I've known at least two people in my life that I would say were born 50 years too late. One was my mother's father, my grandfather, Burton Clement. The other was a friend in Atkins, Ark. My Granddad Clement kind of made the adjustment from the horse age into the motor car age, but he was never comfortable with the new way of life which was developing over his lifetime. Grandpa did buy a Model T Ford car back in the 1920s, and sort of learned to drive it, but cars always made him nervous. Horses at least listened to what you told them, and mostly responded to your voice commands. Cars didn't listen, you had to move the right lever or push the right pedal; and Grandpa's mind automatically wanted to say "Whoa!" before he could think to push the brake pedal.
Grandpa could drive the Model T, and he ventured trips from Bentonville to Eureka Springs from time to time, herding the old T through all those tight curves and steep hills in Carroll County. But Grandpa never learned to shift down to low gear on the hills. Once the car was moving and shifted into high, he never shifted back to low, even on the hills. So, when they got on a good hill, and the T's little 4-cylinder motor went into heavy labor, my Mom (then a young teen) would prompt him, "Daddy, you need to shift! Daddy, you need to shift to low!" and the T would strain for all its worth in high until the motor stalled. Then it was everybody out of the car, scotch the wheels with rocks to keep it from rolling back, and crank the motor to life again. Everybody push to get us going again, and we'll stop the car and wait for you at the top of the hill so everybody can get back in! My Mom always wished her Daddy would let her drive, because she knew how to shift the T to low and keep the little motor chuckling up the hills.
My Atkins friend, Marsh, just loved being around horses. He loved watching them out in the fields, watching them at work under harness; he just purely enjoyed working with horses. When our country was celebrating the bicentennial in 1976, he took his team and wagon and joined the wagon train to Washington, D.C. He always talked about that trip, traveling with other wagons and teams of horses, camping out and roughing it along the way, and replicating 1776 ways of life on the way to the nation's capital. I always thought that Marsh would have been more comfortable if he had been born in the 1870s instead of in the 1920s. By the 1920s, automobiles were appearing everywhere, and the age of horses was beginning to fade.
Some people like to say that we old people don't like change. We tend to get set in our ways and resistant to new things.
I think that supposition can have a certain measure of truth to it, and examples can be given to show us old folks as disliking change. However, I also think that idea is much exaggerated, and we old folks are not given enough credit for all the changes we have taken into our lives across the years. For example, human beings lived for thousands of years without electricity in their homes. Many of us who were born before 1945 easily recall when only the people living in town had electric lights. On the farm, we had kerosene lamps. We drew our water from the well with a rope and a bucket. The bathtub was a No. 3 galvanized wash tub. The toilet was the little square building outside down the path. Did we feel deprived and miserable because we were not electrified? No. Life was good. We were happy. Except, a huge war was going on overseas.
At the same time, we were beginning to hear about electric lights and electric radios and electric fans and electric mixers and electric irons for ironing clothes. President Roosevelt was working to form the REA and things like Carroll Electric Cooperative to build "high-lines" and bring electricity to farms across the country. The times were a-changin' and we changed!
Nevertheless, sometimes we older folks are resistant indeed. We may just get weary of having to change how we do things we have known how to do for a long time. For example, in 1944, I learned to brush my teeth with a toothbrush operated by my right hand. I have never felt a need for an electrified tooth brush. In 1984, I joined the computer age. I learned to program my computer in BASIC and was gaining expertise as an Assembly Language programmer. Then my Commodore computer became out-moded and was discontinued, and I started over with IBM-compatibles and MS-DOS. About the time I gained proficiency in MS-DOS, along came WINDOWS and graphical interfaces and new ways of doing things.
Then came emails and the Internet, and pretty soon viruses and malicious hackers and anti-virus software and firewalls, and worm threats and phishing schemes and complications. You learn your word processor and your spreadsheet and then they change the interfaces and you have to relearn everything. It gets wearisome after awhile, the changing just to have the newest thing. Then comes MySpace and Instant Messaging, and later Facebook and Instagram and Twitter, and LinkedIn and Snapchat, and some of us old folks begin feeling like drawing the line!
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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, member of the Pea Ridge Alumni Association and vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. Opinions expressed are those of the writer. He can be contacted by email at [email protected], or call 621-1621.
Editorial on 05/31/2017