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How has the world changed in your life?
A couple of days ago I saw something, I think on someone’s Facebook although it may just have been a comment on a blog post or a tweet, where the person was ruminating a bit on how things have changed in the world over their lifetime. This got me to thinking a bit (which of course is always a dangerous activity.) I am 60 years old and in my lifetime have seen mankind go out into space and land on the moon. We have gone from Jim Crow laws (I recall being told I could not use a specific water fountain in the county courthouse when I was a kid) to at least some levels of legal equality, if not actual equality for racial and ethnic minorities, women, and LGBT.
Technology has gone from early computers requiring massive power structures and heating and cooling systems to care for the vacuum tubes to today’s super computers that can be carried around.
I remember thinking many times about what my grandmother saw in her lifetime. She was born in 1886 and died in 1979 at age 92. In her life she saw the world go from horse and buggy days to landing on the moon. Technology went from early radios to color television. Telephones become a social tool available in all homes.
Beloit College has produced a “mindset” list each year since 1998, listing the world as it has been known for each class of incoming freshmen if you would like a little refresher on some of the ways the world has changed.
So what are the changes in the world that you have seen? Which are the most meaningful, for good or ill? Pull up a chair and let’s talk about the changes in the world.
And because I can:
119 Comments
Good morning dakine and thank you for a thoughtful post.
Thanks. It is one of the topics that rather intrigues me (and I always feel old when I read those lists each year from Beloit College)
I too recall segrecation. Watching Huntly and Brinkley reporting that a southern sheriff turned fire hoses on peaceful protesters. Bewildered as a child raised in California visiting Louisiana for the first time and seeing a “Whites Only” sign. I also recall the discussions in high school when 4 college students were shot dead by the National Gaurd.
I suppose a good case could be made that times have indeed changed. However, the brutal put down of Occupy, the continuing struggle for equality, war, racial tension, all of those things are still with us. Aren’t they?
Good morning and great topic. I am sometimes just floored by the changes in technology since I was a young child. My first introduction to computers was a teletype that accessed a mainframe somewhere. I was handed a slip of paper with a math problem to put into the “computer”, (that I solved while waiting in line), and it had what I call “mash-click” buttons and it went “clnka-clanka, chugga-chugga, ching!” and out came my answer. The computer I’m using right now is probably on the order of a thousand times more powerful than that mainframe and it has millions of times the memory space.
Even more so though, I’m often floored by the absurd theory that our technology must be reverse engineered from space aliens or something.
I don’t specifically recall Jim Crow laws because I was only five when those became a thing of the past in my state but there was on black child in my elementary school, a couple by intermediate and several by the time I got to high school. My uncle, on the other hand, was thrown out of the Army for refusing to work with and follow the orders of a black superior. Odd that he got to keep his benefits for being a bigot while I kept none by being trans.
good morning.
to be truthful, i’m not sure the “change” i’ve seen in my lifetime is all that changy. i’m an historian, and a lot of “progress” reminds me of various things that took place when christians were getting eaten by lions or a woman ruled egypt dressed in a funny double hat and beard.
there’s a series of bad sci fi books that are the sequels to some better books that i’ve read, and in them the characters basically travel in time. in the first series, written in the early 70s, the author postulates about a future universe where communism expands and ends up controlling the galaxy. he’s one of those libertardian sci fi writers. in the sequels, written in the 90s, his time traveling characters come back to early earth and discover that communism doesn’t exist anymore. the author has to do some funny dancing to “explain” why he got it so wrong in the first series.
i guess what i’m saying is “la plus ca change…” i think the most important development i’ve seen in my lifetime is the progress of gay rights. that is a sea change and will cause other things to happen, specifically in the political world. but i’m pretty sure the master class will just come up with another group to use as scapegoats with which they will distract voters and citizens and blame for all life’s problems.
computers are smaller. so there’s that. but i often joke with a friend that blogging is the new pamphleterring. Tom Jefferson and Ben Franklin wrote some screeds on paper and passed them around to a bunch of drunks in some taverns who later selected a different set of aristocrats to tax and rule them. today, we do the same with keyboards and DSL. meh.
Good morning everyone.
dakine01, thank you for the post.
My hometown in Kentucky handled integration quite nicely. In the mid-late ’50s, they decided to consolidate ALL the schools in the county into a single county wide high school, junior high, and three elementary schools (this from the city schools, “Banneker” (the black school) and at least six schools from the various cross roads communities around the county). It took a number of years to get all the new schools built (I was in the first 7th grade class entering the new junior high). IN reality there was probably more problems with the kids from Berry and Oddville getting along than there were with the kids from Banneker.
And yes, all the problems with Occupy and all the continuing struggles for equality are still with us and the violence is still there in putting things down. But we do have to stop occasionally and look back and reflect on just how far we have come in all ways.
Yeah, IIRC the earliest computers had memory of like 48K and took warehouse size rooms because of all the tubes.
But think of all the techno advances that were made using those simple computers!
Good morning!
My father was a “Data Processing Manager” in the very early ’60s. The computer, IBM of course, occupied a room larger than our house. Punch cards, a sorter, the main unit about the size of a Suburban stood on it’s side. The printer alone was the size of a VW bug. I am no expert but if I had to hazard a guess, it would be that my cell phone has way more computing horsepower than that thing had. And it fits neatly in my back pocket along with my keys.
integration is mostly a myth, imho. sure, it’s illegal for a public school to refuse to educate a poor child of a different skin tone, today, even in the south. so instead, rich people of the “right” skin tone send their children to private academies and religious schools. those children get into selective colleges and spend a lifetime failing upwards. poor children are denied money for college, and while they may not get sprayed with hoses anymore, they do get to work mcjobs and be tazed.
The big thing I always take from most ‘hard’ sci-fi, whether from a libertarian or any other perspective, is the inherent optimism that has us reaching the stars before we kill ourselves on Earth. And that does take optimism.
But I have enjoyed the writings of Heinlein, Asimov, Herbert, Dickinson and many others and all have offered a different universe or universes of the ‘what-if’ for us to envision.
Good morning dakine and fellow pups.
As an historian I remember thinking “What if the year 1969 was the height or effloresence of American culture and that it would all be downhill from here much as the Roman Empire declined and fell.
We are now an evil empire.
Good Morning to All!
This is my first post for a Saturday Morning chat here at the Lake, so, have a tad of empathy for this effort.
Change for me, starts with an Indigenous Perspective, given that my 50,000 history effectively demonstrates that the Great European Migration is now coming to a close. And how one lives and perpetuates Honor in both private and public behaviors, is still a concern to me. And because I am citizen where the ‘green’ dollar is all encompassing, I harken back to the Jimmy Carter Era and which meant that our national debt was in the financial area of $350 billion, and yet today, the national debt will easily surpass $17 trillion, and well on its way to $28 to $32 trillion, and if so, will make our America virtually “ungovernable.”
