Harmon’s Histories: When you become the age of history
Jim Harmon
There comes a time for everyone, I suppose, when it hits you: you’ve reached an age at which you have become history.
I’m not sure how I feel about being of historical age, but I was born in 1946 - so, I have witnessed many things in my life; things that younger generations have only read about.
For instance: The Korean war, the Vietnam war, the Cold War, the creation of Israel, NATO, the Chinese Communist revolution, the Cuban missile crisis, Civil rights, President Nixon visiting China, the Berlin wall, the World Wide Web, the first attempts at organ transplants, astronauts walking on the moon, NAFTA, Panamanian control of the canal, and the Arab Spring.
But, there are also the smaller things that remind me that I am an analog person, living in a digital world. I like to touch things, feel things, and know things by the physical size and space they inhabit - not by a digital plus or minus, or a one and a zero.
That nuance is important. By its very definition it’s “a subtle or slight difference in sound, feeling, meaning, or appearance.”
As a friend of mine, who is approaching 100 years of age, once said of crypto currency, “Give me one of those crypto dollars; I’d like to know what it looks like and feels like in my hand.” “Well,” said the crypto entrepreneur, “It doesn’t work that way,” to which my wise old friend said, “Then it’s a bunch of hooey.”
Since I am an analog person, I know how great a vinyl record sounds. I know how great an analog FM radio station sounded.
Speaking of radio, I wonder how many young people know what a “galena crystal set” or a “cat’s whisker detector” are?
They’ve been around since the early 1900s. I enjoyed making crystal sets and using them in the 1950s, before the vacuum-tube, the transistor, and (now) digital chips and streaming services have made them obsolete.
Crystal sets are a perhaps the simplest and most inexpensive means of detecting an AM radio signal.
AM radio? “What’s that?” ask today’s youth, confirming my fossil-dom.
A galena cat's-whisker detector had a very fine metal wire attached to a moveable arm. You would drag the wire across a small crystal of lead sulfide (galena) searching for just the right spot to pick up the audio signal from a carrier wave.
Radio aside, throughout the 20th century, personal, face-to-face conversations were still the go-to, basic means of communication. Men and women would set up hundreds of social, religious and fraternal organizations, but their group get-togethers boiled down to a chance to catch up on the latest gossip of the town.
My mother loved her Ladies Aid Society (Methodist church) meetings. We kids were banished from the living room while these meetings were conducted. “Go upstairs to your bedrooms, and I don’t want to hear a peep out of you.”
But, we would always sneak over to the heat register above the living room fuel-oil furnace to hear all the latest.
Today folks seem to communicate primarily through cell phones, text messaging, video calls, streaming and virtual reality. We used to guard our personal information as…well… personal. Today, much of our personal information can be accessed from our cell phones and hard drives - many handing out their innermost thoughts on social media.
We have discarded our corded tools in favor of portable, battery-powered drills and weed eaters, we are steadily replacing communication wires with fiber optics, and the days of the shade-tree mechanics are nearly gone, carburetors and all, replaced by intricate circuit boards.
A lot of Americans have never used a real oven. They cook with a microwave. Percy Spencer would be proud. He patented the first microwave oven, according to the Smithsonian Institute, “after noticing that a magnetron was emitting heat-generating microwaves during an experiment with radar in 1945.”
The stone mill and the screw press for making fruit juice have gone the way of the dinosaur; now, just museum pieces. Ask any youngster where a bottle of fruit juice comes from? The answer is: the grocery store.
And now, as I approach four score in human-years, I always thought the grand-kids, and potentially, great-grandchildren would crowd around me wanting to hear what it was like in the olden days.
Nope. Hasn’t happened. No interest at all. I guess they figure they can look anything up on their smart phones (viewed as an oxymoron in our household).
So, I’ve taken it upon myself to begin writing a mini-biography of my family history. I encourage other folks, of my same vintage, to do the same.
Your audience awaits. The kids just need to grow up; live a full and wonderful life.
When they are of a certain age, I believe they will appreciate all those personal stories. Why, they might even write their own histories. Wouldn’t that be nice?