Don't Tell ME About the Good Old Days
Bill Webb
May 29, 2007
I remember thinking, as a kid in the 50‘s and 60‘s, that I’d be old when the new century began. Now we're seven years into it, and I still feel about 14 a good deal of the time. Since I'm more than 4 times that figure (not in dog years, either) I find it sort of odd to look in the mirror and see a grey-bearded guy, albeit highly distinguished looking -- and, of course, there's that extra 40 pounds.
But here we are, three quarters of a decade into the 21st Century -- and where are we? Any old fogy like me can list dozens of things that are different from when he was a kid, from TV sets that only received two channels to gas that cost 25 ¢ a gallon. Nowadays we use “cents” so seldom that when I looked at the symbols available to this font (the little “c” with the line through it has long since vanished from keyboards) there is no such symbol. I had to code it in HTML. I'm even more out of date than I thought!
Anyway, us old fogies can list all the things that were so much better about the good old days and, equally as well, all the things that are wrong with the world today. It might even sound good to some of you youngsters -- nostalgic, and all that. Fact is, though, it wasn’t quite the way it's often described.
Back then, we had “family values.” That referred to a paternalistic system relegating women to only a half-dozen positions (not counting that one) if they didn’t want to be “homemakers." A woman with a “higher” education could be a school teacher or nurse. If she was so unfortunate as to have “only” a high school education, she was stuck with being a clerk somewhere, or perhaps a waitress (despite the fact that a high school education back then was the equivalent, in many ways, of college today).
If the lady (they were all ladies, to their faces) didn’t aspire to independence, she could slave sixteen or eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, taking care of her husband and kids. Clothes dryers were strung across back yards. Dishwashers were at the ends of your arms. Until I was about seven, my mother darned our socks by the light of a kerosene lamp. (Socks were repaired when they got holes in them. Novel idea, huh?) Vacuum cleaners were nearly more trouble than they were worth. There was a choice, if a woman was lucky, of a gas or “coal oil” (kerosene) stove to cook on. If she was unlucky, the stove burned wood. If she was really lucky, the family might have hot water on tap to wash dishes and bathe -- a tub bath, for most, showers being mostly found in newer urban dwellings. Most of Mrs. Homemaker's clothes were cotton, and she had to iron them all, along with everyone else's.
Air conditioning was rare, especially in kitchens.
A family of more means might have a “colored woman” who came in to help. This unfortunate soul would do all the stuff the lady of the house found too boring or strenuous, for perhaps a dollar or so a day. She’d go home to the same duties she’d just helped her employer with, in a house of questionable structural integrity, with a tin roof that might not leak too badly. She would almost certainly not have indoor plumbing. Water would be brought in from a “spicket” in the yard (or someone else's yard) and heated on the stove for washing dishes, bathing, and so forth.
She’d be called “Miz Jones” or “Sadie” to her face, and “nigger” the rest of the time. She would have only about a 10% chance of finishing high school, much less a chance of any higher education. If she managed somehow to advance beyond high school, she’d probably teach in the “colored” school.
She’d be afraid to vote.
Men worked hard too, albeit not usually as long as the women. People stayed with their families in those days, and supported them most of the time. They may have been drunks or philanderers, may have beaten their wives or incested their daughters, but it would never be spoken of outside the home -- and rarely inside it. The one thing a man couldn't live down was failure to support his family. Men (and, rarely, women) “ran off” sometimes, but almost never stayed in their same community if they abandoned their families. These strictures and the ones controlling women's destiny made for a lot of loveless marriages, many that might have been better ended early, or avoided altogether, but we point with pride to the lack of divorces back then.
Long distance calls cost three to five dollars a minute. The cars running on quarter-a-gallon gas got eight or nine miles per gallon and needed to be tuned up monthly, or at least it seemed so. Keep in mind, in the days when $400 a month was good money, even a quarter a gallon was pretty hefty. Health insurance was even less common than it is today, and nonexistent for “ordinary” people. Movie houses had one screen, and you watched what there was. TV, as mentioned above, was limited to a couple of channels if you were lucky. The most channels possible in those days was twelve -- all network programming that was pretty strictly censored. That's if you had TV. Most folks listened to their radios.
Mothers worried constantly all summer that their kids would be exposed to polio. They worried all winter about pneumonia, whooping cough, and a host of ills that would nowadays be dismissed with two days off from school and some pills or a shot, if that. More likely, today, the kid will have been immunized and won't catch them at all.
When people had heart attacks they died, or remained for a short time as cripples.
What I'm getting at here is simply this: as Billy Joel put it, “The good old days weren't always good, and tomorrow ain't as bad as it seems.” For every great nostalgic example of the G.O.D.’s, I can throw back at you three or four advantages we have today that were unheard of when I was a kid.
I was ragged unmercifully in grade school because I thought that someday men might go into space. I was “Space Man” for five years. Today, we have hoards of kids who never heard of Neil Armstrong, and who think a “giant leap for mankind” refers to some kind of extreme sport.
E-mail was written with an Eversharp. A digital word processor needed to be re-sharpened every paragraph or so. The computer I'm writing this on is so far superior to the ones used on the spacecraft that went to the Moon that a good comparison might be an abacus versus counting on your fingers and toes. And speaking of speed, an airline ticket from Miami to L.A. used to cost a month's wages, and the flight took 14 hours! Twenty years earlier, the trip would have taken seven days if you didn’t have too many flat tires along the way.