Now, that I’ve depressed everyone on this rainy-day morning here in Arizona, making some hotter-than-hot salsa, seems quite appropirate to get the taste buds properly focused on Life, and the After Life, can take care of itself until Tomorrow.
Jaango
It is not a total myth. Yes, in many parts of the deep south, indeed even in many parts of the north as well, those ‘white flight’ private schools sprang up but in other areas, integration did occur, peacefully and the towns and cities are better for it.
Things are not utopian, but they are improved. The miracle does not occur over night but is a long, hard fight.
A marathon, not a sprint.
My brother’s first full time job was as a “teleprocessor” which meant that he dragged cables through ceilings and walls in order to connect offices to a big mainframe. I wonder what they use all of those cables for nowadays? Probably just sitting in the walls, rotting.
People love to slam the military and for very good reasons but if there is one entity in this nation which is truly colorblind, it’s the military.
Great topic, D,
I have often thought of the changes my father, born in 02 saw. Paved roads for example. The most profound change in my lifetime has occurred in just the past few years, the loss of optimism, of progress. Many things now going backwards. Dunno when that has happened before.
The main change which has never happened before is the spoiling of the human garden, climate change. I am old so I can more easily accept it. But what do young people think?
Though the topic is changes we’ve seen, at Pull Up A Chair we avoid policy discussions and so forth.
My last 2 1/2 years in the USAF in the early ’80s, I was the liaison with the Data Processing folks and responsible for 3 dummy terminals connected to the mainframe as well as scheduling all the over night batch process updates and accounting reports.
Everything outside of the dummy terminals was card based.
And yes, I would wager your phone has far more computing power than those mainframes
Greetings jaango,
Thanks for posting such a thought provoking comment. ;)
Think of all that copper!
My experience in the military, ’73-’76 was of a colorblind orginization. Black, white, brown, purple, didn’t matter, we were all the same.
Good morning, friends. Lots of changes in my 70 years. Some of us were chatting the other day about how when we were kids we ran around the neighborhood in the evenings after dark, catching lightning bugs and playing hide and seek. Now kids that age aren’t out after dark alone. My grandkids aren’t outside unsupervised unless they’re in their own fenced back yard.
When I was in late elementary or early Jr. High (they didn’t call it “Middle School” then), my friends and I rode a city bus downtown many Saturdays, shopped in Woolworth’s, ate at the department store lunch counter, and rode the bus back home. When my daughter was in Middle School and bored, I suggested she round up a couple of friends and ride the bus downtown. This was in the early 80s and downtown was still pretty safe where we lived. NONE, as in not ONE, of her friends was allowed to ride the bus downtown to shop and eat lunch.
I am turning 70 this week and i really do not know how I made it this far.
First TV experience was watching the Eisenhower election in 1952 on a neighbor’s TV.
Going to a grade school standing in line with my Grandmother to get a cup with two sugar cubes of the Salk Polio Vaccine.
My Dad born in 1915, was one year old when he got Polio and walked with a severe limp the rest of his life.
Watching 4 assassinations on TV including Lee Harvey Oswald in real time.
Watching a Moon landing.
Watching Blacks get attacked by dogs and rolled with fire hoses.
I really should write some of these memories down for my children and grandchildren.
Thanks dakine01. Beloit College is only 15 miles from where I grew up.
Same with me. Not gender neutral by any means but very much colorblind.
yep
As Margaret said, this is Sat am “Pull up a chair” a break from politics. Please enjoy it with us.
Such a sad commentary! I remember those carefree summers when my curfew was midnight. I was so happy to lose the 10pm restriction…when I turned 12. But back then, if a neighbor saw a child doing something irresponsible or illegal, that neighbor was thanked for intervening, not sued for it.
My father was also born in ’15 (mother in ’20). Fortunately neither had polio.
But I do recall receiving the Salk vaccine as well. IIRC, it was given over a few week period although I forget how many weeks it was.
And it was given at the local public health offices. The same nurses there also went out into the county to give us our small pox vaccinations before we started 1st grade
truly colorblind, it’s the military.
this was not my experience in the Corps. when i got booted, it was for two reasons, and my DI was very clear about it. she was a dark skinned black woman, tougher than nails, and sensible. she was not sorry to boot me as she always thought i wasn’t quite tough enough, and that may have been the case. the DADT thing was the legal excuse, but as she explained to me, the real reason was, and i quote “the Corps doesn’t want black officers.” Quantico is a funny place and when it comes to FBI and officer training, it’s rather, how shall i say, pale.
things may be very well integrated in today’s army or navy, but there are some total racists, homophobes, sexists and religious nutjobs in the air farce and Corps. from what i can tell, it’s actually gotten worse in this respect, among the officer class.
My apologies for breaking the rules.
I happened to leave the Army just as computers were going mainstream with them. The tanks I was in were replaced within a year or two and are the main battle tanks used today. (constantly revised of course) Our tanks could not shoot the main gun on the move. Now the computer guidance system will keep the gun locked on target at 50 mph over very rough terrain. It amazes me. Funny thing though, the tank recovery vehicle I drove back then is still in use.
Yeah, that’s a big one. As a kid I had no thought of my safety, rode my bike anywhere anytime in Minneapolis in the 1940′s. Sure kids, boys only I think, fought but if one ended up on the ground the fight was over.
Of course there are racists everywhere. I was attending navy AMS A school when a black first class petty officer would say things like “I had a wonderful dream last night. I dreamed I sent all you white boys to mast”. And the same goes for white, brown and Asian service members but individual racists aside, my experience was that the enlisted ranks were more colorblind in the eighties than it is in society as a whole today.
My kids were swimmers, and when my son was in H.S. I helped compile a list of the top 10 times in each event every week for the local newspaper.
The coaches would CALL me (as in telephone!) with updated times, I would compile the top 10 on my trusty Apple IIe, and drive them downtown to the newspaper offices every week. This was in the late ’70s and early ’80s and I’m sure if the newspaper still publishes best times, the coaches send them electronically.
I think in many areas, the officer corps has gotten worse over the years but there is also push back occurring. When I was in the USAF (10 Dec ’76 – 9 Sept ’82), things were not as formalized and I had a number of friends, co-workers, acquaintances who were lgbt. Most got along fine unless they ran into a supervisor/commander who was looking for an excuse to run them out
Happy Birthday AC2. Come over to Decorah, we’ll go see the eagles, go to Seedsavers, and have lunch.
Margaret@19
Since we’re Brothers and Sisters of Shared Experiences, I will adhere and bow to your Wisdom. Otherwise, I would remain “maladjusted.” (MLK,Jr.)
