The Time Machine is set for Aug. 1, 1952

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

I would end up in a corner by the front door of my great-great grandparents house scaring the dip out of them. I might get shot by my great great grandfather. If I don’t get shot I could see my pre-teen grandfather and my great grandfather across the street. I would see if I really look like my grandfather (because people say I do), who I never knew because he died more than a year before I was born. This town hasn’t changed much. I could probably find a job, buy stock in IBM and AT&T and buy farmland near Columbus to sell forty or fifty years later and make a fortune from it.

Despite the ominous threat of communism, I would reassure people it will be powerless in forty years. Try to save JFK and RFK. However I might try skip the sixties altogether.

42

Hmm…
If I’m at home:
I suddenly appear in a field that within the next year would be dug up to build the apartment building I live in.

When I say ‘in’, I mean ‘in’; my apartment is partly below ground level and there’s a good chance that part of my body would materialise underground. The result? A messy, unexplained death in Etobicoke Township.

If I’m at work:
I fall from my second-floor location to the cornfield in which my place of work would later be built. I pick myself out of the mud and walk south to the country road which would later become Derry Road.

I start walking east to the village of Meadowvale (not yet swallowed by the suburbs, bypassed by the arterial road that Derry Road became, or promoted to “Ontario’s first Historical District”, whatever that means). I start thinking about what to do.

My year-2002 money is useless. Canadian paper money has gone through at least three redesigns since 1952. While the coins aren’t that different in superficial design, there are more denominations, they are made of different materials, and the dates are all wrong. In 2002, most Canadians have never seen examples of the notes used in 1952.

Let’s say I have my backpack on, with its usual contents. (I was just leaving work.) These contents become very interesting.

My cellphone? A pretty but useless lump.

My organizer? Soon a pretty but useless lump unless I brought the charger with me. It at least should fit 1952’s electrical outlets. (Parts of Ontario converted from 25-Hz AC to 60-Hz AC; I’m not sure whether this was still going on in the early fifties.)

A CD containing MP3s? It’d take a week to explain what it is, and nobody could even think of building a device to read it. Which may be just as well, because nobody would comprehend the music anyways; this is before the great cultural shift marked by the arrival of Elvis.

It’s a good thing I still have sketchbooks and markers… though the markers might raise a few eyebrows as well.

My clothing would definitely be odd: no suit or tradeperson’s overalls. People would wonder where my jacket was. But I’m neatly dressed and of English descent, so I wouldn’t raise too much suspicion right away.

I’d be frantically trying to figure out what to do, and hoping I didn’t get injured or ill. What earlier versions of diseases would I be wide-open to? There is no universal public health-insurance…

I’d need shelter, food, and money, in roughly that order.

What skills do I have? [ul][li]Mediocre typist, but I must remeber: no word processors or text editors. Just ink and paper.[]Web designer: a useless skill for the next forty years. []Cartoonist. Who hires cartoonists? Technical writer. And I know quite a bit about electronics and radio, and can handle a soldering iron. I’d have to learn a lot from scratch, considering that the transistor has barely been invented in 1952 and we never even studied tubes in electronics school… and I graduated 15 years ago and barely remember it…[/ul]My best medium-term bet might be to walk to the village of Malton, home of the Malton airfield (that would become Toronto’s international airport) and the A. V. Roe aircraft factory… and try to get a job… if they’d hire someone who walks in off the street with no ID or history. [/li]
But the first few weeks would be nasty. Time-explorers need better social skills than I have.

43

I’d appear in the middle of a forest in an area populated only by deer and dairy cows (and, of course, the dairy cow’s farmers but that would’ve ruined my alliteration).

If I’d been planning on doing this, I could go prepared - I actually own clothing that would’ve looked perfectly normal in the early '50s, for one thing…

My first problem would be getting in to town; it’s about six miles through woods, pastures and cornfields - mainly woods, in '52 - to get to the center of town (which would look a lot like it did in my mid-'80s early childhood).

I have marketable skills for a young woman in 1952, most notably typing - on a computer I average over 90 wpm and on a typewriter I am limited only by the stickiness of the keys; I even know how to change the ribbons and stuff, which a lot of folks my age (or older) can’t do these days. I suppose I could find a job as a secretary fairly easily.

However, coming up with a plausible story as to what brought me to such a tiny rural town without a car or other visible means of transportation would be rather difficult…

Now, if I drove down to Gunslinger’s town in east Texas, and we went back in time together, we could have it made.

