that can now be avoided by the proper protective gear were common. Everyday things presented potential injuries beyond the lead paint on baby furniture.

One day I was telling a child I knew about how I broke my nose in the car at six. I was sitting in the back passenger side seat of a two-door car. My father had just dropped my brother off at Little League. My brother had been sitting in the front seat, but now it was empty. As my father approached the intersection, the light turned yellow. When he realized he wouldn’t make the light, he slammed on the brakes. I served as the crash test dummy, hurtling forward as the front seat back collapsed forward. And I landed nose first on the metal dashboard.

The wonderful 21^st century child I was telling about this wanted to know if I had my seatbelt fastened. I explained that in 1961, the only place seatbelts existed were in airplanes, unless it was an option for the very expensive luxury cars of the wealthy. Ours wasn’t even a new car. Nor were there locking seat backs in two-door cars. Or padded dashboards. I was lucky we were on a 35 mph road or I might have been thrown through the windshield. Alas, my pug nose turned into something I haven’t liked since.

Some of our toys wouldn’t pass muster now, either. I had a device called a Vac-u-form. It consisted of a rectangular metal base. The top was divided in half. On one side was a platform where plastic molds were placed; on the other side, was a heating plate. Above the heading plate was a flip arm where plastic squares were secured above the heating plate. The heat of this machine was similar to a burner on the stove. It would have cooked cakes much faster than the Easy Bake Oven that was popular at the time. But it wasn’t for baking. Instead a plastic square was heated above it for about three minutes, then flipped over onto the mold. At the same time a handle was pumped to create a vacuum, and suck the plastic into the shape of the mold. Then, after a few minutes’ wait, the plastic form could be removed and cut out. There were molds of boats, half ½” balls that were glued together to form a whole ball, and a variety of designs that could be made into decorative pins.

The directions to this item included a statement that an adult should supervise any child using this, but by the time I was 10, I was considered intelligent enough to use it unsupervised – although there was always an adult in calling distance. Other than a few melted plastics that weren’t mounted correctly and a couple of burns on fingers, nothing bad ever happened to me when using it. But it was taken off the market not long after it was introduced. I never knew anyone else who had one. Thinking about it now, this could probably be considered a ’60s forerunner of the 3-D printer.

Our unsafe world taught us that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Still, we of the generation of Rocky and Bullwinkle, the Flintstones and the Jetsons had plenty of room for imagination. Now, finally, the robot maids promised by the year 2000 might soon be in a mail-order store near you.