When I was a youngster in Sidney, Nebraska (I’m of the Cesar Chavez Era.), I was the designated “Indian” and thusly, when it came to playing cowboys and indians, I died a Thousand Times. And now, that I am grey of beard and long-of-tooth, Changes continue to remain dazzling, especially, when the technology that permits us to communicate with each other, and which circumvents the traditional media outlets, means that “personfying” relationships in the Great Ether, means that our America will move forward, in small and important steps.
Jaango
I turned 12 in 1972 and even then in my neighborhood, ALL adults were pretty much allowed to intervene if we were ding something we shouldn’t be doing. And none of them really went overboard with the intervention. Usually it was a scolding and a phone call to your parents. Of course we knew who would be inclined to get physical and so avoided them.
It’s not my “wisdom” Jaango, if indeed I have any of that. That’s just the way PUAC has been since it was being written and administered by The Redhead.
The Air Force has gotten down right scary. Religous nuts and homophobes running the show for sure. Didn’t know the Marines were that way though. Very disheartening.
I have noticed that the burgeoning technology that purports to connect us has not served to strengthen our common bonds, but has led to a splintering of the our culture.
In every aspect of life the general has given way to the specific.
The brave new world of archipelago living is upon us.
i really don’t get the whole “don’t let your kids out” thing today. my sister and i were kicked out of the house on a regular basis. sis and i were joking about the fact that we almost burned a forest down one time playing with the neighbor girl and some stolen gasoline. afaik mom still doesn’t know about that little episode…
but still, it’s not like there were fewer rapists, pedophiles and kidnappers back in the day. this whole “helicopter parenting” comes from somewhere, but i just don’t know where. and it’s stupid, and creating a whole generation of young adults who are afraid to do anything by themselves.
When I was in Hawai’i, the barracks were set up so that every 2 rooms shared a shower/toilet. I had a black roommate from Chicago and the other room had a white guy from Orange, TX and a black guy from Maryland. We put the two rooms together so there was one bedroom and one living room. James and Thomas used to bust on me for going out and getting a tan at the beach because I was “trying to pass”
dakine,
Father in ’15, mother in ’21, very close timeline to yours.
That list that I just wrote up could go on and on thanks to your prodding my memory this morning.
I found a book at a resale shop called “To Our Children’s Children,
Preserving Family Histories for Generations to Come” by Bob Greene.
Inside the front cover is a message to a father “Dad, please write us your memories so they don’t get lost.”
That book has been sitting here on my desk for awhile. I think I will get started before it is too late so I really owe you one this morning dakine01. Thank you.
On the way to dinner the other night I was struck by what we take for granted. I live a few miles outside town and there is no place to eat within walking distance, but a 10 minute drive converts my dining choices from zero to limitless. $3 for a gallon of gas is a tiny price to pay to open up the world.
One of my earliest memories–I guess I was four or five in a small coastal town in South Carolina –is of the African-American cooks from the county school walking down my sand street on their way to the African-American neighborhood on the other side of the highway, the laundry they were taking in to do for extra income in bundles balanced on their heads. The county I lived in was a black majority county, but because of segregation I was never conscious of it. All of my friends had some piece or another of army gear that their dad had brought home from World War II. I can remember my friends and me talking about our favorite cowboy stars and saying the words “hospital” and “A-bumb” in the same hushed tones that some of our parents did.
I remember our first telephone with a dial. Before that an operator routed our calls. And our first phone line that was a private line and not a party line. When I was four, my parents bought an AM/FM radio and phonograph (45 rpm); when I was eight, a television; when I was fifteen, a stereo and 33 1/3 rpm changer. I was 42 when I bought my first personal computer (an Osborne portable). When I retired, my kids gave me an iPod.
When I was little there were cars that still had the blue “blackout” bulbs in their tail lights from World War II blackouts. All of the road were two-lane and only the main roads were paved. Most Southern towns had tree-shaded streets except in the downtown. By 1960, there were a few sections of interstate highway completed.
All politicians where I lived were Democrats; the primary election was the hard-fought election except for President. Eisenhower was the first Republican that most folks voted for. In junior high school in 1960 one student had the temerity to be campaigning for Nixon and Lodge. In 1963, when the high school principal in my high school announced “the President is dead”. you could hear cheers. In between those dates, Jackie Robinson had desegregated the restaurant at the county airport and the public library had quietly desegregated. The county school superintedent beginning in the late 1950s had been promoting staff and locating schools to make desegregation easier (a rare situation then). In 1963, Harvey Gantt, later mayor of Charlotte, desegregated Clemson University; he was housed in the dormitory hall with the foreign exchange students (from Iraq, Iran, India, Pakistan).
Of the houses I lived in growing up, one was destroyed by a hurricane, one was moved or demolished to provide more parking lot for an ice plant, and one was moved so the Baptist church across the street could expand its parking.
When I was a kid, my doctor had his office in an old house on a small town street. Physical exams were free. When I was in high school, doctors began having appointments and a visit was $5 (a haircut was $2).
I almost wept when I saw her comment on the Scarecrow thread. I still miss her.
Yeah, the Air Force has been creeping me out for a long time.
JC, I was going to do that last spring and it got away from me.
This year is a definite and I am looking forward to it.
Eagles, Seedsavers, lunch and even a conversation about our coaching experiences.
I had to laugh the other day when you mentioned the halftime pep talks. Been there, done that.
We had a similar arrangement at Miramar. Except it was three to a room. We even had the corner of the “living room” set up as a kitchenette. I provided the refrigerator and another brought in an electric stovetop. Of course we had to hide the burners during inspections.
I teared up myself. She is one of a kind.
My birthday was last Saturday, and I got “Happy Birthday, Grandma!” text messages from my grandkids. Sent to my iPhone!
I kept trying to picture my mother in that scenario. She died before there were even cordless phones, let alone cell phones or smart phones!
Actually, it was last Sunday, but who’s counting? HA!
I remember my mom trying to puzzle out the computer she bought. She was very good at typing but some of the nuances of windows eluded her, especially as she was using the ME platform! I upgraded her to XP but she died shortly after.
She has a blog, and I’m sure she’d love it if you’d comment. She posts a few times a week, home and family and “the Peanut” subjects.
Home Celebration: A Blog Of Comfort and Joy
I think I was 5 when we got our first TV. I remember Dad and my brother carrying it across the lawn. We got 3 stations out of Cincinnati
I don’t recall our number on the party line for the first phone but remember calling the operator who would respond “Number, please…”
My small home town in Kentucky seems to have had many similarities with yours.