44

I’m reading Jared Diamond’s book, “Guns, Germs and Steel,” and was wondering exactly the same thing earlier today. What immunizations should we be taking before allowing someone on the time machine trip?

– Polio was still a dangerous disease in 1952 and I’ve been surprised to read that my Salk/Sabine vaccinations of the late 50s may have lost effect by now.
– With the threat of bio-terrorism, the issue of whether or not our childhoold smallpox vaccines have worn out has been in print.
– I never did have the mumps.
– What if one of us carried a unique flu bug (or worse) back into the 50s: that would surely screw up the space-time continuum. So much for using the TM for historical tourism!
– there are going to be lots of smokers back there. Many are going to believe that smoking’s actually GOOD for you.
– designated drivers? Ha! I remember learning to fly in the 60s and magazines would actively discuss how much alcohol a pilot could consume (the enlightened answer: 8 hours, bottle to throttle).

If any other health threats germinate, please let us know. . .

45

Actually, the first thing to do on your checklist is suffocate from lack of oxygen. Not much to do after that…

46

To hell with save-the-future/get-rich schemes. I wanna eat.

Like racinchikki, I have appropriate-for-1952 clothing, so assuming I happen to be wearing it at the time, I’d walk 5 miles through the pine forests and farms to downtown, find Carl Estes, and ask him for a job — Estes was the owner of the Daily News and Morning Journal at the time. I am, in 2002, a newspaper photographer by trade. If the transporting was intentional, I’d have my vintage Speed Graphic (made in 1950) with me, which is what the paper would issue me anyway, so I’d be saving them money, even…

And if that didn’t work out, I’d sell the $300 camera and start making sports bets and buying stock. :smiley:

47

An afterthought: That’s the paper I work for now, in fact. They’re only putting out one issue a day now, though, under the wonderfully merged name “News-Journal”.
racinchikki brings up an interesting point, shared here for the enlightenment of everybody else:

Actually, not really. You’d be surprised at the beating newspaper equipment takes. The Graphic’s in the same or better condition, cosmetically, than the 2-year-old Nikon D1 I’m using now.

48

Even though I’m not a doctor, I’d try to see if something could be done to prevent President Eisenhower from dying in February 1956, after complications due to his heart attack in September '55. Then maybe Nixon wouldn’t have been President for so long, and we wouldn’t have had that nuclear war in October 1962.

49

I would go outside, walk up the block and see for myself that Providence’s very lovely Benefit Street was now a horrible slum. I’d ride a trolley that wasn’t really a cute bus. I’d go downtown and walk into old fashioned department stores that are now something else. I would try to remember to look both ways at Canal Walk on my way, because it would now be Canal STREET with cars and everything. I know that nothing would be as pretty, because this was all pre-Cianci. I wonder whose office this was in 1952.

50

Ideally, I’d be recruited by the Time Patrol to help police the timestream, protecting it from uptime menaces who want to ensure that their own particular futures come to pass. I’m looking at you, Squa Tront!

51

In August, 1952 I was anxiously anticipating 5th grade. We were building forts and playing in the vacant lots in the neighborhood. I wasn’t allowed to go to the swimming pool because my mother, like all my friends’ moms, was scared to death I’d get polio.
In the evenings we’d ride bikes until dark, then catch lightening bugs. It was hot, the humidity was high, and home air conditioning may have been found in homes of the wealthy, but not in my neighborhood. When it rained we put on our bathing suits and played outside. When we went to a neighbor girl’s wedding I wore an outfit with a polished cotton full skirt with lots of crinolines underneath and thought I was the belle of the ball.

I don’t think I’d want to go back to that time as an adult. I like today’s modern conveniences, and my career possibilities would be extremely limited. It was a much different time.

52

If I knew enough to be transported back in time, I would know to be prepared. I would outfit myself in clothing to blend in and gather enough pre-1952 money to buy a few choice baseball cards, coins and other small, to be valuble, trinkets, bring them back to 2002 and improve my family’s lifestyle.

53

In mint condition, even!

54

Firstly I’d go find my maternal grandfather - who died the next year at the age of 43.

My parents would both be eight. I’d swing over to my dad’s boyhood home in South Dakota and spy on him to see if he really did have to walk to school uphill (both ways) in a blizzard with only a teaspoon to dig his way through.

Then I’d swing over to NYC and find a good job so I could buy all the Christian Dior clothes I desired.

Then I’d return to the present with a killer wardrobe.