I was very proud of my “I Like Ike” button. My dad brought it home, and I was able to wear it to school. I have a memory of wearing it with my crossing guard vest. I was in the first grade, and I felt the heavy responsibility of being part of the school crossing guard.
I arrived early to school. I joined the other crossing guards, and we would unfold the flag and raise it ceremoniously. We then paired up and went to the two or three crosswalks in front of the school. We wore yellow vests, and we each had a stop sign on a pole. My partner was in an older grade, and we would station ourselves on either end of the crosswalk. Students would wait at the corner until my partner blew his whistle and we would walk out a couple of steps into the crosswalk and put out our stop signs for any on-coming cars. The students would then safely cross the street. In the afternoon, we would do the same thing, ending with a flag-folding ceremony.
I’m not sure why things changed, but I don’t see student crossing guards anymore. It must have become a liability issue, but I feel I benefited from having the responsibility. I also learned to respect the flag of our country. We were sure to not let the flag touch the ground, as that would be disrespectful and could possibly lead to having to burn it!
I believe I grew up in an innocent time for our country. I was born in 1949, just after World War II. As a country, we were united behind our leaders and trusted them to make good decisions. As a child, I wasn’t aware of the McCarthy mess in congress, but I was aware of the big communist “threat.” Childhood games included “Cowboys and Indians” and when we played “war” the bad guys were the “Japs.”
I grew up in a white, suburban neighborhood that was built and was being built in the housing boom that occurred after the war. I wasn’t even aware of race until about the 4th grade when our teacher talked with us after lunch one day. A black (called negro, then) family was moving into the neighborhood, and their son was going to join us in class the next day. I was completely color blind up to that moment. I was then very curious about the fact that there were these classifications of people, and that we didn’t all look alike.
I think I grew up a lot and the country lost its innocence when President Kennedy was assassinated. I was a newspaper carrier at the time. As I passed each house, delivering the paper, the TV was on and tuned to the same news feed. I thought it amazing that nearly every house had a TV, and they were all on. To give you perspective, color TVs were fairly new/expensive then, so most TVs were black and white, if a family even owned one.
One of the most dramatic changes that have happened in my lifetime is the evolution of the phone. I always remember having a phone in the house. The phone was a magical devise that connected you to other households and businesses. Our phone number consisted of a three letter prefix, followed by four digits. If you were calling another number with the same prefix, you only had to dial the four numbers. When you dialed a number, it actually went to a switchboard, somewhere in town, and an operator would physically connect the line you were calling from to the number you dialed. Once, we had a party line. We actually shared a phone line with another customer, or “party.” If the phone rang with one ring, we knew it was for us. If the phone rang with a double-ring, we knew not to pick it up, because it was for the other party. You were on the honor system to not listen in on the other line. Of course, the phones were physically wired and placed in a central location in the house. You could pay extra to have an extension phone so you could have a phone in the kitchen and one in the living room. It was like having a party line within your own house. It was expensive to call long distance, especially during the day. Long distance was anywhere outside of town. The rates were time and distance based, so the least expensive time to call long distance was after 10:00 PM and before 6:00 AM. Calling home from college involved waiting until after 10:00 at night. If you were calling from a pay phone, you had three minutes before you had to add more money, so you tried to talk about everything in three minutes. Most long distance communication happened via mail. After writing a hand-written letter, you would put it in an addressed envelop and put a three cent stamp on it. You would drop it in a mail box and it would arrive at the address in about a week or less, depending on the distance. As can be imagined, communication was slow and limited.
The first innovation for the phone was the wireless phone. This wasn’t what you think of now as a wireless phone. The base was still wired to the house phone system, but the receiver was wireless so you could walk around the house and not be tied to the phone cord. The first models had static and didn’t work well, but they improved over time.
The first cell phones were called bag phones. It consisted of a bag about the size of a loaf of bread. You could unzip the top and there was a key pad that you could dial a phone number. Also, connected to the inside was a receiver on a coiled cord that you could use to talk into and listen on the ear piece. A large antennae pulled up as well. Cell service was very spotty or non-existent. Oh, and this large, heavy bag had to also be plugged into the cigarette lighter in order to work. There was no battery.
Cell phone technology improved and after a few years, I had a flip phone. It was a clam-shell devise that was amazingly small for the time. It was only a phone. There was no camera or connection to the Internet. At the time, I was working as the Director of Technology for a high school district. Another related devise that I carried at all times was my pager. A pager was a simple devise that you could call and leave a phone number. The pager would buzz and show a phone number. You knew then to call that number. This was necessary because cell phone service was too spotty, but a pager signal could reach nearly anywhere. You got a page, and then you found a phone and called.
The most life-changing upgrade to phones was the smart phone. Now everyone carries an Internet-connected devise with them everywhere. If you have a question about anything, you can find an answer on the Internet. You can now identify a plant by just taking its picture. You have access to everything and everyone at any time. That is an incredible change. As with any powerful gift, it can be a blessing or a curse. Unfiltered access to knowledge requires critical thinking in order to sort it out. It is far too easy and irresponsible to let others do the “research” and come up with what to think. When I was in elementary school, there was a comic strip named, “Dick Tracy.” The story took place in the future. He had a wrist watch which he could use to call the station. They could see him, and he could see them. Now, that’s called an Apple Watch, and it is more capable.
