Things Change

This is in response to the StoryWorth question: How is life different today compared to when you were a child?

I didn’t live in the Stone Age, but sometimes when I look back at my childhood, those idyllic times seem almost as remote.

When I was a child, I lived in a little neighborhood in Dayton, Ohio with lots of family nearby. Mom was a stay-at-home mom during my early years. I don’t think that that was unusual at all back in that day. One breadwinner could support their family pretty well back then.

Many of my family members had moved from Eastern Kentucky to Dayton for great jobs in the automotive industry. With a high school education they were able to work for great wages and received wonderful benefits; good health insurance, pensions, paid vacation days… Today, that kind of work is almost nonexistent. Many family members work at minimum wage jobs with few if any benefits. Folks have to work more and more hours while receiving less and less in return. Many places only hire part-time help so that full-time perks can be avoided.

Family members who have gone to college often have student loan debt that will take years to repay. Even some folks with the degree that accompanies that student loan debt cannot find jobs in their fields. They are forced to flip burgers for minimum wage while repaying “maximum” debt. There is absolutely nothing wrong with flipping burgers but it is a shame that folks work hard to get a degree and yet cannot be gainfully employed in their field. Even those fortunate to get jobs within their professions often don’t make enough money to be the sole providers for their families.

This has been a huge change in my lifetime and it has not been a change for the better. It has eroded the pride that folks used to be able to take in working hard and being able to provide well for their families. They could even sock away some savings. This is turn has eroded the very foundation of the family. One parent used to be able to work and provide decent support for their families. Now, two parents working full time barely eke by. This is one tragic change that has occurred since I was a child.

My childhood home was a little white-sided house. We had a single bathroom and no air-conditioning. We didn’t miss it because air-conditioning was not even on our radar; no one that we knew had it. Air-conditioning was pulling up the windows and putting a box fan in a window or two. You had to pay attention to the weather because if it started to rain, you would have to dash around the house closing the windows.

Of course, we had electricity and a telephone but some folks didn’t. You had to watch using the telephone. Long-distance calls cost extra money and were to be avoided. If a long-distance call was necessary, it was made during certain hours when long-distance rates were decreased. Dad put our single bathroom in after we moved into our home. Prior to that, there was an outhouse. Nowadays, there are often more bathrooms in a home than actual butts requiring them. We had city water.

Now when we went to visit Grandpa and Grandma Smith on Anglin Branch in Eastern Kentucky, they had no indoor facilities, and they had no telephone or television for the longest time. They did have electricity. Grandma drew drinking water from a well just off of the back porch.

My uncles in Dayton used tractors and rototillers to work up their garden spots but Grandpa had an old mule that he hooked up to a plow to work up his. Gpa and Gma milked their own cow, raised their own hogs for meat, and had chickens for eggs and an occasional chicken dinner. My Granny in Dayton did raise chickens so she got eggs and chicken for chicken dinners from her henhouse, but we got milk, butter, pork, red meat… from the grocery. We did get much produce from gardens like Gma and Gpa.

When I was young, we played outside a lot, and often it was barefoot. I suppose that the absence of air-conditioning likely made indoors less appealing than nowadays. At least if you were outside, you could play in the shade of a tree and you might catch a cooling breeze.

 

   

 

I can recall having a tricycle to ride and I remember that we had one of the little red wagons that are still around today. We didn’t have fancy toys to play with though. I had a few baby dolls and a couple of Barbie dolls. My brother David had army men and Matchbox cars. He would make planes for the battles his army men were in by putting two of Mom’s clothespins together crossways. There were no electronics so no video games. We had books, a few simple toys, and our imaginations and those imaginations were something else!

Crime was not as rampant back in the day as it is now either. Of course, maybe we were just oblivious to it because we didn’t have 24/7 news. When we played outside, I imagine that our parents worried less about us being snatched from our yards than parents of today.

I am certain that there were substance abusers when I was a child but we didn’t read of multiple deaths due to drug overdoses on a regular basis. I am sure that there were some, but not like today. Drugs were what was in the fruitcake tin on top of the fridge that Granny had to pull down and take every day for her heart.

Perhaps the loss of pride one feels when being able to provide well for family has contributed to the widespread use of drugs?

We knew our neighbors back when I was a child. Conversations might be carried out over the fence or sitting outside on the porch. We played in our yard with the neighborhood children. Nowadays, many folks don’t even know who their neighbors are.

Even living in Dayton, gardens were common in my family. Uncle John and Aunt Hortense had a large garden spot. Uncle Bug and Aunt Alta also had a large garden spot. I remember family sitting out on porches to break beans or to string them into green bean necklaces for shuckie beans. Canning was not uncommon. Folks knew how to raise a garden and they knew how to preserve its bounty for the lean times of winter. Nowadays, many folks living in the city barely have enough land to plant a flower bed, let alone have a big garden.

We did have a black and white television that picked up three or four channels and every station shut down at midnight. That TV was a big boxy thing. If not for having a screen, it might be unrecognizable compared to today’s sleek flat screens that take up most of a wall. Color TV becoming common was a big improvement back then!

If you wanted to watch the news, you turned on the TV to watch the evening news. There were no 24/7 news channels. If you wanted to watch a sports event, you checked your TV Guide to see which, if any of the stations would cover it. There were no 24/7 sports channels. My brother and I got up early on Saturday mornings to watch cartoons; 24/7 kid-friendly stations were nonexistent also. There were no 24/7 channels of any kind! If you missed your show, you just had to wait for it to come out as a rerun. There were no video recorders or streaming. The TV Guide magazine could help you keep track of your shows.

