THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, July 7, 1995 TAG: 9507060170
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 02 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Ronald L. Speer
LENGTH: Medium: 73 lines
My dad would have been 100 years old Monday, and he and others of his age probably lived through more changes than any other generation in history.
It was a mind-boggling trip through life for those born in the fading years of the 19th century.
At the turn of the century, in small-town America or out on the farm or along the coast, people lived about like people did in Jesus' time.
Nobody had telephones or electricity or indoor plumbing. Cars and airplanes hadn't been invented. Neither had radio or movies or television or computers or refrigerators or phonographs.
Medical care was crude, and painful.
Horses and wagons and trains were the main means of travel when my dad was born in 1895 in Nebraska. He got his first car when he was in his early 20s, a black Model-T Ford. I don't know when he heard about those crazy bicycle mechanics who put a plane into the air in North Carolina. He never flew until the 1960s. But he learned to love it. And he was as excited as people decades younger when he watched men land on the moon in 1969.
He never did get to like telephones, and thought that the farther the call, the louder he should shout.
In his youth, people communicated by letter, and for a few years Dad drove a horse and buggy delivering the mail to farms and ranches on a 50-mile route. People sent - and got - several letters a day, often their only contact with the outside world.
Television didn't do all that much for Dad when he got his first set in the '60s. But he loved to listen to the radio. Dad was about 25 when a neighbor got the area's first crystal set, and he and other cowboys listened in awe for hours until they were driven from the house at midnight.
As he matured, baseball on the radio was a favorite pastime, and so were those nightly shows such as ``Fibber McGee and Molly.''
He was overwhelmed when electricity came to his house for the first time when he was 55.
Kerosene and gas lamps provided lights in most of the country when he was young. City folks cooled their food in ice boxes. But few people had ice in the country. So Dad's food was fresh, canned in jars by his mom or dried. People dug a hole a foot across and six feet deep into the ground, then lowered milk and butter on a string to keep them from spoiling, or floated them in a tank filled with water freshly pumped by windmills.
Dad shaved with a long razor with a very sharp blade, and I still treasure the use he made of my first Christmas present to him - a pack of paper squares cut from a Sears catalog and tied with a string so he could rip one off and wipe the soap from the razor.
He worked with horses most of his life, and was skilled at handling them. When he was 69 he was bucked off a bronco and broke a hip.
He never rode again. But he loved to tell about the changes he'd seen. And after I got past middle age, I became a big fan of his stories.
I was all set to start taping the tales when he died at the age of 80, cheerfully awaiting a modern medical miracle, the implant of a heart pacemaker. The old horseman's final trip was by plane, and I'm sure he loved looking down on the land that had seen such changes in his lifetime.
Perhaps, with computers opening up new visions, people born 100 years after my dad will face a century of unimagined milestones, too.
I hope they deal with the stunning developments as well as the people of Dad's generation. And if your mom or dad is still around, I sure hope you tape their stories.
They're special, those people who were born before man flew and lived to see men and women explore the universe. MEMO: Ronald L. Speer is the North Carolina editor of The Virginian-Pilot and
The Ledger-Star.
by CNB