Yes, thank you Geoff.
My mother, now 90 years old drove the Alcan highway back in the 50’s with her brother to Alaska. Pretty much destroyed a brand new pick-up that was purchased for the trip.
My Wife did the Alcan in the '80s in a 3 cylinder Chevy Sprint. Wife and car survived somehow. I thought I was tough…
What you have seen though Geoff, belongs in a book. Seriously.
Best Regards, enipla.
Wow, back in 1950 the Alcan Highway was a real adventure. One needed a permit and had to have their vehicle loaded with spare parts, tools, sufficient food etc. Many never made it. Your mom was a tough lady. Obviously, your wife too. Was the road paved when she did it?
Well, I did write a long autobiography just for my kids. Lots of stuff I would not want anybody else to read. 
I am so glad you survived and I’ll pass along the advice in case we do get it.
Are you from Massachusetts? (“wicked”)
I want to read that autobiography! C’mon. Dopers are just like family, right?
No, but for a stretch most of my customers were in Boston or environs. Lady at the switchboard was told that if the caller “spoke funny”–we were in Chicago–they probably wanted to talk with me.
That’s excellent!
I’ve mentioned my sweet but aged MIL a few times in conversations with you. She was a newspaper reporter for some years during & immediately post WWII and generally had a fairly adventurous life for a woman of her era. She has always lived in her memories and loves to regale anyone with tales of those times.
Except that whenever we asked her about writing an autobiography for family consumption she totally refused. No way! She doted on her father but wouldn’t even write a capule bio of him, an immigrant to the USA through Ellis island around 1920 who’d fought for Italy in WWI. What stories both their lives would have been! She still enjoyed writing a bit for recreation, but refused to even consider these projects back when she vigorous in her 70s & 80s.
Now at 94 she still has most of her main memories, but her ability to remember yesterday and today is just about gone and she has no focus longer than 10 minutes. All the rest of her generation of siblings and inlaws are deceased. So that last opportunity for her family to look through her eyes into that bygone world is gone forever.
Thank you Geoff for being so much wiser than my MIL. Your descendants will honor and thank you more than you’ll ever know.
Geoff, it sounds like you fit right in as a member of the Silver Horde.
KlondikeGeoff, that was a fascinating and entertaining story. Thank you for sharing it. I hope to read more of them.
Happy Birthday! 
Thanks for sharing your lovely story KlondikeGeoff. If you are interested I would love to hear your thoughts on the technologies that you have used over your lifetime. You are old enough to remember the radio age and when television was brand new. And here you are using the Net in the 21st century.
Which new technologies amazed you the most? What has disappointed you? For example after the moon landing did you expect that space travel would progress much faster than it has?
I could write about 200 pages about Alaska back then, but I’ll add just one thing I will never forget:
The first winter I was in Fairbanks was the coldest in 11 years. One spell it was down to -60 every day for almost a week.
I was listening to the radio and a news guy was very excited. He said, "Good news, folks. It has warmed up 40 below.
Funny thing, it did feel warm. Well, warmer.
KlondikeGeoff, Thank you for a wonderful post! It is wonderful to learn about what it was like back in the day. I wasn’t born until 1952, so of course my first memories are from the late 50s and the 1960s. Hearing about what it was like when my parents were growing up is really cool. My dad road the rails for a year or two in the 30s. Got married to a hometown New Jersey girl in the late 30s. He never talked much about those days.
That is kind of difficult to really know. When we finally relented and got a TV in the mid '50ws. It only got one channel, CBS I think. It was mainly for the kids.
I was always a car nut as never had one growing up. My first,when in living in CA, was a '33 Terraplane roadster with a '47 straight-8 Hudson engine jammed into it.
I got my first computer in 1981, a Commodore VIC-20 and instantly fell in love wit it. It had the OS on a ROM chip in the keyboard so when you turned it on, it opened instantly. No monitor, so had to connect it to a TV. I stayed up until 3 AM when I got it, saying to myself, "How does id DO that?
Then got the Commodore 128 which had two 5.25-inch floppy drives, one for the programs and the other to save stuff. Then when the PCs finally came out, I built my own. That was far easier than expected. Just went to a computer store and bought the case, memory chips, the mother board, power box etc. It all just snapped together, the only wiring wasmfor the switch from the outside of the case to the board.
From then on I was hooked. I can’t think of any technology thathas advanced as much and as quickly as computers. I finally switched to the first Windows which I hated, but it had so many programs that had to use it. I had every version from 1.0 to XP (excdpt Vista) which I kept as long as possible until my Dell desktop finally died at age 8 years. Then reluctantly got a laptop and a 23-inch monitor. It, of course, had Window 10 which I also hate, but have managed to tweak it to do things they said could not be done. Such as loading Lotus WordPro and Lotus123. MS annoys me, but although looked at the first Apple when it came out, it cost too much. I did admired the graphics it had.
Other than that, I got nothing.
Thanks. Very interesting.
I have this theory that computers and the Internet are the perfect pastime for the elderly but unfortunately with happy exceptions like yourself they have found it difficult to use.
Fortunately this is changing fast since every cohort that retires is more and more tech savvy and computing in the age of smartphones and tablets is less difficult than it used to be. Seniors living on fixed incomes and with lots of time on their hands have a wide range of inexpensive and fairly user-friendly IT choices today and it will only get better: I think virtual reality in particularly will be amazing.
Well, kudos to the Olde Phartes here who can use a computer…
See, I teach computer stuff (that’s a technical term). And I often think “I should figure out a way to get those elderly folk on the internet. Especially now, they could be shopping, using online banking, and interacting with their friends and family on social media.”
Then I try to get my mom or one of her friends to do something on a computer or an iPad, something that I consider simple … sigh.
The biggest problem I’ve seen is the attitude of “Oh, it’s a computer, I’ll never understand it!”*
*I’ll get a phone call from Mom: “A little box popped up with a warning!” So, I ask what it said… “Oh, heavens, I don’t know! I didn’t READ it, for Petey’s sake!”
Digs, you’ve been talking to my son, haven’t you?
To it’s credit, SDMB has motivated me to stick with it and learn more computer stuff than anything else has. So kudos all for being so appealing. Just wish my “Ah, Mom!” eye-rolling tech/nerd/geek son was here to see me pound these keys (and iPad touchscreen).
My father - although he never used the Internet - used accounting software to keep track of his daily expenses and investments - as well as Word and Excel - up until the last month or so of his 99-year lifespan.
Tell him your Invisible Doper Friends told you to show off and tell him how well you’re doing.
ps, don’t get cocky, young’uns. YOUR kids are going to be saying "Well, duh, of course it’s not working, ma; you don’t have the newest subcutaneous neural net! …
“Damn, mama, do you even quantum entangle?”
Shoot, I don’t even know how to ‘clear my cache’ or dump my emails (said tech/nerd/geek son bursts a blood vessel every time he sees my gmail count)! Isn’t it enough that I use The Cloud?
Don’t be so sure you are invisible to him. After all, he is the one who sets up my devices for me and installs heaven know what spyware🧐. But, the chances he thinks I would have anything interesting to spy on is remote. After all, he insists he was not homemade.
BTW, thrilled to have IDF. *Invisible Doper Friends. (I would also be delighted to have Israeli Defense Force friends)
Thank you KlondikeGeoff. Your story is by far the best thing I’ve read in a long time. I’m not young. I’m 60. My mother in law just hit 90 in June. We’re getting ready to move in at her house to help out with some things. She has great recall too.
I loved your breakdown on first computers. You were on top of it. Keep on keeping on brother.