Programming was usually soap operas during the day. Folks, usually women but I bet that more than a few men also watched, liked to catch their shows each day to find out what was happening on One Life to Live, As the World Turns, All My Children… I am not sure, but I don’t think that daytime soaps are still around. Perhaps they have been replaced by primetime reality shows which are full of drama like the old soaps. Daytime TV seems to include many daytime talk shows.

There were many family shows like The Wonderful World of Disney, Leave It to Beaver, Father Knows Best, I Love Lucy, Here Comes the Brides, The Red Skelton Show… There were westerns and dramas like Bonanza, The Rifleman, The High Chaparral, Man From Uncle, Dragnet, The FBI,… Folks who liked more imaginative shows could watch Star Trek, The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits… There were also a few game shows; Concentration, What’s My Line,… The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson was a talk show that came on every weeknight after the late news just before the station went off the air for the evening.

Of course, when I Love Lucy was on, Lucy and Ricky couldn’t even sleep in the same bed. When Lucy became pregnant with Little Ricky, they had to figure out how to work around her pregnancy. Surely Lucy and her husband wouldn’t…gasp… have had sex! Just think about how different that is today!

Now our home did not have a dishwasher other than Mom. We didn’t have a microwave. Up until I saw a microwave at my Aunt Davilee’s house, I had only seen them as prizes on game shows like Let’s Make a Deal. TV dinners came in metal foil trays that had to be stuck in the oven for about 30 minutes. Mom usually did real cooking so TV dinners were a treat.

Mom had to use an old wringer washer to wash our clothes. The dryer was a line outside and sunshine. She probably had to disassemble David’s airplanes for clothespins when she hung the clothes out to dry. If it started to rain, a mad dash was made outside to retrieve the clothes. If they weren’t dry, they would have to be hung out later when the sun came out.

Mom and Dad didn’t have the money to buy much pop but when they did, they would pick up a six-pack of 16 oz. glass bottles in a cardboard carton and pay a deposit for the bottles. When the bottles were empty, they could be returned to a little window at the back of the grocery store. You would place the bottles on a track with metal rollers and they would roll back to somewhere in the back of the store where they would be collected to return to the bottler to clean and refill again. Some folks would carelessly throw their bottles away when they finished drinking their pop. Kids could go around and pick up bottles to take to a store for a little money. It may not have been much money, but it went further back in those days. You could buy a bottle of pop and a little brown paper bag filled to the top with penny candies for a few coins. Kids could buy bubble gum cigars and candy cigarettes back in those days. Nowadays they can’t and I reckon that that is a bit of actual progress.

I remember getting books to read from the library. I don’t really remember going to the library. Rather, I believe that there was a bookmobile that would carry library books into neighborhoods. It was kind of like an ice cream truck for books. We loved to get books to read and they were free!

When our family could splurge and fork over some money for entertainment, we would usually go to the drive-in movies. There we would pull a speaker over and put it over the edge of a window to hear the movie and we would watch it from the car. There were often double features. Sometimes there would even be some fireworks at the end of the movies. The drive-in gave us some bang for our bucks.

Bowling was also a big form of entertainment back then. Many family members bowled and most of them belonged to leagues. Bragging on a good bowling score was not unheard of. Some family members spent many hours at the bowling alley. Once someone was looking for my Uncle Olen and they knew he would be at the bowling alley. They called the alley to ask to talk with him. Uncle Olen hears over the intercom. “Is there an Olen Nolen here bowling?”

Cell phones were a thing of the future. Telephones were corded and either sat on the table or hung from the wall. Public phone booths were scattered around public areas for folks to use…if they had the proper change!

I can remember taking typing class when I was in high school. It wasn’t a keyboarding class, it was a typewriting class. The typewriters were electric but I don’t even think that our school had a computer. When I started college, our college did have a computer lab where they had computers for students to use. They were connected to the mainframe computer system which was so large that it required an entire large building to house it. It had its own cooling system to make certain that it did not overheat.

I think that computer technology is the biggest change in my lifetime. Computers used to be a thing for NASA, large companies, universities. Now I can carry a small cell phone slightly larger than a deck of cards in my pocket. I can send and receive calls. I can even Facetime if I want to. I used to watch George Jetson video chat with folks on a bulky desktop computer never imagining that I would one day do the same with a small, wireless cell phone that fits in my pocket. I can search the internet for answers to any questions that I may have.

The small cellphone that I carry in my pocket may well have more capacity than that enormous mainframe on MTSU’s campus back in the day. That technology is absolutely amazing to me! We can do our grocery shopping without leaving the house. We can check out library books without going to the library. We used to order items from the Sears Roebuck catalog and now we can order just about anything our heart desires from Amazon and have it delivered overnight if we like. The world is almost at our fingertips. It can bring folks from all over the world together. Sadly, it can put distance between folks in the same room.

So there are a few changes that have occurred since I was a child. Of course, the biggest change came because I grew up. With adulthood came adult responsibilities and worries. When I was a child, I could be blissfully carefree. My biggest worry was likely that David’s half of the bottle of Pepsi looked like more than my half! How I wish that that was my biggest worry today!