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. 

 

Into the Future

Some of us remember a time, perhaps in the 1960s when the 21^st century was looked upon as the ultimate utopia.

We were told we would have refrigerators with computers in the door where we could check off grocery items as they ran out (rather than having to do something as old-fashioned as write a list!), and when we had enough items on the list, send it to the local grocery and our groceries would be delivered to our doors.

We were assured we would have robot maids, like Rosie from The Jetsons.

We would have flying cars.

We would have wrist watches that would allow us to make phone calls, as Dick Tracy could do.

Doctors would wave salt shaker-looking gadgets over us to get a comprehensive diagnosis of our well-being, just like Bones did on Star Trek.

And perhaps we would be able to beam from place to place from a transporter room rather than using planes.

We would have the option of living on Mars or a space station, and perhaps vacation on the moon.

There would be so much gadgetry to make our lives easier, it was almost inconceivable.     

Ah yes. The future.

In reality, there were computers – PCs and laptops, something they never predicted – and cell phones.

Yes, the fridge did catch up to the computer age. There are apps on our cell phones that allow us to order our groceries – and even our fast food – and have them delivered. We can even order almost anything from Amazon and have it delivered within a day.

Thankfully – especially living in New Jersey, where the driving is horrible and turn signals are optional – there are no flying cars. Indeed, people’s drones are bad enough.

We do have wrist watch phones, but they still need to be synced with cell phones.

Medicine hasn’t quite caught up with Star Trek – nor has travel – but there are big machines to do those diagnostics, and I’m sure one day they’ll be the size of salt shakers.

We also haven’t got our robot maids, for which I’m dreadfully disappointed. The closest we’ve come is the Rumba.

Vacations are still earth-bound.

But our advances haven’t been without drawbacks.

Remember Y2K?

And while nearly everyone has a laptop or tablet, and every child seems to have a phone, they haven’t made life easier, and they certainly haven’t made us a more civilized society.

It hasn’t made us freer. People are enslaved by their phones. They can’t tear their eyes from them. Walk down any street, and you’ll find pedestrians with eyes glued to the screen.

Try having a conversation with someone who is physically standing next to you. Even loved ones usually lose in competition with an incoming text.

And while some talk, most don’t want to talk to others. They prefer texting.

People call one another hoping no one will answer. Leave a message at the tone. Better yet, text.

Children don’t go outside to play. Good heavens, it might be too hot or too cold. Heat index and wind chill determine whether or not there is outdoor recess in schools. And the poor dears might not have hats and gloves. When I was in school, it was considered the parent’s responsibility to make sure a child had those things, and the child’s responsibility to wear them.

Besides, children would rather stay inside and “play” on their computers or phones, where their playmates are in cyberspace, not in the same room.

Adults “friend” people online, while actual friendships often languish in preference to the electronic.

And the negative result of all of these “futuristic” advances is that we have lost contact with being human – or at least being civilized.

You can be anyone online. No one need know your true identity. While many people are the same online as off, the anonymity of the internet has given people license to be horrific excuses for human beings.

If someone disagrees with your opinion online, rather than having a conversation to further understanding, or at least explain why you feel as you do, there is more likely to be an attack of insults. Snowflake seems to be the insult of choice. If you’re conservative, the worst you can say of someone is that they’re a liberal snowflake.

It doesn’t matter whether the person is a liberal, conservative, moderate or being from mars. If they disagree with the other person’s opinion, they are the enemy.

We have become such a rude, bullying society since the advent of the internet that tolerance has gone out the window. This bullying rudeness has, with the blessing of a variety of politicians, bled over into actual interactions in the real world.

Yes, this is a sweeping generalization not true of everyone in the world. There are decent, civilized people in the world. But they’re being drowned out by those who are incapable of admitting – or even realizing – there are valid opinions on the other side.

There is a feeling of anger and rudeness about the world that I don’t remember growing up. We had fears of an enemy, but it wasn’t your next door neighbor. It was the leaders of another country: The Nazis, the Communists.

We didn’t walk around with a chip on our shoulders, waiting for the person standing next to us to say the wrong thing so we could start an argument.

And we certainly didn’t live in fear of going places because we might not come home alive.

Don’t believe me?

When was the last time you thought better of beeping your horn at someone who sat at a green light because they might turn around and shoot you?

When was the last time you decided to order online rather than going to the mall because of a recent spate of shootings at malls?

Have you stopped attending religious services because of shootings in churches, synagogues and mosques?

Perhaps that hasn’t come home to roost where you are. Or perhaps you’re one of the ones who concealed carries “just to be safe.”

I have more than once swerved on a highway rather than beeping at someone who’s crossed the dotted lines because I didn’t know if they might be an angry person with a gun.

Maybe my reactions have more to do with the fact that I work in schools.

One day there was a threat by a student in one of those schools. He planned to shoot up people in the school. While they assured us he wasn’t in school that day, and there was significant police presence in the school, I had my car keys with me at all times, and knew the closest door to the outside everywhere I went. If there was a lockdown and the opportunity presented itself, I was going to run, not cower in a fetal position in the back of a classroom.

Maybe it’s the little things like that that keep me angry just below the surface.

I’m impatient with other drivers because I’m trying to get home, get to my safe place, before anyone can hurt me.

It’s a hell of a way to live.

Maybe that’s why I’m so anxious to retire. Maybe that’s why I’d prefer to live in another country – one without guns.