Excerpts Chapters 9 - 12

CHAPTER 9: SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY: Hal and His Pals

One year before the beginning of the twentieth century, Charles Dowell, the head of the U.S. Patent office, urged in a letter to President Grover Cleveland that “everything has been invented already. Let us close down the patent office.” Shortsightedness in the extreme!

The twentieth century was the century of invention, which produced the most dramatic changes in the history of the world, and its major characteristic was the intense, exponential growth of scientific knowledge. Because of accelerating technology, the last one hundred years ushered in more discoveries and inventions than in the entire chronicle of civilization. It was the age of splitting the atom, medical imaging, nuclear reactors, atom and hydrogen bombs, of probing the nature of the galaxies and our own psyche. It brought us the transistor and the silicon chip, plastics, organ transplants and artificial knees, antibiotics and vaccines for infectious diseases, radio and television, lasers, satellites, radar, transcontinental flight, computers, wireless communications, the Internet, the World Wide Web, and landings on the moon.

I was born in 1932, so home radios hadn’t been around very long. When I was a little boy we had a big console radio in the living room. No one had small portable radios then because they were powered by large vacuum tubes. The tubes were always burning out so you had to keep a supply on hand because if one burned out on Friday night, you wouldn’t have a radio until 11 o’clock Tuesday morning when the stores opened again, because many of them were closed on Mondays. Most households had only one radio, so you didn’t have music to accompany you while you were in the kitchen cooking, or in the basement workshop. We didn’t have a record player of course, because records came later, and when they finally arrived they were thick, scratchy vinyl 78 rpms and, if you accidentally dropped one, it would break into pieces. When we got the plastic ones after the war you had to be careful where you put them because they’d warp and melt quite easily.

About 1960 I bought my first transistor radio; a tiny thing you could hold in the palm of your hand that ran on batteries. It was amazing! That meant we could carry it to the beach, and even have a radio in the car. That seems really strange now when I have a Walkman that I use on my morning run, and a portable CD player that I take to the beach.

- Bob Harrison, electrical engineer, Miami Beach.

Western Union Teletype Operating Room,
Seattle, WA, 1930

I worked for Canadian National Telegraphs in the fifties as a teletype operator. The press wires were in the back offices, along with a few Morse Code keys that were still being used by some old-timers, mainly sending messages to ships at sea. It was a really exciting job because of course we got to read the telegrams while we were sending them. People today wouldn’t like that form of message transmission because it isn’t private enough. We were all sworn to confidentiality, but sometimes we’d call another operator over to share a particularly interesting telegram, usually from a movie star, or some other famous person. On the late night shift when there wasn’t much business, we’d go to the back room and read the news coming over the wires from the United Press and Associated Press.

Getting a telegram in those days was a big event and sometimes very scary. During the war people were frightened by them because they were afraid they would bring bad news. People would send telegrams to someone who might not have a phone, or they wanted to put the message in writing. The telegraph boy in his black and yellow uniform would come to your house and hand it to you personally, that service was part of what you were paying for. People liked to send them to wish someone a happy birthday or anniversary. Somebody capitalized on that by inventing the ‘singing telegram,’ or telegrams delivered by someone in a gorilla suit, which were always fun to get.”

- Melanie Yates, retired teletype operator, born 1934, Toronto

At the beginning of the century only eight percent of homes had a telephone and long distance calls were so expensive, people made them only in dire emergencies. A three-minute call to New York City from Denver cost eleven dollars; a huge amount in 1903.

Until we got a rotary dial phone in 1935 we picked up the phone and asked the operator to get us the number. Usually it was a party-line so there were one or more other families sharing a line with you. In those days relatives often lived close to each other, so your grandparents or great aunt might be on the same line. If someone was talking when you wanted to make a call, you just had to wait your turn unless it was an emergency, and then you could ask the operator to break in. The operator and your neighbors on the party-line could also listen in to your call if they had a mind to, but people were usually too polite to do so in those days; otherwise, this system wouldn’t have worked very well.

