Sixty years old today. The Beginning of the Baby Boomers. Really the first birthday I’ve ever given any thought to. With luck and no more attacks from my Multiple Sclerosis I can probably squeeze another 20 years out of this life. Beyond that is a bit iffy. At this point 20 years would be good, we will see as time progresses if that is still satisfactory or not.
I don’t believe in an afterlife or prior life or such. I believe I was created by scientific chance and will live until some random scientific chance (and that includes human sponsored occurrences) ends my life. That will be it. Nothing that happened before my existence was influenced by me and nothing that happens after my existence will be changed by me once I am gone. I will be remembered, for a short time (in the history of human time) by those who knew me. A few will remember me longer than others but it really doesn’t matter.
A lot has happened in my time on earth. Many of you only know of many of these things as history. It is hard to decide what is the most significant.
The threat of Polio: Those of you who didn’t experience it will never appreciate the true fear of spending your life (as far as we knew then) laying on your back in a metal can (an iron lung) and only being able to talk to people you could see in mirrors mounted above your head. This was especially serious to me as a six year old second grader standing in line to get a shot from a new “gun” that injected a new serum into dozens of children without a needle. We were called “Polio Pioneers”.
The “Cold War”: Had such an effect on me that it contributed to some ‘life’ decisions that I made through the years. I can remember in grade school having Air Raid drills as regularly as scheduled Fire Drills. Yes, we did actually climb under our school desks to protect us from falling debris. As we got father away from the Korean “Conflict” we moved from just crawling under the desks to using the desks as a barrier between us and the windows. From the late 1950s to the late 1990s we lived with the all ways present thought that within minutes the world would be irrevocably changed. That millions would die and those that managed to live would face indescribable hardship just trying to live. There wouldn’t be electricity, gas, food, or anything that we considered normal. When I was forced into retirement by my disability in 1978 I had to make a decision as to where to live. Australia was the first thought since I had enjoyed my visit there and I had an MBA in finance. I could become a banker in Western Australia. Failing that I had many years experience in school administration including almost 2 years as Assistant Professor at VMI. My health, however, mitigated against that choice so I was a matter of finding a place in the USA to live. My time in the Shenandoah Valley had convinced me that I no longer wanted to deal with snow (for that matter I had started to use a wheelchair and snow was much more of a no no) I chose central Florida based on a cold war scenario. I didn’t want to live through a nuclear exchange as a cripple. Therefore a place likely to be hit with multiple warheads in a first round was the place to live. Central Florida had the Kennedy Space Center/Patrick Air Force complex, the B52 base at McCoy AFB Orlando (now Orlando International Airport) and MacDill AFB in Tampa pretty much assured destruction.
Civil Rights Movement: This is truly amazing. My ignorance of the condition of anyone who was none white was almost non existent until I went to College. It was only then that it dawned on me that I had never known a ‘Negro’. My schools had always been all white and I had never lived in a neighborhood where there were non whites. I knew there were blacks, Mr. Benny had his man Rochester and there was a place where ‘The Kingfisher’ was a lawyer of sorts and had some strange black friends. Beyond that blacks took care of people on the Pullman sleeper cars and you could get your shoes shined by them in Boston. I was oblivious to “white only” every things in the south, restrictions on voting, etc. These things just never crossed the mind of a young white boy growing up in the north. The ‘60s were a real wake up call.
On a lesser level: You only got a telephone from Ma Bell. It was black, heavy, had a rotary dial and there was only one in the house if you were lucky enough to have one at all. You had to listen for the correct sequence of rings to see if the call was for your house or the one down the street. If memory serves there were three or four families on one line. Exchanges were special groups of numbers (PREsident 3456 or FAIrview 7891) you dialed the first three letters and the 4 numbers.
Depending on where you lived there might be anywhere between 1 and 3 TV channels to choose from. Programming began in the late afternoon or evening. Before programming for the day began you could watch a test pattern or actually use it to tune up your 7 or 8” round black and white screen for optimum viewing pleasure. They were very helpful and I know my dad could tune our set (yes, there was only one set in a house) so that we could actually see almost half of the resolution lines on that part of the test panel. There was no such thing as a remote control and I had to get mom to turn it on when I got home from school so it would be warmed up (yes you had to wait for the picture tube to get a picture) before the ‘Mickey Mouse Club’ came on. Later on, if you were lucky enough to have a station affiliated with NBC programming would go until the ‘Tonight Show with Steve Allen’ ended at midnight otherwise programming ended about 9:30 or 10 PM.
The next breakthrough was morning programming. The ‘Today Show with Dave Garroway’ was created by Sigourney Weaver’s father. Then there was “The Evening News with John Cameron Swayzee’ little more than a man reading the news off sheets of paper.
The first time I saw anything on a color TV was the inauguration of John F Kennedy. I was shoveling snow from the driveway of a wealthy neighbor when he asked me in to watch. I remember the room as being dark, like a theater and the picture had rather week color, but it was amazing to us.
When I was 10 years old.
The average price of a house was $22,000.
Average income was $4,137 (that’s per year, not per month).
A standard FORD car was about $1700.
Mailing a letter cost $.03
Gas cost $.023 – it was up to $.25 when I got my driver’s license.
A loaf of bread $.18
A pound of coffee $.93
Concert tickets $1.25
When I went to college (1963) a hamburger from a fast food place was $.25 and I wouldn’t go for the cheese because it was $.05 more
Some things that didn’t exist when I was a teen:
Cell phones
Color TV
Cable TV
Remote Control
VCR
Stereophonic Sound
Portable Radio under a pound
Home computers
Flat screen anything except a movie
CDs
Digital clocks
Scanners of any kind
ATMs
Automatic toll booths
Microwave ovens
Light Emitting Diodes
LASERs
Home TV Came
Electronic Games
Dishwashers
Electric Stoves
Queen Sized beds
More than one bathroom in a house
Electric typewriters
The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
No man had ridden on a rocket
An interstate system of roads
And countless other things we deal with every day.
Dashboards in cars were steel; there were no airbags, nor seatbelts for that matter.
The air in London, Gary Indiana, and major cities on the west coast was visibly gray and people actually died by the hundreds in SMOG alerts.
We had to wait for film of Queen Elisabeth’s Coronation to be flown by propeller plane before we could see it on TV (about 9 hours after it occurred).
The military was the only thing that had jet aircraft.
Flying from place to place was a special occasion. You made arrangements for your flight using big books (like telephone books) that listed each flight from one city to another and if you weren’t going to a big city you just flew to one that was as near as possible. Men wore Jackets and ties and ladies wore dresses. You were asked for your weight and if there was any question you were weighed at the counter. All bags were weighed.
Having a foreign car was a real problem. You had to wait for repair parts to be shipped from their home country. Finally, when I was a teen, Volkswagen stated to be relatively common, Opal was reasonably well known and I did know of one Renault in the city. If you wanted a car you were going to buy American. Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler were the big three, but you could also buy Studebaker, Packard, Nash, or Hudson.
Japan made things generally classified as tin toys and Pearls. Certainly nothing complex as a car. Some of the tin toys for kids were quite complex like a robot that walked.
MEDEVAC Helos, paramedics, police helos, and SWAT teams are all post Vietnam War