They were alive when...

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

In this thread Rilchiam tells of the loss of her grandmother, who was 105 years old. It reminded me of when I think of my parents and grandparents.

My dad was born in 1927, over five months after Charles A. Lindbergh flew The Spirit of St. Louis across the Atlantic Ocean. But he was child when Bonnie & Clyde, John Dillinger, Al Capone, et al were active; and when the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped. I imagine that he heard of these things on the radio. He was alive during the Depression. He was 14 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and he tried to join the army. (They sent him home to mama.) I watch The History Channel a lot, and I often think, ‘Hey! Dad was a kid when that happened! I wonder if he and grandma and grandpa would gather around the radio and follow the news of it?’

My dad’s parents were born in 1902 and 1906. They would have been aware of The Great War. I imagine my grandfather as a young man in a suit, and doing whatever it was he did. I watch Carnivale and think of grandma and grandpa taking dad and his sisters to such a place.

My mom was born in 1934. She was around for WWII, and was married to my dad when he was in the Navy in Korea. Dad was commissioned in 1956. The dashing young Naval officer and his pretty wife, driving around in a convertible, going to the Rose Parade (I have 8mm films of that), and raising my sister in Southern California.

It’s weird to think of my ancestors being alive in a time that, to me, is remote history. I guess that one day my nephew may wonder about me, since I was alive when Man first landed on the Moon. (Actually, I don’t remember it; though I did follow the space programme closely. I do remember the Apollo 13 mission. I remember hearing about the carbon dioxide problem, and imagined the astronauts with their shoulders against the hatch of the LM trying to keep it out.) ‘Uncle Johnny was alive before computers!’ I have a book in my library, How to Shoot Nudes, that I picked up when I got into photography. There’s an illustration of a studio, but something’s missing. No computer on the desk. The book was published in 1981.

I like history. I imagine what things were like. But most of it isn’t ‘real’. When it comes to my parents though, I knew my parents. And they were alive and aware when some very significant things happened. That’s neat and weird.

2

Yeah, I think of my paternal grandparents. Born in the 1890’s, rode in horse-drawn vehicles. They were Okies, straight out of “Grapes of Wrath”, I have kin from Oklahoma all the way to Salinas. Some of them made it all the way, some of them didn’t make it 100 miles. Had a great uncle born on Rt 66, in Tucumcari, NM.

But both my grandparents lived to see the Space Shuttle and everything between the 1890’s and the 1980’s. What an amazing period to live through, from horses to space ships.

I’m not quite half as old as my grandparents were when they died, and the world has changed quite a bit during my life, but nothing like the rate of change they would have witnessed.

3

My grandfather was born during the Arthur administration (1882 to be exact) and died in 1954. When he was born, civil service reform and restricting Chinese immigration were the hot political topics. When he died, it was holding back the Communists and hoping we didn’t manage to blow the planet into dust.

4

I think of my mother’s parents. My grandfather would have been born around 1912, and if my calculations are right, my grandmother would have been two or three years older. They both lived through things I can’t even imagine, like both World Wars and the Depression. I can barely imagine a world before computers, yet I don’t think my grandfather has ever used one. It’s really strange when I think about it.

I bet when my grandfathe was growing up, he didn’t imagine that his grandkids would spend half their time manipulating non-exitent objects on a lit screen.

5

My grandfather died in 2002 at the age of 98. My grandmother (his wife) will be 101 this August. That means they were each born in 1904.

I’ve though often about the unbelievable changes they’ve seen. Born a year after the Wright brothers first flew, they saw men land on the moon, and then saw space travel become routine. During the Depression, they moved to South Dakota (I think, maybe ND) to work in a door factory because it paid $0.25/hour, which was considered good enough to move for. They were in their late 30’s (older than I am now) when Pearl Harbor was bombed.

When my Grandpa and his brothers would get together, I could listen for hours. They would talk about the first person in their area to own a car, the first time they saw an airplane fly overhead, the unusally warm summer of '21, prohibition, etc, etc.