So when we become nostalgic, let's keep a bit of perspective. As Carly wrote, “These are the Good Old Days.”
(Carly who?)
But here we are, three quarters of a decade into the 21st Century -- and where are we? Any old fogy like me can list dozens of things that are different from when he was a kid, from TV sets that only received two channels to gas that cost 25 ¢ a gallon. Nowadays we use “cents” so seldom that when I looked at the symbols available to this font (the little “c” with the line through it has long since vanished from keyboards) there is no such symbol. I had to code it in HTML. I'm even more out of date than I thought!
Anyway, us old fogies can list all the things that were so much better about the good old days and, equally as well, all the things that are wrong with the world today. It might even sound good to some of you youngsters -- nostalgic, and all that. Fact is, though, it wasn’t quite the way it's often described.
Back then, we had “family values.” That referred to a paternalistic system relegating women to only a half-dozen positions (not counting that one) if they didn’t want to be “homemakers." A woman with a “higher” education could be a school teacher or nurse. If she was so unfortunate as to have “only” a high school education, she was stuck with being a clerk somewhere, or perhaps a waitress (despite the fact that a high school education back then was the equivalent, in many ways, of college today).
If the lady (they were all ladies, to their faces) didn’t aspire to independence, she could slave sixteen or eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, taking care of her husband and kids. Clothes dryers were strung across back yards. Dishwashers were at the ends of your arms. Until I was about seven, my mother darned our socks by the light of a kerosene lamp. (Socks were repaired when they got holes in them. Novel idea, huh?) Vacuum cleaners were nearly more trouble than they were worth. There was a choice, if a woman was lucky, of a gas or “coal oil” (kerosene) stove to cook on. If she was unlucky, the stove burned wood. If she was really lucky, the family might have hot water on tap to wash dishes and bathe -- a tub bath, for most, showers being mostly found in newer urban dwellings. Most of Mrs. Homemaker's clothes were cotton, and she had to iron them all, along with everyone else's.
Air conditioning was rare, especially in kitchens.
A family of more means might have a “colored woman” who came in to help. This unfortunate soul would do all the stuff the lady of the house found too boring or strenuous, for perhaps a dollar or so a day. She’d go home to the same duties she’d just helped her employer with, in a house of questionable structural integrity, with a tin roof that might not leak too badly. She would almost certainly not have indoor plumbing. Water would be brought in from a “spicket” in the yard (or someone else's yard) and heated on the stove for washing dishes, bathing, and so forth.
She’d be called “Miz Jones” or “Sadie” to her face, and “nigger” the rest of the time. She would have only about a 10% chance of finishing high school, much less a chance of any higher education. If she managed somehow to advance beyond high school, she’d probably teach in the “colored” school.
She’d be afraid to vote.
Men worked hard too, albeit not usually as long as the women. People stayed with their families in those days, and supported them most of the time. They may have been drunks or philanderers, may have beaten their wives or incested their daughters, but it would never be spoken of outside the home -- and rarely inside it. The one thing a man couldn't live down was failure to support his family. Men (and, rarely, women) “ran off” sometimes, but almost never stayed in their same community if they abandoned their families. These strictures and the ones controlling women's destiny made for a lot of loveless marriages, many that might have been better ended early, or avoided altogether, but we point with pride to the lack of divorces back then.
Long distance calls cost three to five dollars a minute. The cars running on quarter-a-gallon gas got eight or nine miles per gallon and needed to be tuned up monthly, or at least it seemed so. Keep in mind, in the days when $400 a month was good money, even a quarter a gallon was pretty hefty. Health insurance was even less common than it is today, and nonexistent for “ordinary” people. Movie houses had one screen, and you watched what there was. TV, as mentioned above, was limited to a couple of channels if you were lucky. The most channels possible in those days was twelve -- all network programming that was pretty strictly censored. That's if you had TV. Most folks listened to their radios.
Mothers worried constantly all summer that their kids would be exposed to polio. They worried all winter about pneumonia, whooping cough, and a host of ills that would nowadays be dismissed with two days off from school and some pills or a shot, if that. More likely, today, the kid will have been immunized and won't catch them at all.
When people had heart attacks they died, or remained for a short time as cripples.
What I'm getting at here is simply this: as Billy Joel put it, “The good old days weren't always good, and tomorrow ain't as bad as it seems.” For every great nostalgic example of the G.O.D.’s, I can throw back at you three or four advantages we have today that were unheard of when I was a kid.
I was ragged unmercifully in grade school because I thought that someday men might go into space. I was “Space Man” for five years. Today, we have hoards of kids who never heard of Neil Armstrong, and who think a “giant leap for mankind” refers to some kind of extreme sport.
E-mail was written with an Eversharp. A digital word processor needed to be re-sharpened every paragraph or so. The computer I'm writing this on is so far superior to the ones used on the spacecraft that went to the Moon that a good comparison might be an abacus versus counting on your fingers and toes. And speaking of speed, an airline ticket from Miami to L.A. used to cost a month's wages, and the flight took 14 hours! Twenty years earlier, the trip would have taken seven days if you didn’t have too many flat tires along the way.
So when we become nostalgic, let's keep a bit of perspective. As Carly wrote, “These are the Good Old Days.”
(Carly who?)
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