I remember one time back in the 1970s, my daughter Jennifer asked me to tell her some things about "the old days," like back in the '50s! My first reaction at the time was to say, "Why Jennifer, the '50s weren't the old days! To me, the old days were the 1930s and the early 1940s. The old days to me were times before I was born and shortly after, the days of the Great Depression after 1929, and the World War II years of the late 1930s through 1945. When the 1950s dawned, things felt new and modern to me. We now had electricity in our house, the war was over, (although Korea was not looking good), I was in the fifth grade, and things were looking bright on the home front. I tended to think of the years 1900 through the 1920s as the old, old days, and the 1800s were a really long time ago.
I suppose when we are young, anything before our lifetime seems like a long time ago. But it was reading the Bible that started me thinking about time and the passing of time a bit differently. I noticed that it was nothing for biblical writers to be talking about people who had lived 400 years before them, or a 1,000 years before them, and speaking of how things that happened a long time ago were important to consider in shaping what is to happen in the now. In our days, in the 2000s, it is not uncommon for people to think of the long ago as a kind of forgotten and even unreal time that doesn't make much difference to us. Many of us know almost nothing about who our great-grandparents were, or what they did, or the things that led up to our being born where we were, or how our family's situation in life all developed.
I heard an ad the other day saying that Chevrolet has been making automobiles in the USA for 100 years! That seems like a long time ago to most of us. But from a world time perspective, a hundred years is just a brief few days. Human beings haven't had cars all that long. Someone told me some days back that in the early days of the automobile, the Whippet car was very popular. I looked that up on the Internet and found that Whippets were introduced in the 1920s. Although in the 1920s the Fords were the leading automobiles in sales, the Whippet was in second place at times, along with the Essex. The Whippet was made by Willys, out of which came today's Jeep, and the Essex was made by Hudson, which is not with us anymore.
During the 1940s and 1950s, I think most of us would have never imagined that we would see cars from other countries matching the numbers of our American cars on our roads. Once in a great while we would see in imported Jaguar, or a Volkswagen. We knew from World War II that the Japanese knew how to make a fearsome fighter plane, but we had never heard of Toyota, or Nissan, or Mitsubishi, or Honda, or Lexus, or Infiniti, or Acura. And, we just supposed that Oldsmobile, and Packard, and Plymouth, and Pontiac, all of which had been around "forever," would just keep on being around forever. But, as it goes with cars, the 1950s were a long time ago, way back there when Chevrolet started making V8s. That was a huge legacy-altering change from the tradition of the in-line Six, which of course had been quite a bold step forward in its day.
Now, I think the computer age has put a new wrinkle in our thoughts about the old days. In a sense, the old days of computers was the 1970s, back before computers were affordable by ordinary people. In the earliest days, a computer occupied a sizeable room, and needed a major cooling system to handle the heat from all those glass tubes. But by the 1980s, the personal computer, as introduced by IBM, plus the Apple IIe and Macintosh, plus the many clones of the IBM, and many other makes such as the Commodore 64, had begun making computers affordable. The invention of transistors was one of the major developments in electronics, opening up a new world of computers, calculators, new TVs, music players, cell phones and so on.
In the world of electronics, the 1970s are a long, long time ago. I suppose there are probably people who think that time began and real life began with the invention of smart phones. To them, probably everything before smart phones is the Dark Ages, when there was no Twitter, no Facebook, no Instagram, no friending, no likes, no unfriending, and when there was nothing interesting to do. To those who are really "into" social media, I suppose MySpace is a distant memory, maybe totally forgotten now? Ten years ago, MySpace was "big." But that was a long time ago!
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Editor's note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.
Editorial on 03/11/2015