Should’ve written it down, as they’re all gone now.

6

I’ve thought about how things have changed for my grandma. She’s lived through the Depression and world wars. When she was born, they didn’t have electricity, indoor plumbing, phones, cars, or planes. No vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, electric stoves, not to mention TVs, microwaves, computers, VCRs, CDs, and DVDs. When I was really young, they still had wood heaters in the house. They used horses to pull their farm equipment (Old Bess was my grandma’s favorite when she was a girl).

When Grandma was in her 20s, people were dancing the Charleston (although she was too busy teaching so she could pay for college, so she never had time for dancing). If she had been a dancer, she could have done the Charleston, swing dancing, the Twist, the Hustle, the Electric Slide, and the Macarena.

I have a gorgeous picture of my grandma with her parents in a horse-drawn carriage. It reminds me of how much things have changed in her lifetime.

ME

7

My maternal grandmother was born in 1912. She lived through the invention of just about everything we take for granted today. Widespread electricity, light bulbs, telegraph, radio, gramophones, cars, kitchens that consisted of more than a basin and a giant wood stove, television…you name it. Both wars. She had my mom during the Depression. It all happened during her lifetime. It got so modern technology baffled her after a certain point.

She owned a microwave, but she threw a freakin’ fit on me the day I explained to her that I didn’t need to wear oven mitts to get my cup of tea out of there. There was no heat in a microwave oven. “But it’s an oven! Of course there is!” “No, Grandma, your food or water is bombarded with high frequency radio waves, which vibrate the molecules, causing friction, which causes it to heat up from the inside out.” She took massive offense at how I was making up some bullshit story to make her look like a stupid old lady. Um, right.

Nevertheless, she did see an awful lot happen before she passed away in 1991.

8

My grandfather is the closest I come to having a “hero”.

He was a young man in the Royal Danish Guard during WWII and spent much of the war as a POW in prison camps and concentration camps.

He’s old enough to know the advent of the tv, the microwave, the first man on the moon, cars as a form of conventional transport etc.

And now, at his grand old age, he’s got his first computer, knows more about it than I ever will, and he is building his own computer “out of curiousity”. I wonder what innovations I’ll live to see?

9

My dad went to school in the proverbial one-room schoolhouse. With his brother, sister, and cousin. This was the entire student-body.
Years later, as a 20-yr old, he was ordered (along with his guard unit) to defend Central High against the National Threat of that era (black schoolkids).

My wife’s dad, while still a teenager, shot down several Zeroes (and a few Kates and Vals, to boot).

10

My grandmother, now 92, likes to tell that story as well. She ran and hid in the barn, convinced that Jesus was a-comin’ back. I am uniquely blessed in that I get to see her and my grandfather (94) every morning before I leave for work - and every morning my grandfather has a piece of fruit for me to take as a snack. Sometimes, if I’ve been really good, he’ll sneak in a piece of candy, too. I hope my kids realize how truely fortunate they are.

11

My grandfather was born in 1882 and lived to be 102. He remembered the first time he saw electric lighting, the telephone, airplanes, etc. all the way up through man walking on the moon.

My parents were born in 1916. My father lost a brother to the Spanish flu. They remembered polio epidemics, the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor, the first television set on the block and silent movies.

12

My paternal grandmother died in June. She was born in 1911. She spent her first years of life in a house without electricity, and three years before she passed away, she had a computer in her apartment. She once told me that the most amazing thing, to her, was that my sister was an engineering student in the Air Force. Not only were women not in the military when she was growing up, but there was no Air Force. Women didn’t do math or science, outside of nursing.

My father was born in 1951. He was at Woodstock, for the entire time, and recently burned me a CD with a ton of live recordings from Woodstock, interspersed with his memories of it. When he was in grad school, he worked with punch-card computers that took up entire rooms. This past summer, he got me a laptop to take to college with me; my notebook computer has far more processing power than his room-size computers (and a far more user-friendly interface!).

