When I Was Young Innovation has really taken off. We see new inventions all around us. We don’t realize the speed these things are coming out until we look back in time. The older a person is the more he or she realizes how much things have changed since they were young. When I look back the changes are almost overwhelming. In my day the kids played outside and when they were inside, they played with toy soldiers, dolls, cap pistols and all sorts of toy trucks and cars. Most families today complain they can’t even get the kids to go outside it all because they all want to spend their day playing games on the computer and many of these games are extremely violent. As a matter of fact, for those that criticize the use of toy guns all I can say is some of the games the kids are playing today are so brutal and loaded with blood and violence they are far worse than a kid using a cap pistol. Electric cars are starting to make their mark and many younger people believe they are something new, when in fact the electric car preceded the gasoline powered car. Throughout the history of cars and trucks there has always been electric vehicles and while electric cars waned, it was more practical at times to use electric trucks for short routes such as milk trucks, delivery trucks and so on. They weren’t as sophisticated as the ones we have today because the batteries would have to be charged outside of the vehicle and when the vehicle’s batteries ran down, they would just simply be replaced. Today we are on the verge of replacing all gasoline engine cars with electric cars. The only things holding us back are batteries with a longer-range and the number of charging stations. In the old days phone calls were expensive and that was all our phone would do, make and receive calls. You couldn’t take it anywhere because it was wired into your house or business. No one would’ve ever believed anything like what we have today would have been invented. We have replaced the old telephone with a cell phone which doubles as a camera, game machine, computer and information device and we are able to carry it in a pocket. Being able to see who you were talking to on the telephone was something which only happened in science fiction novels. In my day we were still being amazed by computers which filled entire rooms. Televisions hardly existed when I was small, they were around but hardly anybody had them, because we couldn’t afford them. When you did buy one you got a tiny screen measuring maybe 10 inches which showed black and white images on just a few channels. You had to struggle with the aerial to trying get it to pick up the optimum signal for the channel you are looking at and sometimes this was not easy. As time went by and televisions got a little better, aerials were mounted mostly on the outside and as high up as we could get them. This improved the pictures somewhat. Since then televisions have become relatively dirt cheap for a reasonable sized flatscreen smart television which gives you access to the Internet and streaming movie services besides picking up channels from your subscriber or even from a high-powered aerial which needs no adjustment. There was no Internet or social media and all the news we got was from newspapers, television and radio. Many newspapers used to publish several times a day so we could get the most up-to-date news. I remember my grandfather sending me out to get the night owl edition of the daily news from the candy store which was located right next to our apartment building. Most of us lived in apartment buildings because we couldn’t afford our own homes. There were a lot less people who had money where I came from. Today those cheap apartments have become highly desirable and expensive. The poor people have been pushed out of the neighborhood because the real estate prices have gone up so much. I know of one case where a building was turned into a condominium and the woman who bought her apartment for around $25,000 and when she died many years later, the apartment was worth at least $1,000,000. The big deal was to have a good job and by that I mean a job that paid a decent living wage, not necessarily any type of executive job just a good reliable job which might’ve even had a pension for you when you retired. If one of the people in your neighborhood was a postman, he was considered to be very lucky and who we looked up to. Today, some people would look down on somebody like that because he was a college graduate or working for some big prestigious company. We just didn’t think that way in the old days. We felt any work as long as it was legal was desirable. My grandfather, who was a deaf-mute, used to walk many miles to a newspaper called the Brooklyn Eagle which is no relation to the paper with the same name today. He was a typesetter and for years he would shape up which meant being hired on a daily basis if needed and if not needed would have no job for that day. He eventually got hired full-time and we were also happy for him. We trusted the government unconditionally and believed everything they told us; we just didn’t know any better. When World War II broke out, millions of people volunteered to fight. Women became more independent as they took over the jobs of the men who left for the war. We weren’t really involved in politics the way people are today. You usually didn’t meet anybody that wanted to argue with you about politics, so that subject was usually not brought up. One might comment on someone who was running for office, but that would be about the height of it. Things have changed so much today. The technology would be totally unrecognizable by people who were alive when I was young, but are now gone . It seems to me people are a lot more combative these days. One of the things I noticed is there were many more very old cars being used when I was young. In other words, people would be driving all the buckets rather than getting rid of them. I don’t know if this is just where I lived or was like that in most places in those days. One can only imagine what the next fifty years will bring.
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