By Jack Hommel
We frequently see imaginative movies about travelling in time. Some folks think they’d like to go back in time, others would like to go forward. Those of us who have managed to live a long time have already done our travel through the many portals of time. I’ll admit we had to do it the hard way, one day at a time. Yes, we have experienced the wonders of the new and unexpected. We have seen wondrous things and we have seen horrors. However, I believe that most of us who have had the privilege of our trip through time would choose to change nothing we have seen. The experience has been, and remains, too valuable to change. I’ll describe for you just a few of the things we geezers have seen.
The first television sets were the size of a washing machine and the view screen was only six inches across with a picture that was low definition at best and they offered no color, zero! TV was broadcast only about twelve or fourteen hours each day and there were usually only three or four channels per major city. The programming was, at best, pathetic, but it was such a new medium no one seemed to know just what to do with it. Radio was then the medium of choice for home entertainment. Every home had one and families listened to entertainment programs together.
Telephones were large and heavy and were hardwired in place, and early ones were so large they had to be wall mounted. There was a small manual generator inside them that had to be hand cranked to contact an “operator” who made the connection for us. Cell phones were things seen only in comic strips. Telephones were not very common in private homes. There were telephone booths found scattered around cities and a few were many miles apart along highways, usually near highway junctions. The public phones of the era were “pay phones” which had a mechanism that would accept coins to pay for the call. Not cheap! Phone service today is so casually accepted and to all-encompassing as to make old-time phone service laughable.
Airplanes then were crude enough and slow enough that a modern car can be driven faster than they could fly back then. Jet engines didn’t exist then. Anytime an airplane flew over, it was sufficient cause to stop whatever a person was doing and goggle at the wondrous machine until it flew out of sight. The best airliners of the day were ludicrous by the standards of today.
Computers simply didn’t exist back then and even pocket calculators had not come on the scene. There were bulky desktop machines that were the precursors of calculators. They were strictly manual devices on which was an astonishing array or numbered keys that had to be pressed very firmly to enter numbers, then there was a large lever on the side of the machine, a tiny bit like the pull handle on an old fashioned slot machine. This had to be pulled very firmly to accomplish a very basic calculation. The folks using these old monsters had right arms like a wrestler, just from the endless task of several hundred pulls per hour.
There were many horrible diseases that were commonplace then that are, thank goodness, just history now. Amongst those nasty diseases and maladies were mumps, malaria, whooping cough, scarlet fever, rickets, diphtheria, chickenpox, smallpox, typhus, and a bunch of others we managed to escape by our time journey.
Interstate travel was only for the affluent and for those it was a very real adventure. The majority of automobiles of years ago were capable of traveling incredibly slowly compared to today’s luxurious carriages. Roadways of those years were pathetic and dangerous by today’s standards. Most were just graded gravel, if they were even that good. It was not at all uncommon for travelers to carry three or four spare tires. Everyone who traveled knew how to not only exchange a flat tire for a good one, but to dismount and repair them as well. A commonly seen feature along the highways, at the top of almost any long, steep road grade, was a “Hilltop Garage” and café where a traveler could buy a glass of ice water while their overheated car was being repaired. There were also a great many roadside “museums” offering some tacky attraction to entice the traveler to stop and spend money.
If you are under the age of fifty, you’ll have no memory of any of this. If you are younger than sixty, you may have seen a few of these things. If you ae under thirty years old, you will most like likely think this is all B.S. If you are old enough to remember all of these things, you are a fully qualified geezer. Enjoy the rest of your journey!