The advent of the computer and the Internet and smart phones has changed society dramatically. You only have to go back to movies and TV shows before 1985 to see how life was so much different. Things we have become accustomed to and take for granted haven’t been around for that long, yet when there is a power outage we become disabled. If we loose our cell signal, we loose our bearings because our GPS navigator doesn’t work. Our “smart” life has caused us to become dumb, and we can’t read paper maps anymore. We are clueless to find our way if the GPS doesn’t work. The more we rely on technology to make our lives easier, the more we become dependent on that technology and the more we forget how to do things without it. I have experienced major changes to our country in my lifetime. Most change is good and necessary in order to evolve, but we need to be cautious about what we leave behind. Some of that knowledge might come in handy in the coming days.
Brian
“Yay, it’s finally 10:00 pm and I can call my parents”! In the 1970’s Brian and I were married with two children. Money was tight and we didn’t always have a phone or live in a place that offered a phone service. One year, the phone company started charging 10 cents a minute after 10:00pm to call long distance, which was what I had to do to call my parents. That was a real bargain at the time, we could talk for an hour for $6.00. When we didn’t have a phone, I’d go to phone booths to call my parents. Today, we have cell phones and can call people from almost everywhere, except a phone booth. Our phones used to be tied to wires that were tied to the house. You had to sit by the phone to talk on it. It seemed wonderful in the 1980’s when the phones became wireless and you could walk around and talk on them in the house. Today we talk on our phones almost everywhere. We can also see each other through our phones, send messages to people and take pictures with them and they guide us to our destinations. These things were all a fantasy to us growing up in the 1950’s and 1960’s.
A life time of changes have happened in the 73 years since I’ve been born. We have solar panels on our roof and get some of our electricity from the sun. Society has become less discriminatory as a whole and more accepting of non traditional people. There still are problems and small minded people but we have made progress. Black and white people can now marry each other. Gay people can also marry. In the 1950’s everyone tried to keep the fact that they were gay private. There was a lot of discrimination against gay people and also black people. I used to think that black people were treated equally. Now I know that wasn’t and still isn’t true.
There were no seat belts in cars and car seats for babies weren’t for safety or required when I was growing up. In the early 1970’s, I got hit from behind when I was stopped at a stop light in Stockton, CA. Cori was a toddler and in a car seat in the back seat. When the car hit us Cori and the car seat went flying into the front seat. Thank goodness she and her car seat weren’t in the front seat!
The Internet is a huge change that has happened in my lifetime. When I was growing up, I relied on encyclopedias for most of the information I was looking for. My family had a set of encyclopedias, but I also had to go to the library to look up information in other encyclopedias. Now you can type what you’re looking for into your computer on your lap and wah la, the information appears!
Television and radio have changed a lot over the years. Television first became popular in the 1950’s and people started having them in their houses. My family didn’t have a television until I was 8 years old, in 1957. It only got one channel, CBS from Portland. My sister and I, were thrilled! The TV cable went to some of the neighborhoods in Toledo but not to ours. There was an antenna on the TV that you could move around to pick up different stations. The nearest stations were 3 hours away in Portland, Oregon. That’s why we were only able to pick up one station. Once in a great while we were able to turn the antenna just so and pick up NBC or PBS. The television stations wouldn’t stay on all night, they had a certain time, 12:00, I think that they would shut down for the night.
Where I lived when I was growing up, only AM radio stations were available to listen to. FM radio started to become popular in the 1960’s and 70’s. It was called underground radio and in the beginning played full albums that weren’t as well known as the music that was being played on the AM stations. They also had no advertising and the DJ’s were laid back. AM radio played popular 3 minute songs and the DJ’s were very upbeat and full of energy. Today there are AM and FM stations and satellite and Internet radio. We can listen to stations from everywhere all day long.
In 1970, Brian and I became vegetarians. We became parents and I wanted to be sure my baby got everything she needed to thrive and grow. I did a lot of reading and studying what to feed a vegetarian baby. I even wrote a term paper for Brian on the subject and got an A. There were not many protein alternatives to be found. I made everything from scratch. I remember cooking soy beans (they take hours to cook, boiling them on the stove) mashing them up with a fork and feeding them to Cori. She didn’t like them very well but with a little ketchup on the tip, she’d eat them for awhile. I also made my own yogurt to give Cori some protein. There was no such thing as veggie burgers. We tried to make our own but they always fell apart. When we went to restaurants there was never much to choose from…grilled cheese or peanut butter sandwiches, a cottage cheese plate. Breakfast menus and pizza parlors worked well for us. The only fast food restaurant that had anything we could eat was Taco Bell. We were probably fooling ourselves about Taco Bell but we didn’t want to know.
Dress codes in schools have also changed a lot. I always had to wear a dress or a skirt and blouse to school. In elementary school on the playground, that was a problem when girls wanted to climb the monkey bars. Some didn’t care and did it anyway. There were two days a year that girls could wear pants to school. One was on Halloween and the other was Sadie Hawkins Day. Sadie Hawkins Day happens every 4 years on February 29th. It is the one day of the year when girls were allowed to ask boys to marry them. How silly, it all started with a comic strip. I’m glad that has changed, but at least we could wear pants on that day!
There have been a lot of changes in the 73 years that I’ve been here. These are just a few of the ones that come to my mind. It’s exciting to think about what changes are going to happen in the next 73 years with the development of self driving cars, nuclear fusion and the Webb telescope sending us new photos of outer space. I hope I’m around to experience some of them.
Mary Lou
Swagerty-Aldrich Family Web Site 