- Adrian D’Angelo, photographer, born 1940.

In 1933 there were 10 working telephones at Lockheed, the California aircraft manufacturer.  By 1944 there were 5,871. I’m the 6th operator from the right in this picture.  – Beth Northridge, retired switchboard operator

When I first started with AT&T 35 years ago, operators, who were always female, had to wear dresses and heels, even though the customers never saw us. We would always answer by giving our name, and saying ‘How can I help you?’ But now we’re impersonal because we don’t have the time. You just can’t spend time with people because you only have so many seconds for each call, and it’s all counted automatically so the company can track your performance. In the old days people would call and maybe ask you about a storm that was coming up in a city nearby. Now I’m just a disembodied voice identified with the phone company by a number. That makes it easier to just disconnect a customer if they’re rude to you, and a lot of people are these days, they just don’t have any patience.

Thirty-five years ago we use to plug the calls manually into a “cord board,” and each operator only took care of about six local cities or towns. If you wanted to go beyond that you had to call the long-distance operator. The end of the world for most operators came in 1984 when AT&T divested. At that time there were 40,000 operators, and now there are about 8,000, and there’ll be even less in another ten years; just enough to handle the problem calls. With computers and voice synthesizers, the customers can do their own dialing and save some money, and so can the company.”

- Clarita Morenez, telephone operator, born 1946, Pittsburgh, PA

BITS, BYTES AND GIGABYTES

Two of the greatest inventions of the twentieth century were transistors and the microprocessor, and both were invented in America. In the summer of 1946, a tiny electronic device the size of a pea, called a transistor, was presented to the world during a press conference at the headquarters of Bell Laboratories in New York. This little device, invented by Walter H. Brattain and William Shockley, was one of the century’s greatest technological discoveries, underlying all of modern electronics, from supercomputers to talking greeting cards. The transistor, with solid-state electronics, replaced vacuum tubes, and transformed the electronic world. It eventually turned furniture-sized living-room radios into walkmans and boom boxes that could blow out your hearing, and its direct descendant, the integrated circuit, turned room-sized computers into laptops and hand-held devices. Today the world produces about as many transistors as it does printed characters in all the newspapers, books, magazines, computer and electronic-copier pages combined.

The transformation of modern society with the invention of the microprocessor has been like an earthquake, shaking up our working and private lives. The computer is the signature technology of the latter half of the twentieth century and, without really being aware of it, our daily lives are dominated by them.

When I first started working in an office, if something had to be printed, I would take it down to the local printer who used hot type or typesetting to set it up, and maybe would take a week or two to print a sales brochure. Then came offset printing and things got done a lot faster, but now we have desktop publishing and I design the manuals and brochures right at my desk on my Mac, and print them in full color on my desktop laser printer, and they look really super. If I don’t have time to print a large job I just take it down to the local copy store and run it off. All of these changes have taken a lot of the drudgery out of clerical office work.

Another neat thing is that I can wear pants or casual clothes to the office and don’t have to trip around in those stupid high heels all day, breaking my back. And—my boss is a woman.”

- Stephanie Reagan, designer, born 1950, Hollywood, CA

CHAPTER 10: WOMEN: You’ve Come a Long Way Baby!

The greatest cultural change of the century was the woman’s movement, which was resurrected in the late sixties, and freed millions of females from dependency on their husbands, sending them en masse into the workplace, and in search of higher education. Feminism radically and inalterably changed the role of women from being subservient to men and generally considered inferior, to the introduction of women into management and formerly male-only jobs, with demands for equal pay. This was greatly resisted by some males who wanted their wives to have dinner on the table in the evening and a clean ironed shirt awaiting them in the morning, and had no plans for helping to change the baby’s diapers. Women’s entrance into the workplace meant shared housework, a notion foreign to most men, and considered beneath them.