And the Dem primary was always where the elction was decided.
my dad told me this story: so during WWII, his uncle was an “air raid lookout” in detroit. because, everyone knew the germans would eventually come to detroit and bomb it, because that’s where military stuff was being made (instead of cars, which were on hold For the Duration). my father’s side of the Fambly is Finnish, from Finland only one generation at this point. detroit wasn’t officially “segregated” but my mother’s african american family and most of the rest of detroit’s blacks lived in the “blackbottom,” a distinct neighborhood that the police made very sure did not grow or integrate with dope smoking liberal white people or anything like that.
anyway, dad was just a little boy at this time, and he didn’t understand things. so he asked his uncle about his part in the war. his uncle explained, but pulled dad aside where no one could hear him and said, “i like this country. but Hitler has the right idea.” and told dad not to tell anyone he said that.
this same uncle, years later when detroit was burning to the ground and my interracially coupled parents had no choice but to flee, turned them out when they came to his suburban home for shelter. nice guy, him.
dakine, Thank you for this trip down memory lane this morning.
What a great conversation. BBL.
One more reminiscence before I head off to the Farmer’s Market. When I was small, we lived in an apartment and the lady upstairs worked for a dentist. I assume she was a hygienist — it would have been uncommon in the ’40s for her to have been a dentist, but I don’t know for sure.
My mother used to take me upstairs to her apartment to have my teeth painted with fluoride. I can still remember the taste.
Sounds like my uncle. The one who was thrown out of the Army and later gave me a baseball bat and told me to whack myself in the head every time I had one of “those” (trans) “Thoughts”. Asshole.
What a great thread! I’m out now, so have a good weekend everyone!
Morning all Thanks for the reminising.
I can remember going to an aunts house who was the first to get a tv with a little round screen. This was after my Dad got a car in the early 50′s and could travel there easier. remember choking on all of the fumes spewing out of all the vehicles on the NYC hiways.
so we have been a computing fambly for ages, all the way back to the 70s. dad built computers out of parts he’d order from catalogues. he really wanted me to go into programming, and to my regret i did not; i’d be really rich today if i had. we had a mac, the very first one, and a Lisa and lots of other mac products over the years. i’m using dad’s last one right now.
mom and dad separated for 12 years. mom, being the woman that she is, needed a computer and decided to get one for herself. just to show that she didn’t need to listen to anything that asshole husband of hers said, she bought an IBM. this was before a lot of fancy stuff we have in computers today. it was small and made you work really hard in order to do the most basic of functions, programming stuff, etc.
later, after they got back together, dad bought her a new mac.
she was all like, “of course macs are superior! i knew that!” and pretended like the IBM never existed.
My suspicion is that it comes from several factors: all the milk carton photos, the latchkey children of dual income household (a current necessity), news coverage of crime that has gone from local to national sensationalism, and a post-Cold War anxiety that needs some object.
Also remember class where there would be a giant slide rule hanging from hooks above the BLACK board. Then came calculaters.
Morning dakine01,
Thanks for the PUAC post. 1971 age 18, I moved out on my own after a year in college largely spent doing everything available other than pursuing a degree. The school was in its second or third year of punch card computing, the group I hung with were artists, musicians, educational reformers looking to upset then current and now imho, more repressive and less valuable grading and student evaluation systems, and also anti-war activists, educating on the issues and who were quietly part of helping conscientious objectors through a number of processes.
My own awareness of the political/capitalistic system as it was then and mostly is now, had already been solidly formed over recognizing religious oppression/hypocrisy in my mid-teens, along with a firm theoretical/practical gender and racial bias understanding that in many ways sees conditions that have not changed all that much. Blatant disregard for the rule of law and the influence of money seem to be more prevalent, maybe just because of the information access through today’s alternative venues.
A lot of great comments here.
I was a latch-key kid at age 9. Mom had gone back to school and finished her degree and became a teacher. She and my brother were a the county school next to the home county. My sister was in HS in our home county and rode the bus and I walked to the local school in the small community of about 300 so I was home about an hour or more before anyone else.
Thanks for the post n host. Please give Dan’l scritches. See y’all later.
Good Morning Dakine and PUAC Dogs,
apparently, I’ll be playing the contrarian ass this morning. . .
with the India gang rape story, have been wondering how much have things changed ??? in the 30+ years since I worked Rape Crisis, in the good ol U.S.of A, it’s still only 1 in 10 assault victims ever filing charges, less than a 10% conviction rate, and defense attys are still allowed to slutify the victim in court blah blah blah
Roe v Wade is 40 years old and the mouth breathers are still raising wheelbarrows of cash blathering about ‘life’(and a purported democrat POTUS intervenes at the FDA to deny 16 year old women morning after pills
american women are still making less than .70 for every dollar men earn
on a good day, I simply think we are living one of those ‘contractions’ the historians tell us happens with progress
but then again, I feel like Jane Jetson every time I start the microwave . . .
Thanks for a great postnhost dakine. I’m out also.
Have a wonderful weekend all.
I remember listening to the Lone Ranger, Tarzan, and The Shadow on a radio the size of a small refrigerator. Our first tv was the size of that radio, with a screen about the size of today’s iPad. In our school we rec’d copies of My Weekly Reader, which always devoted a section to showing us our future of jet packs and flying cars. And spending summers barefoot and most of my days outside the house and mothers that didn’t have anxiety attacks when they discovered their little ones eating dirt.
Thanks dakine for allowing us to wander down memory lane!
Were you a free-range kid when you got home? Was the whole neighborhood latchkey children?
We were free range kids because no matter where we went in the neighborhood someone knew us and knew who our parents were and would not hesitate to call them right then if we were getting into trouble. And we knew that.
Phoenix Woman upstairs with Come Saturday Morning.
In Berry, I think I was the only latch key but everyone did watch out for m. When we moved into town the next year, I had the whole town as my playground but again, all the parents all over watched out for us – and yes, called the folks if we did wrong
You just described my old home town to a tee, nobody locked their doors and school buddies ran together during that time between school ending and a family dinner. First stop was for a sweet treat of some sort at the corner drug store, nickle for a candy bar, hang out at the feed mills or lumber yards or the town park and beach. Seasonal pick up ball games in the school playground, baseball, basketball, etc.
Well spoken, thanks.
Good belated morning. When I was born, FDR was president, my Dad was a CCC worker and WWII was still 4 years away, almost exactly. Vacuum tubes were so big no computer of any worth was possible.
Some things of enduring value haven’t changed much. This place and I are exactly the same age and on it’s (and mine) 40th birthday/anniversary, I was it’s major photographer.
One of the key instruments in developing the computer was a real monster and could heat a room easily. It was one of many of Tek’s instruments in which I had a hand.
As a child, we went everywhere on street cars, sometimes by auto, but mostly street cars, especially during WWII.
I’ll leave you with a pictorial history of Tektronix.
