Memories

         I've been blogging quite a bit lately about getting old, and I guess I am facing the fact that I am.  I can recall when I thought somebody who was 70 was ancient, and maybe we are.  But now that age seems relatively young.  I am continually amazed at how so much has changed in my lifetime and how little many folks know about what we've experienced - we who were born before computers, cell phones, television, jet planes, GPS's, microwaves, credit cards, a cure for polio, and even snow blowers.
          These thoughts hit me again when somebody recently sent me the following story - The boys had been up in the attic together helping with some cleaning. The kids uncovered an old manual typewriter and asked her, "Hey Mom, what's this?" "Oh, that's an old typewriter," she answered, thinking that would satisfy their curiosity. "Well, what does it do?" they queried. "I'll show you," she said and returned with a blank piece of paper. She rolled the paper into the typewriter and began striking the keys, leaving black letters of print on the page. "WOW!" they exclaimed, "That's really cool. But how does it work like that? Where do you plug it in?" "There is no plug," she answered. "It doesn't need a plug." "Then where do you put the batteries?" they persisted. "It doesn't need batteries either," she continued. "Wow! This is so cool!" they exclaimed. "Someone should have invented this a long time ago!"
         About 20 years ago I was amazed when one of the bright, young math teachers that I had hired asked me what a sliderule was.  She had never seen or heard of one.  She missed all of those "fun" years when we used this amazing tool and log tables to do all of our advanced calculations - multiplication and division.  We spent weeks in algebra II teaching students how to use logs to do calculations - do you remember interpolation? I also recall the summers working on my master's degree in math at Bucknell when we just had a "juiced up adding machine" to do our work.  Then a few years later, when I studied at Florida State, I was introduced to their "modern" mainframe computer which filled a large room.  We had to input our data on punched cards.  Oh how times have changed.
         The younger generations have missed so much - some of it good, some not so good - such as Blackjack chewing gum, wax coke shaped bottles with colored sugar water, soda machines that dispensed bottles and not cans, table side jukeboxes, home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers, party phone lines, butch wax, telephone numbers with a word prefix (MAdison - 8356), peashooters, Howdy Doody, 45 RPM records - or any kind of records for that matter,  S&H green stamps, metal ice trays with levers, home ice delivery for refrigerators, mimeograph paper with that interesting smell, blue flashbulbs, roller skate keys, cork popguns, drive-ins, Studebakers and Edsels, wash tub wringers, Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, automobile headlight dimmer switches on the floor, listening to radio announcers report baseball games play by play by reading the teletype, atom bomb drills, and dial telephones.
         Well those are enough memories for one blog from an oldtimer.  Guess I'll go heat some tea in the microwave, do a little surfing on the internet, send some e-mails and then watch some programs on our hi-def television. If you want to give me a call, you can try my cell phone - I haven't yet graduated to a smart phone.