Protesting Feminism in Pennsylvania

When I married Paul in 1952 I was twenty-one and had worked as a secretary since I was eighteen. I had two years of high school, and some secretarial training, and that was enough in those days to get a good job. Not many females had completed high school, and it wasn’t required as long as you could type. I fully expected to keep on working until we had children but, as soon as we got home from our honeymoon, Paul told me to quit my job Monday morning. He was eight years older than I, and he had a good job which could provide for both of us financially. I asked him why and he just said that standard phrase of the day: “No wife of mine is going to work.” That was all that needed to be said because you were supposed to obey your husband in those days. It really scared me because I knew that meant I’d be totally dependent on him and, if I wanted a dollar for something, I’d have to go to him and ask for it. I just wasn’t the type to be that helpless so I pleaded with him to let me work part-time. He finally said okay, provided I kept the house clean and had supper ready when he got home from work.

Paul had a car that he drove to his office, and I had one too, but he prevailed upon me to sell it when we got married. Since it was a big old gas guzzling Buick that I’d bought second-hand, I agreed. After I sold it, he wouldn’t let me drive his car, so I had to carry the groceries home eight blocks from the store, even in the winter in sub-freezing weather. On Saturdays Paul would go out all day exploring hardware stores, boat docks and other places he liked to hang around. In the meantime I was supposed to clean our two-story house from top to bottom and, when he got home, he actually gave it the white glove treatment and complained if he found any dust. For years I never protested his treating me in such a demeaning way because I was doing my best be a good wife; after all, that was a woman’s highest calling in the fifties. It’s hard for me to believe now that I submitted to this type of treatment, but that was a different world then and your husband was king.

I went back to school in the seventies and got a degree in accounting, and then I divorced Paul because I was fed up with waiting on him. He was devastated and couldn’t understand what went wrong because, as he told the marriage counselor, “he loved me and was perfectly happy with our marriage and thought I was too.” When she asked him what he loved about me, he said I was a great cook, kept the house clean, and took good care of him. I thought I detected a flicker of disgust on the therapist’s face, but I could have imagined it.

- Joanne Anderson, accountant, born 1931, Dover, Minnesota

Mrs. Harriett DeCelles doing the wash in 1940

In the past, if a woman wasn’t married by the time she was twenty-five, she was considered an “old maid.” If she decided not to marry, or if no man asked to marry her, she could become a teacher, nurse, secretary, clerk or waitress. She was often refused admission into college, and so-called "male" jobs were flatly denied her. Until 1975 the "Help Wanted" ads in newspapers were divided by gender. A woman could get a job selling dresses or lingerie, but she couldn't sell washing machines or vacuum cleaners. A large-ticket item, or anything remotely mechanical, was reserved for men to sell. Even in the nineties, very few car lots had female salespersons.

After getting divorced in the sixties, I was in for a shock when I tried to re-establish my life as a single person. I wanted to rent a small three-room cottage but the landlord refused to rent to me because he didn’t think a female was capable of taking care of a house by herself, so I had to get an apartment. Then I went to Sears to establish credit in my own name and buy some furniture. They refused to give it to me, claiming that, since I had no credit record, they couldn’t establish my ability to pay. In those days all the credit had to be in your husband’s name, so there was nothing in my maiden name, and companies didn’t think women made enough money to be trusted with a credit card. These weren’t Visa or Mastercards, there was no such thing then, they were just department-store cards for furniture and clothing. The irony was that my husband was totally irresponsible when it came to money, and I had always paid all the bills and made sure I did it on time. He got the benefit of my frugality and responsible habits because we had a perfect credit record when we divorced, but that didn’t do me any good; it was all his. It wasn’t until the women’s movement of the seventies that Congress passed a law making it illegal to deny women credit in their own name.”

- Merlinda Schrader, bookstore owner, born 1940, Louisiana

LOST IDENTITY

In the past the society pages of newspapers always related social events as held by, for example: “Mr. and Mrs. Robert McBride.” After the resurgence of feminism, women began objecting to losing their entire identity to the male after marriage, and insisted on being called “Mrs. Nancy McBride.” Some women chose to keep their own last name after marriage, often hyphenating it into a double-name.