Ditto here, except my parents got anxiety attacks every day when the steel fab plant quit for the day and blacks walked through our neighborhood on their way home.
We weren’t latchkey. We did eat kolatchkey!
I was born in 1951 and the world of the 1950s and 1960s will always be my home era–since then it’s been like living in a foreign land. There was enormous change in the 1950s and 1960s, the civil rights revolution, space travel, development of computers and computer science, rock and soul music, and more generally, the entire contemporary view of life and society (so different from that of our parents and grandparents in the early twentieth century).
Since the early 1970s, there has been much less real development. What development there has been has been in an ominously negative direction as concerns global warming and the environmental degradation of our planet. I would venture to speculate that we have begun an era of decline which, if it is not reversed, will be analogous to the Late Roman Empire, when the entire foundations of ancient civilization came crashing down in Western Europe.
Two events, in retrospect, form the watershed between the two eras. First, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis when the world came very close to destruction due to the recklessness of our leaders, and the trauma has not yet dissipated. Second, the Vietnam War, a horrendous betrayal of the youth at that time.
This is a collection of echos easily subject to the accusation of tryin to top told stories. Which accusation propabley has merit.
I was 8 when we lived in in Galveston. My Mom would give me $0.25 on Saturday morning to cover the bus ride downtown, admission to the movie, a snack, and the bus ride home. I’d ride the bus to town, go the matinee (Cartoons, a Sam Katzman short and Roy Rogers of Gene Autry), but I’d get popcorn AND a coke so I was broke and I’d have to walk home. 35 blocks. Sometimes in the winter it was nearly dark when I got home. Nobody seemed to think much of it, one way or the other. If anybody even asked where I’d been I don’t remember it.
A German waitress came to my table in a Bad Toelz, Germany gasthaus and whispered “The President’s been shot!” It was dark already (time zones). The whole group was in BDU’s standing in formation with field gear and weapons when the first officer arrived. We didn’t know who we were gonna shoot, but we assumed somebody was gonna have to die for shooting JFK, and we would have been delighted to get the nod.
I remember when we got our first black & white tv when I was about 4 years old. If memory serves, I believe no shows came on until about 4 pm or so, when we used to watch Mickey Mouse Club. Remember Annette Funicello?
We lived in the north but had relatives in AL. My grandparents & parents were wonderfully non-racist and hated Jim Crow. My grandfather always wanted the AA maids and gardeners to ride up front with him when he drove them home from our AL relative’s house. They wouldn’t do it because they politely told my grandfather that they’d get in huge trouble and probably lose their job and possibly get beat up for doing that. Sad.
Even though we lived in the north, none of my K-12 schools had ANY minorities in them. We were comfortably middle class, and my parents always chose to live where the best schools were, so: no minorities, sadly. People were definitely racist in those areas.
I used to be a big basketball fan, and there was this AA player from the AA school, who was really good. Several years later, I worked at bank in my “hometown,” and he walked in one day as our new security guard. He was totally astonished that this white person in that part of town actually knew who he was! We became friends of a sort, but I always had my white friends bitching at me about being friendly with him (this was in the early ’70s). I ran into him once at popular hang-out bar near the local university. I was there with white friends, who got “upset” when I spent so much time talking to this person. It made me sick.
At the college I attended – which had a very very progressive admissions person during the years I went there – they gave a bunch of scholarships to kids from Harlem. I went to a small private liberal arts school in eastern PA. Most of the kids there, like me, were lower to middle class white kids who were over-achievers; kids of depression era parents, who were basically told “you WILL get a college degree.”
Many of us had not interacted much with AAs, and the kids from Harlem hadn’t had much interaction with whites. I have to say (and many of my friends from college would agree) that I think becoming friends with one another was a HUGE thing and a one of the more “educational” aspects of my time in college. Those students from Harlem went through a lot of “stuff” while we did our studies. There was one year where most of them became black separatists, and they pretty much refused to interact much with the rest of the white student population.
There were a couple of these Harlem kids, though, who “crossed” the boundary between white and black. The next year, the rest of the Harlem students relaxed, and we all got to be friends again and hang out together. We still discuss our experiences when we get together for reunions. Some of the Harlem students had a very tough time when they graduated trying to figure out how to fit in outside of the college environment. Most, like the rest of my pals, have had pretty successful lives.
Women’s rights got much better in the ’70s, ’80s and early ’90s, but it seems to me that these are starting slip-slide away. I feel that younger women take too much for granted, and it pains me to hear some of them diss feminism as either stupid, not needed or a bunch of ugly angry women who cannot “get a man.” Sigh.
The woods were once full of people, even at night. Now, nobody much gets off the pavement, certainly after dark. I never was and didn’t know anybody who was afraid of the dark or even the dark woods. We knew not to run around barefooted in the woods at night, good way to get snake bit, but otherwise it was just something to do. Or you could stay in and listen to the radio with grandma and grandpa; woof.
Once in Central Texas my big brother and I spent a whole day hunting rabbits. We climbed over maybe fifty fences. Once we saw a farmer plowing (or something) on his tractor. We were crossing his plowed field to get to the next patch of woods on the other side. We waved, he waved back and went on plowing. We climbed over his fence and went into the woods. I hope I don’t need to help you imagine how that would have gone last Saturday.
On the other hand: Everybody in seventh or eighth grade (that was sometimes referred to as “junior high” but there was no such edifice – eighth was “grammar school” and ninth was “high school”) was clued in on which (men) teachers to watch out for if you didn’t want to get groped. We never told anybody in authority. I guess we told our younger sibs, but I don’t remember ever telling anybody else. You watched out for scout masters and priests too. Just came with the territory.
I grew up with few restrictions on my comings & goings, esp in summers when my friends and I played outside ’till all hours. I used to walk to the municiple swimming pool that was about a mile away on my own and swim there by myself beginning when I was about 7 years old. Such freedom!
I can remember doing Halloween on my own with just other kids once we got to be about 7, and we used to roam quite far from houses in the dark in our costumes.
I do not have kids, but I often wonder at the helicopter parenting thing going now, too. My friends with younger children would never DREAM of letting their kids just play on their own, even within the boundaries of our neighborhood. Most parents in my area insist on driving their kids to/from school, even though it’s only a few blocks away. The schools in my neighborhood have tried to encourage parents to let their kids walk, but: no.
I used to walk to school by myself – again starting around 7 – about mile and half from where we lived. Had to cross a couple of busy streets, too, but there were crossing guards. Did it all school year in all kinds of weather.
I think it’s too bad how kids don’t have that freedom anymore. And I don’t think there are that many more pedophiles, etc. It’s just that the news has become soooo sensationalized and dramatic. Makes it seem like it’s happening constantly.
