When I moved to Texas almost 20 years ago, Dallas and it’s suburbs all used the same area code, as well as towns as far as 70 miles east of here. Now there’s three area codes for Dallas alone, and another one for the cities east of here that used to share 214.
When I was a kid we used to make prank calls, and never worried about getting caught. I remember one time deciding it would be fun to leave a prank message on somebody’s answering machine. I had to call about 15-20 doctors and lawyers before I found one with an answering machine.
My dad was born in the bathtub of his immigrant homesteader, lumberjack father’s log cabin on the northern edge of the Great Plain in Saskatchewan in 1915. They, of course, had an outhouse and were without electricity. The nearest town was Prince Albert.
Fishing was not so much sport as a necessary way to supplement protein in the family’s diet. Those of my father’s 10 siblings who survived childhood all graduated from high school. College was not an expectation for many in those days, but before the war, my father did manage to get in a couple of semesters before the cost became unbearable (no student loans in those days).
That was plenty to make him management material, and he held a few jobs that I imagine today require some kind of Masters’ degree. One such was manager of a pineapple plantation in Hawaii - the job he held when he watched the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.
WWII was something that affected the lives of almost everyone of my parents’ generation personally. We of the Vietnam generation were largely able to miss that immediate, personal effect.
The digital stuff that those who can recall, at the earliest, the Challenger explosion grew up with is of major note, but I feel like my father and my grandfather traveled courses in time that are hard to rival.
My kids don’t know what commercial tv is. They watch media constantly, but its all on DVD or TiVo. Live TV is so alien to them that they get confused when something can’t be watched again or paused or we have to sit through a commericial.