When I married David back in the fifties, I was really proud to be called “Mrs. David Logan.” I remember I used to write that name in my journal over and over before we were married, and I could hardly wait to be called ‘Mrs.’ because married women had more status then. In fact, if you weren’t married by the time you were twenty-four people thought there was something wrong with you, and you thought so yourself. Nobody wanted to be an old maid. Men were the superior sex, so if you wanted to be somebody you had to be married to one. And the more important he was, the more important you were, because that’s where your identity came from.

After marriage I seldom used my first name when introducing myself in public, I was Mrs. David Logan, and that’s how I addressed all my mail. And you know, it never really dawned on me until the seventies when I read Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique that I had lost my total identity with that name. I didn’t have my last name anymore, and I didn’t have my first name either. I wasn’t a person in my own right--I was David’s wife. When I finally woke up to how I’d been so willing to give myself up, I was mad. --Call me Meredith.”

CHAPTER 11: GETTING THERE: From Horse and Buggy to Outer Space

This picture of my father, Edwin, sitting in the center, wrapped in a
blanket because of the cold, was taken in 1906 when he was a year old. He
was with his grandparents in front of their house in Aitkin, Minnesota.
- Helen Wendt Smith

When I was a child in the twenties I loved to listen to the clippity-clop of the horses’ hooves as they trotted down the street. We kids played on the street because there were hardly any cars. We used to just have dirt roads, but when they paved them over they put rubber shoes instead of metal on the horses’ feet because that made it easier for them to walk on the hard concrete. There were horse troughs full of water every half mile or so, which had one side for the horses and one side for humans. It was mostly filled with rainwater. There was usually an old tin cup hanging on a post that everyone in town used to drink from. That would be unimaginable today!

- Lorna McKenzie, mother and grandmother, born 1917, Canton, Ohio

My father drove a seven-passenger 1917 Chandler touring car during World War I. It took ten hours to go 160 miles to my dad's farm in Iowa. In those years if you could drive fifty miles without getting a flat tire, you were really lucky. Of course if you did get one, you changed it yourself; there were no service stations along the two-lane highway. My first car was a 1923 Model T Ford, which I bought for $150 in 1930. In 1941, I earned $3,000 a year, and I bought a brand-new Pontiac for $l,100 and drove it from Cleveland to Boston in one day. That sounds like a lot of money, but today people often spend more than a third of their yearly pay to buy a new car.

- Donald Roan, retired butcher, born 1912

When I bought my first car, a big Pontiac, in 1938, none of the modern conveniences had been invented, but of course I didn’t miss them. It had a heater but one usually arrived at their destination before the heat kicked in. There was no radio, and therefore no antenna, There were no turn-signals, so you had to roll down the window and stick your arm out to indicate which way you wanted to turn. But in those days we always kept the windows open in the summer because there wasn’t any air-conditioning. It was a gear-shift of course, because automatic drive hadn’t been invented yet, so one had to become adept at changing gears in traffic. But, since there was very little traffic, that wasn’t much of a problem.

-Jonathan Wilson, retired dentist, born 1921, Detroit

CHAPTER 12: A POTPOURRI OF CHANGES

Most people who were alive when the twentieth century opened, didn’t get to celebrate their fiftieth birthday; the average life span was only forty-seven years. Statistically, it is now seventy-nine years for women, almost seven years longer than men. In actual fact, many people live into their eighties and even nineties, and it’s no longer astonishing to find people over 100 years old. Life was fairly primitive in 1900, you couldn’t take a bath unless you lived in one of the fourteen percent of homes in the U.S. that had a bathtub, and only eight percent of homes had a telephone.

People worked for what would be considered starvation wages, even compared to the cost of living at the time. The average wage in the U.S. was twenty-two cents an hour, and the average worker, almost always a male, made between $200 and $400 per year! A professional, such as a dentist or accountant, could expect to earn between $2,000 and $2,500 per year. Most people, particularly women, had never graduated from high school, and one in ten U.S. adults couldn’t read or write.