I will say that one of our neighbor’s kids was kidnapped and never found. VERY sad, but it happened in the morning when he was waiting for the school bus to pick him up. A horrible tragedy, but … well, I don’t know. I’m glad that my parents didn’t use that as an excuse to “lock” me in our backyard.
I remember being in 7th grade Latin class when the principal announed over the PA system that Pres Kennedy had just been shot. School was excused early. I was amazed when I got home to find my mother weeping copiously – because she was an adamant Republican who didn’t like Kennedy. But back in those days, there was then the feeling that the President is the President, and *everyone* should be respectful of whomeever was in office (so there’s that difference to today).
Then my Dad and I watched Lee Harvey Oswald get shot “live” on tv. That is such a *seminal* moment in my life, even more so than the announcement about Kennedy being shot. I just remember thinking: WTF?? And then feeling that… well, let’s just say I never trusted the USG again. The jig was up for me, and that started me down a long and winding road of continuously questioning what’s going on.
And then of course, there is the searing memory of John-John saluting JKF’s casket as it went by in Wash DC. Will never forget that.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
The Beatles on Ed Sullivan! (I wanna hold your hand!)
The Rolling Stones on Ed Sullivan!
Laugh-In
The Smothers Brothers (with Buffalo Springfield: “Something’s happening here…”)
LBJ announcing that he wouldn’t run again for POTUS (I was babysitting for our neighbors when I watched that on TV)
Star Trek (c’mon, Gene Rodenberry was so far thinking. The issues raised esp in the first series was amazing for its time. Remember that MLK pretty much directed Nuchine Nobari to stay on the show to be a role model for AA women. I do confess, though, to being a huge Trekkie, and I eagerly await the next movie coming out in May – woot! – how long-running is that?!!).
The moon landing (I almost lost a summer job bc I left to watch it) July 1969.
Woodstock!! August 1969. (Jimi Hendrix’s great rendition of the Nat’l Anthem)
Altamont… :-( (what were the Stones thinking? Hells Angels???)
John Lennon killed (someone called me at work to tell me) – and thinking: never again can we ever have the Beatles play together. sob
“…it pains me to hear some of them diss feminism as either stupid, not needed or a bunch of ugly angry women…”
I’ve had a sneaking hunch about that for a while. My Momma was the original women’s libber way before that term was coined. Of course, she didn’t think Jesse James was an outlaw, “He only robbed trains and banks, and that’s not a crime.” And my wife was actually dangerous when it came to the subject of women’s rights. She was a school teacher, and pity the poor idiot male faculty member who asked her to make coffee for the teacher’s lounge. She’d still be spewing, sputtering and shaking when she got home. My granddaughters don’t seem to have a problem like that. They apparently just assume that boys are mildly retarded and need to be carefully managed to prevent them running into things.
But this phenom. is pathetically on display among younger workers when the subject turns to unions. They not only have never thought of the fact that the reason they make a living wage is because of unions; they actually seem to reject the notion. Until their own factory shuts down, that is. Then they are just flabbergasted.
this is totally the geezer thread, innit? /naughty
i’m a little younger than yall. the shooting i remember most was raygun’s. they turned on all the TVs in my school and made us watch the coverage for the rest of the day. i did not understand it at all. i actually sort of liked him at that time (sue me, i was 10). but it was my introduction into the notion that there were Really Bad People out there who shoot others.
heh, now that i think about it, that was the year dad was driving the SuperModern GM diesel luxury car. it was the ugliest box of bad, detroit is in decline car you’ve ever seen. and it smelled, and was noisy, and you had to let it warm up for a long time in the winter before driving it.
we’re MI union folk from way back. it’s very sad to think about how much it’s all changed, including the recent passage of the law there that defanged the union’s political power. (i know, no politics at PUAC) but it’s hard to contemplate how people screw themselves by voting for politicians who want to hurt them and rob them.
dad and grandma have some totally awesome stories from their union days, about working class unity, standing up to power, exciting brawls with police, and most importantly: victories… i’m just not sure how we get back to that, today.
Yes. The whole issue with Unions is very sad, I agree.
I cannot tell you how often I hear: well, the Unions did *some* good at one time, but we don’t need them anymore.
Breath-taking.
Vis LGBT issues.
Again in my college days, a good friend was/is gay. I didn’t “get” it at first – mainly due to naivete. Well, back in the day, the whole LGBT thing was in the closet, and probably, too, a lot of kids may simply not have known or been in denial or what have you.
Anyway, eventually I – and a lot of female pals – figured out that my friend was gay but pretty much didn’t discuss it. He kept a lid on it, so to speak, but did have an ongoing “affair” with one of the aforementioned Harlem kids (who was pretty “queenly”). Most of our male pals had no clue about their friend’s orientation.
Later he came out. None of the women cared; at first, though, some of the guys were less comfortable. These days? No one gives a crap and are very supportive. I see that as real progress, and some of my college friends are pretty conservative politically.
My friend is possibly right this second getting married in MD, which just passed the law for gays to get married, to his partner of over 35 years! Now THAT’s progress!
I don’t think that there were as many bad people preying on children when I was younger. Yes, I’m one of those “greedy geezers” that gets alan simpleton so enraged. I remember the first time there was a real problem that impacted my conciousness. A boy named Bobby Greenlease was kidnapped. That made headlines because it was so out of the norm.
As far as the military is concerned, I found the army to be up and down on racism. Sex “problems” didn’t even seem to be on anybody’s radar.
Along with all of the other changes that have been cited here, the one that is striking to me is two parts of the same thing. One is the conversion of our country to fascism in a most outright way. The second is the adoption of torture as an accepted procedure. These two things coalese into the uniparty with an authoritarian pres and the total militarization of the police, esp. in the big cities.
IMO, I think this nation has always been pretty fascistic. It’s just that it was more under cover & smoothed over with polite rhetoric. Of course, there was the period, post WWII, where taxes were higher on the 1%, and the middle & working classes got a better deal than today.
But we’ve always been a rapacious & plundering nation, enacting coup’s against various nations (mostly third world) in order to plunder their resources. Most US citizens were just blissfully unaware of it and/or they agreed to turn their heads and look the other way and pretend to themselves that what was going on was “ok.”
What’s happening now is that the 1% is, once again (not the first time in our history), plundering & pillaging Team USA in a more outright and forthright fashion.
Torture has ALWAYS been a part of the agenda in Team USA, whether used against foreign nationals for the “good” of the USA, or used internally against those deemed a “problem.” The main difference now is that it’s pretty much out in the open & discussed, and we get torture-porn propoganda bullshit “movies,” like Zero Dark Thirty. THe PTB will *make sure* that movie gets tons of Oscars, including possibly Best Director for
Leni ReifenstahlKatherine Bigelow. And the sheeple shrug their shoulders, turn their heads and look the other way, and shout USA, Fuck Yeah!I do agree that the police state is a newer development, although in “olden days” the Pinkertons were often used to similar effect.