My mom was a biologist. She once worked in the same lab as the scientist who (allegedly) discovered the AIDS virus. DNA was still a relatively new concept when she was in grad school (when I was in high school, some of our bio labs included DNA gel electropheresis!).

She and my father both were adults by the time that man walked on the moon. Later, my dad worked for a company that did some contract work on one of the Mars rovers and government spy satellites.*

*The fact that my dad went from ‘long-haired, politically-active hardcore hippie’ to ‘cube dweller creating spy satellites for the government’ is part of why I’ve sworn I will never have a family!

13

My grandfather was born in 1889, and was a subject of the British Empire (Ireland was part of Great Britain then). He lived to see the moon landings, and the Presidential term of Jimmy Carter. My father was born in 1918 (still alive). He is a veteran of WWII, and told me once that he remembered seeing Civil War veterans marching in memorial Day parades, as a boy!
Which makes its amazing but true-there are people around today, whose great-gradparents participated in the Civil War (I guess thats why there are so many “Colonels” in the South).

14

My father was born in 1893 (I’m 45, so if you do the math, you’ll realize he was 66 when I was born).

He was 10 when the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, and 76 when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. He lived to see Ronald Reagan elected president.

Even cooler is something I learned while doing some genealogy a few years ago: he emigrated from Greece to America in 1910, settling for a while in New York. Two years later, he helped a Greek doctor who lived in the same apartment house as him. The doctor needed help tending patients in his apartment and fetching supplies. The doctor was overwhelmed – there had been a terrible accident on a boat called… Titanic.

15

My grandmother, at 100, remembers many of the things already mentioned here

Young girls today wouldn’t believe that in “the good old days” you had to wash clothes in a tub, chop wood for the stove, and use clean folded rags during your monthly period. Grandma remembers all that, and says the present is better.

Oh, and she remembers when, as a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse, she was supposed to quit her job when she got married(1926). Instead, she and my grandfather married secretly, and lived apart for the rest of the year. They’d sneak off to a hotel in another town sometimes, on the weekends. We’ve come a long way baby.

16

Heck, there are people like my grandmother whom I just mentioned whose grandfathers were in the Civil War. Both of grandma’s grandfathers served, one was incarcerated in Andersonville. He told her once that he still had stomach problems from time to time, because of the beatings, and the awful food(when there was any.)

17

Back when Strom Thurmond was still alive, George Will wrote a column commemorating some occasion (it wasn’t his 100th birthday, but it might have been an earlier birthday).

Will noted that Thurmond had first been elected to public office in the 1920s. And thus, that he had inevitably “received votes from Civil War veterans, presumeably, all Confederate”.

It made me reflect on how events believed long past can still influence the present.

18

My own parents and grandparents had kids young so grandparents were all born in the 20s. A great grandfather on my mom’s side was born in 1862 and dies in 1952. He headed west at the age of 14 to the Dakota territory just about the same time Custer met his fate at the Little Bighorn river. He was a bullwhacker, running freight wagons until the railroad made that job obsolete. He cowboyed and established several ranches and was a sheriff in North Dakota in 1892. The hot new military technology when he was a boy were rifles that fired metallic catridges and when he died jet airliners were coming into being

19

I think the generation that came of age around 1905 - 1910 probably saw the most sweeping changes of any. Though they came to awareness in an era in which most of the technological innovations that we use every day were either non-existent, or were rarely seen novelties, most of them lived to see routine air travel and the flights to the moon. (Now the flights to the moon will likely become grandparents’ tales to a future generation, but that is a different, and very depressing matter best left to another thread).

My father turned 80 last summer, and his paternal grandfather was in the Civil War.

20

I remember being stunned when, as a young teen, I learned that when my grandmother turned 21, she couldn’t vote. No American woman could.

Once I astounded some youngsters in my neighborhood by telling them that when I’d been their age, we didn’t have television. One of the kids piped up and asked “But if you didn’t have a TV, what did you play your video games on?”