CRIME: FROM CRIMINAL ORGANIZATIONS TO KIDS WITH UZI’S

One of the most significant changes after the 1960s was the increase in crime. When the twentieth century began, there were only 230 reported murders in the entire United States! This was soon to change.

When I was a housewife in the fifties, home alone with my three little kids, salesmen would often come knocking on my door, selling things like hair brushes, encyclopedias and vacuum cleaners. They were uninvited and unannounced, yet I always opened the door to them. If I were interested in their product, I would even invite them to come in and give me a demonstration, and it never occurred to me that they might rob or rape me. Sometimes they were hucksters, peddling wares that soon broke down, or expensive items that I really didn’t need, but got talked into because of low monthly payment schemes or special discounts. But for the most part they were honest, hard-working enterprising men who had to live on commissions earned with a smooth line of talk and a pleasant personality. I often welcomed their calls because I was starved for the companionship of an adult, and they seemed to know that sharing some local gossip helped persuade women to buy their product. Today I never open my door for someone I don’t know, especially a male. At night I never even answer the door unless I know someone’s coming over.

- Maria Parades, social worker, born 1936, Los Lunas, NM

Salesman Demonstrating a Vacuum Cleaner

In Buffalo when I was a kid an Italian baker who had a little grocery store a few blocks from our house would come by in a horse and enclosed wagon once a week and deliver the bread. If nobody was at home, he would simply leave it on the windowsill, and no one ever took it. Stealing a neighbor’s loaf of bread was unthinkable in those days. A few week’s ago I moved into a new neighborhood. I had an old rattan chair that I decided to put out on the front porch. It was gone in the morning.”

- Roberta Berg, cake decorator, born 1926.

When I was 14 years old I was very introverted and loved to read. On Sundays I would take a book with me and go to a ravine I’d discovered in back of Casa Loma in Toronto. I enjoyed strolling by myself down the path through the woods, just listening to the chirping of the birds, and watching the sunlight stream through the trees, and maybe see a little chipmunk or squirrel run by. When I got to the little wooden bridge that crossed over the stream, I’d sit on the edge and let my feet dangle into the cool water, while I read my book. It was so peaceful there, I always felt close to the creative power of the universe, and it was really an inspiration. Sometimes people would stroll by, but it was very rare because this ravine was rather isolated. If a man came by walking alone, we would usually just exchange a greeting, and he would be on his way. No one ever bothered me there. Today the idea of an adolescent girl walking alone in the woods is preposterous; the sad fact is there’s a good chance she wouldn’t make it out alive.

– Marta D’Angelo, writer, born 1936.

KEEPING WARM AROUND THE BACKYARD FIRE PIT

When I think about the “good old days,” one of the things I miss most is the sweet smell of leaves burning. Every Saturday during the Fall my dad and brother would gather up the leaves from the big old Oak tree in our back yard and put them in a barrel. At dusk all the kids came and stood around the fire watching the leaves burn while mom was cooking supper. There was no concern then about air pollution because we didn’t have enough people then, or enough cars, to create a lot of it.

Another thing I miss is getting firecrackers on the fourth of July, which was always a big holiday in my youth. Although my folks were very conservative when it came to the safety of their kids, they seemingly thought nothing of providing my brother and me with firecrackers so we could join in terrorizing the neighborhood kids by sneaking up behind them and dropping a lit one. But, they were too dangerous, and now they’re gone in most places.

- Mary Jackson, realtor, born 1932, Warm Springs, CA

In 1932 President Herbert Hoover promised his constituents “a chicken in every pot.” In 1992, at his inaugural address, President Clinton promised the voters “a computer in every classroom.” These two very diverse statements depict the progress that has been made in the last century, and the last millennium. At the beginning the emphasis was on taking care of our physical needs, but at the end the focus was on advancing our intellectual objectives.

WHAT A CENTURY IT HAS BEEN!

Kilroy Was Here