Do not disagree with you entirely, but just saying…
Actually you’re not disagreeing with me at all. I just said that the change was that these things were now out in the open. You just amplified that.
Sometime in the late 40′s or early 50′s one of our neighbors in veteran’s housing got this tiny TV, with a screen that was maybe a foot wide by a foot high. They invited the whole block over every evening in the summers. We all brought our chairs and watched. There was a big magnifying glass over the screen. It didn’t really interest me that much. I was a very active kid.
When we moved to the suburbs in 1951, we got our own TV and a Hi-Fi that sat on top of the TV, which meant I couldn’t listen to music while my Dad was watching TV. After much lobbying, the Hi-Fi was moved to my room. My Dad had strict instructions to call me whenever Lee Marvin or Charles Bronson came on the TV for one of their bad guy bit parts. I would race from my bedroom to the living room.
The doors were never locked. Our family of 4 lived in a 1200 square foot home with one bathroom. There were fireflies in the backyard which greatly interested me and my brother. I was constantly in the woods nearby, climbing trees and exploring the creek. We had a party line to start with and eventually got a private phone. My Dad could never understand how I could talk to my friends for an hour or more on the phone when I just seen them.
There were no computers or mobile anything. Except my roller skates and bicycle.
My first job after college in 1965 was at Chase Manhattan Bank computer programming with the mammoth computers that had to be kept in the basement because of their weight. We were computerizing their systems.
I always knew that if a person got too far left, democracy no longer applied, but that’s all more blatant and more pervasive now. And now we are technologically “endowed” enough to have much more blatant, pervasive and dangerous surveillance. It makes civil liberties and habeas corpus much more fragile. I think that’s one of the most important changes in my lifetime.
I think TV is to blame for much more than we can ever definitively proove.
I remember the first time it dawned on me that if some Indian shop keeper in “Bombay” (that’s what we called it back then) knifed his wife on videotape, we’d have to watch it on the six o’clock news while there was probably six or ten such incidents in LA that very day which wouldn’t even get an eyebrow. I didn’t hear the phrase, “If it bleeds, it leads.” for years, but it was true then. The DOD and the Administration got the message long ago. No non-inbeds in theater, no coverage of American casualties in action, no news coverage of returning coffins or casualties, and no M$M discussion of Iraqi consequences beyond suicide bombers.
Don’t watch Al Jazeera if you don’t want a sharp rap on the skull about the “Global War on Terror.”
I think TV is mostly to blame for the political polarization we see. I guess we’d have to give talk radio a nod here tho.
I see that while I was typing BearCountry and onitgoes made similar points.
Yes. I don’t like “geezer”, and if you feel like calling me “Pop” you should first take two steps back, but you’ve got the idea.
For instance, if you can believe this: I can remember when phrases like, “You’re either with us or you’re against us,” and “The ends justify the means,” were considered beneath the dignity of any educated person. I don’t know how long they’d been around, but when they came out of V. I. Lenin’s mouth they were relagated to the trashheap of history once and for all.
You can imagine how I felt when I heard Dubya saying that, and then smirking as if he’d just thought it up. It’s been a couple very depressing decades for us old guys.
Most of my neighbors call me Uncle Ragg.
the thing is, and i know this from dad (intel experience) and my own military and
fascistUniversity of Chicago training, there’s probably some bean counting paranoid behind a lot of all this. or maybe, several. and it’s not KKKarl Rove. someone smarter.what is happening now is Global. we can thank, and curse, technology for this. but as i was arguing to my somewhat conservative sister about this yesterday, it’s 6,000 or so.
not ‘years old.’ but rather, the number of people we need to drop to the bottom of the ocean, in a nice, clean liberally appointed prison with fresh fish daily because i don’t advocate for the death penalty and prison rape.
that’s really all it would take, and the interwebs are helpful because you can find out instantly who they are. hint: they have so much money they couldn’t not trip over it even if it were not stacked so high like they were like Johnny Depp’s house in that drug dealer movie.
all that needs to happen is 6,000 or so people go to jail, and the rest of us realign the pixels so that we all have enough money to live and thrive. revolution has never been simpler.
Well, epu’d again. Actually, what I would say would pretty much track what others have said.
That topic of the change in kids’ freedom seems to come up a lot among people of my generation. Not sure how it happened that each succeeding generation seems to have clamped down tighter on their kids.
A random thought; the fear of kidnapping and murder of kids if you took your eyes off them…was that just the first stage of the fear that we all seem to live with now? Then the politicians started (or increased?) their use of “be afraid” of everything in order to win power, and now, well, we (loosely using that “we”) are afraid of everything.
My mother was thought to be overprotective, and I was bookish. In summer, I spent part of most days reading with another bookish friend. But even we then went out and played with the other kids in the neighborhood, coming home for lunch and dinner, and of course, going out after dinner “until the street lights came on.”
This was in a city, not a small town, so the nearest public pool was too far to walk to, but there was a small park with a baseball diamond, swings and slides, and plenty of space to run around, on the cul-de-sac behind my street.
In memory, that ’50′s childhood was positively idyllic.
I see you’ve thought this out.
the only problem i have with the “50s were idyllic” meme is that it was not true, if you were black, gay, atheist, and liberal. like me.
my parents have some very interesting stories about that time. they vary, widely. white blue eyed dad has some Good Times. dark skinned, nappy haired mom? no so much.
the 50s rocked; if you were a rock and roll star or a white person or a rich person and you didn’t live in the south. everybody else, including hispanics, blacks, not-Christians, the poors, homosexuals… well. the comfort and joy white “normal” people felt in those years came at the expense of the rest of us. who did exist, even back then.
Tejana! Sorry you feel epu’d.
“…each succeeding generation seems to have clamped down tighter on their kids. A random thought; the fear of kidnapping and murder of kids if you took your eyes off them…”
Everybody seems to think this (and a lot of other stuff) was not so bad back when. Not So! Not per capita anyway. Several of my classmates were raped and murdered, one was a twelve year old boy. They convicted our scoutmaster of that one, and we all knew it was him. My big brother inadvertntly got right in the middle of a shootout at the PO. There was a WW II vet who took his Luger pistol and strolled down the streets of Galveston shooting everybody he came to, and there were lots of people on the streets of Galveston in ’46. My Uncle Dan was crazy as a loon after he came home from fighting in New Guinea and the Phillipines, everybody just made sure to throw their hat in before they stepped into his house. He finally got OK, but plenty of others didn’t. A guy tried to rape my sister. She got loose, but it was too late for him regardless; the cops never heard a word about it.
It’s the constant bath of TV sensationalism that makes us afraid.
