The WRight Way
By Ron Wright
(Cazenovia, NY – March 2014) Interesting to consider time frames and contemporaries. My great-grandfather was a contemporary of both me and President Abraham Lincoln. I recently have lived longer than one of my grandmothers lived. Thought-provoking for me because when I looked upon her as a child, I thought she was so elderly.
Automobiles are another time-framer. Before about 1960, the name of a car generally got you pretty much a single-styled vehicle (sedan or wagon) with options of two or four doors, a six-cylinder or V-8 and automatic or manual transmission.
Since then, there have frequently been the full-size, the mid-size, the compact, SUV and other variations of automobile models. Many mature adults will recall the Desoto and the Hudson cars for example. Both have been gone longer now than their total years of production lifespan. I took my road test on a pushbutton-shifted Desoto.
For another time, maybe, if you don’t understand what pushbutton-shifting was. Then there were Oldsmobile, Pontiac, Plymouth, Studebaker, Nash, Mercury, Kaiser-Frazer and a number of other well-known makes … for mature adults, anyway … that are memories now or antiques you may see at a car show.
Remember the Willys automobile (not the Jeep), the Sears Allstate or the Crosley?
At my first full-time job, I observed how the clerical people in the office would stack typing paper and carbon paper together to try and get a fourth or fifth copy that was readable and not just a bunch of smudges. Too many pages in the stack, and the typewriter might punch out the o’s and zeros, to add to the problem.
Also, the nasty hand-cranked mimeograph machine that would get blue ink all over you and your clothing, corrections about impossible unless you used a special eraser or stick-on correction tape or liquid white-out.
And finally the rudimentary wet paper copiers that required hanging up individual sheets like laundry to dry; too much liquid, and your printed work would sag into modern art before drying.
Popular music you heard was on vinyl records or AM radio for the most part. Oh, there were a few cars with record players built in under the dash. Hard to listen when driving over rough roads with the needle bouncing off the record surface; and unless you subscribed to certain magazines you never knew what the singers or their groups looked like.
Years later when you did see photos of the stars, you were often disappointed.
Even though clothing and hair styles cycle about every other generation or so, you can usually date a photo to within a couple years of the correct date, regardless of the setting or condition of the picture.
Compare a 1940s, ’50s or ’60s popular magazine with current periodicals. Even without a date evident it is intriguing to see what interested potential readers (or at least the opinions of marketing people) regarding the printed word, illustrations and layout.
I saw somewhere the other day that the average adult in America “looks at a screen” an average of 8.5 hours a day (and we say we’re too busy to keep up with the demands of modern life). Pursuing this, what percent of that 8.5 hours of viewing is work and what percent is “recreation?” This third of a full 24-hour day is what? 50 or so years ago, constituted a work day for most adults.
Children generally think time passes very slowly, unless of course the child is doing something very interesting or experiencing how fast a “snow day” away from school passes. This can be looked at as a percentage of what that day/week/month/year represents as a portion of his or her lifetime.
A year for a little kid may be 25 percent of his entire life. For an adult, a year maybe just a couple percent of theirs. And certainly the rapid development and learning experiences of a child’s mind must have a profound impact on time perception.
For older folks, as the years fly by, we need to appreciate each extra one we are granted.
Ron Wright of Cazenovia is a retiree with keen interest in his family, history, politics and his church. He began putting his thoughts on paper a little over a decade ago to share with family and friends. Ron, whose column appears the third edition each month, may be reached at madnews@m3pmedia.com.