“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.
Swagerty-Aldrich Family Web Site 