Well, you are absolutely right about that. I’m only saying it was idyllic for me and my friends..and that of course, we didn’t know it.
I’d say it wasn’t really until the Civil Rights Movement got going – and got covered on tv and in the newspapers – that I really realized there were two Americas, and that everybody’s life wasn’t like mine.
I’d had inklings earlier…lived in small–town Virginia from age 1 to 6, and occasionally saw the “colored” side of town, where houses were shabby and roads were unpaved. I have vague recollections of wondering why it was so different from my brand-new, postwar tract-house neighborhood. Probably saw those segregated drinking fountains, too, but was too young to understand. And I was sick most of the year that should have been first grade, so I wasn’t going to school.
No, I lived in a child’s world until around 11 or 12, when the Movement began to shake things up. Probably when I first started to question anything much.
You’re right. When we only knew about what happened around us, I think we felt more control.
The only “incident” I recall from small childhood was rumors of a “molester”. A group of parents asked a bunch of little kids (5-7-ish) who were playing outside if we had noticed anyone of a certain description. It was a little scary, but our parents pretty much said, if you see him run and tell a grown-up, so I don’t recall being terribly frightened.
And the parents didn’t even round us up to go inside after this talk!
The ’50s were far from idyllic, but as a white kid living in a nice area, it was pretty good. At the time, of course, I was naive & had no idea. Just saying, though, that it’s a shame how kids are so “locked down” by their parents & have less freedom to roam about.
Plenty wrong in the ’50s with race, with the whole LGBT issues (totally closeted, etc), women’s right (remember that Betty Friedan wrote the “Feminine Mystique” pretty much in response to the repression of the ’50s), not to mention the horror of the red-baiting by Senator McCarthy (of which I was, bc of my age, completely oblivious).
From a young white child’s eyes, the ’50s were a “nice” time grow up, but I can see in retrospect all the other issues. As mentioned, my eyes really began to be opened when I watched Lee Harvey Oswald get shot on tv. Then the Civil Rights movement began, with the attendant stories & Rosa Parks & all the other stuff… and then I began to learn a LOT more.
We have both come a long way on some fronts, as well as *regressing* tremendously as we, the people, rush frantically to give away our dwindling civil rights, sad to say.
Yes, I agree. And to a certain extent, that’s deliberate. Fearful people are much more easily manipulated.
Well I don’t think that child abuse, child abductions, etc, are much worse than they ever were. We just hear more about it. Learning about these incidents can be beneficial – as in: better to know about the RC Church pederast priests than to have a veil drawn over those incidents, while priests just get shipped to other parishes to continue their despicable crimes.
I guess I just wonder if all the helicopter parenting & “locking down” of kids has made any *dent* in lowering the incidents of child abuse, child kidnappings, etc? IF so, then I suppose all of that is merited. I guess my question is whether the helicopter parenting serves a beneficial purpose – mainly child safety – or whether it just results in more fearful children growing into fearful adults.
Unsure how one could figure that out, though.
Time will tell, I guess.
Still, the thing that to me encapsulates the harm done by this extreme “helicoptering” is the story of a fire in a frat house, I think (don’t remember what college) in the last year or so.
The twenty-somethings in the house at the time called their mothers instead of the Fire Department!
Worse, some of the mothers called the Fire Department, insted of telling their kids to get the hell out, then call 911 themselves.
This, it seems to me, is a failure of a chief purpose of parenting; raising kids to be adults who can take care of themselves. (the other being to protect the kids while they cannot care for themselves; somehow that’s the only one some parents seem to focus on).
Before I go off to do something constructive, Chicago Dyke, if you’re still here, are you still at Ruth’s?
Just wondering how she’s doing these days. I have seen her pop in on a couple threads, but just hoping things are um, getting sorted out, I guess. If that’s possible.
Anyway, a great, if nostalgic, geezer-ish thread. Have a good day, everybody.
My God that’s incredible, and twenty somethings. That’s about as bad as it gets. I know some college kids (not related), they seem smarter than that.
Changing the subject (He said with relief). onitgoes @#106 said, “… as we, the people, rush frantically to give away our dwindling civil rights,…”, and I started getting depressed:
What’s an “epu”? As in “Well, epu’d again.”
While we’re at it listen to this: What are Timotes. I can’t figure it out with my Larousse Spanish Dictionary. It was cut into the bottom of a terra cotta planter-pot-like ash tray before the clay was dried as part of the phrase, “EL PORTON DE TIMOTES”. There are a couple other marks below the words, but they don’t seem intentional.
Tejana, I didn’t notice you were gone until I put up that last. I’ll check back here about midnight if you feel like responding to my scatterbrained questions.
From this memory of being a young white and blonde child, growing up then and I remember feeling Guilt even then. There was an Unfairness going on that I felt. I couldn’t put a name to it at that time.
EPU’d goes back to early days at FDL
thank you for teaching me the meaning of EPU’d. this blog has different posting/commenting habits than others i read.
i don’t mean to make you all feel guilty; it sounds like most of you were just children in the 50s. i grew up in the 70s and 80s, which believe me when i say, was a different time, better and worse.
but i just don’t get down with 50s worship, and again, not accusing anyone here of that. have yall seen “if these walls could talk?” the first or second ones? man, i’m telling you. i am soooooooo glad i was not born in the 40s or 50s. i would have been so very, very unhappy.
ruth is doing fine, btw, and traveling. you’ll hear from her soon.
And me too; have seen it all along just didn’t ask.
Is there something about the 40s/50s that seems particularly bad? Just wondering about your thoughts. The Friedan book truly changed my life and outlook; always abit jealous of the 60s; less so as Ive gotten older with a different perspective.
Being born in the 50′s meant that when you were an adult female in your twenties and thirties, you couldn’t get a mortgage. But as a young female you could get an abortion. Now, abortion is disappearing as is the ability for many to qualify for a home. Weird. Life is weird.
Hey, “epu” made the Urban Dictionary? I’m so impressed.
RaggMopp: El porton de timotes? Hmmm. Don’t recognize the word – could be a place name. “Timote” is likely to be a Mexican or Guatemalan word…every word that I know that ends in -ote is, like guajolote/turkey, or…damn, my brain just went blank…anyway. I’ll see what I can find; you have me curious now.
Yeah, EPU has been in the Urban Dictionary for years now.
I wonder also how much one’s view of the times/decade is also determined by one’s own age. I usually think of the ’60s & 70′s as particularly interesting and vibrant, I guess. Pursuing my education and career, being a mother…all personal elements that made for vibrant times.
Twas in the 60′s, however, that I was turned down for credit unless I had my spouse’s approval….community property and all that jazz….meaning the husband was head of the community. (I know much of that has changed; I was truly surprised at the time I was turned down.)