Mike Parker: Living history through the last century
As I was working on completing the writing assignment my son gave me - “Dad, I Want to Hear Your Story” - some of the prompts asked me to outline the events that took place near the time of my birth in 1950. As I looked at the advancements made since then, I started wondering what changes had taken place in my mother’s life.
A couple of weeks ago, my mom turned 96. She was born in 1928. The world she was born into was much different from the world I entered in 1950. She attended a one-room schoolhouse – Wickline School – where children from first to eighth grade learned from one teacher in one room.
The school she attended did not have running water or indoor bathroom facilities. School-provided lunches did not exist, so each child ate what their moms packed in their lunch sacks - or what they packed themselves. In place of a water fountain, the classroom had a bucket and one dipper. Every student who needed a drink sipped from the same dipper.
She walked through fields and woods to get to school. No buses came to pick up the students, so the children had to leave their homes early enough to arrive on time. When the weather was hot, they had no air conditioning, and the only source of heat was a pot-bellied stove that the teacher arrived early to fire up to take the chill off the room. After all, Mom grew up in the mountains of West Virginia.
The Great Depression struck roughly a year and a month after her birth, but she and her family barely noticed. They were farm people and largely self-sufficient. My mom’s parents did not have electricity in their home until after I was born.
Mom was born in the year that Alexander Fleming accidentally discovered that penicillin was an antibiotic. Scotch tape did not exist until 1930, and in 1937, Edwin Land founded a business to develop and market Polaroid cameras.
Parker Brothers has marketed “Monopoly” since 1934. In 1943, “Silly Putty” fired the imagination of many American kids. In 1949, bakers no longer had to make cakes from scratch because cake mix developed. Nylon for stockings dates from 1935, and Velcro made its first appearance in 1948.
The atomic bomb, which began development in 1941 and was first used in 1945, was a fission weapon whose power depended on splitting atoms. By 1952, scientists had developed a fusion bomb, also known as the hydrogen bomb. This weapon fused heavy hydrogen nuclei into helium, resulting in tremendous and destructive energy. The first fusion bomb was 450 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
Mom was born less than a decade after World War I, but in her lifetime, she has lived through World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and the host of Middle Eastern conflicts.
Think of the developments in airplanes that occurred in her 96 years. Personal computers did not appear until 1977. Then came cell phones and smartphones. Now, many are concerned about the capabilities and threats of Artificial Intelligence.
The progression of areas that impact our lives seems to have been exponential during her lifetime. I doubt the world has seen more developments in medicine, science, and communication in the life of any person in our collective history than my mom has observed in her 96 years.
But some things never change – such as her devotion to family and her faith in the Lord.
She repeatedly tells me, “I wasn’t brought up in this electronic age.” I chuckle. The changes she has observed go far beyond electronics.
Mike Parker is a columnist for the Neuse News. You can reach him at mparker16@gmail.com.
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