It was February 1955. Our little street, which had been a dead-end, was being pushed through. What had been a narrow path through a swampy area just wide enough for one person to walk would soon be a paved road that connected to the street beyond. My world was about to expand.
[Alan in 1st
grade]
I was the oldest in our
family of what had just expanded from two children to three. I was
six-and-a-half and in first grade. My sister had just turned five at the end of
the previous year. She was a cute and precocious girl with blond hair. My
brother was only two months old. Our family had been living in this house in
Wolcott, CT since my father purchased it nearly nine years ago. He was 34-years-old
and had been working at Scovill Manufacturing as a draftsman since graduating
from high school (except for the two years he spent in the U.S. Navy during
WWII). My mother was a beautiful 30-year-old and was focused on raising we
children.
My grandparents (most of
them) were in their mid-to-late 50’s. The primary exception was my grandmother’s
second husband who was 30 years older than she was. He had been born just a few
months after the end of the Civil War, making him almost 90. I thought about
him growing up at a time before Edison invented the carbon filament light bulb.
Even when my other grandparents were born in the 1890s, light bulbs were not
common outside of major cities. Automobiles came along toward the end of the 1800s,
but even by 1910 there were only 5 vehicles per 1000 people in the US.
Commercial aviation was not available until the mid-1930s when my father was a
teenager. So the lives that my grandparents and parents lived were totally
different than my own has been.
While the road from our
house to the city where my father worked had been paved about twenty-years
earlier, he saw few cars on the road during the seven miles he drove to work.
Telephone service was provided by the cities to the north and south of us, so
it was a long-distance phone call to others even in the same town. We had
recently gotten a television (black-and-white of course). It only got three stations,
and they came from different directions so my father had put a motorized
antenna turner so we could turn the antenna on the chimney to get the best
reception possible. Shows were all live and after the late-night news there was
only a test pattern being broadcast until the following morning.
As noted above, I had
recently started school. Our little school serviced the entire northern section
of town, but still only had one class per grade. Some of my classmates came
from English backgrounds, as did I, and our ancestors had been here in the US
for over 300 years. Others came from more recent immigrant families and had
ancestors from places like French Canada, Italy, Poland, Ireland, Denmark, Germany,
or Austria. We were a pretty motley crew, but our differing backgrounds really
didn’t matter. Having the commonality of being in the same class was more
important than our ancestries.
Time Moved On
I stayed in that small
town until I graduated from high school in 1966. Then I spent five years in
Michigan for undergraduate and graduate school. Getting married, my wife and I
spent four years back in Connecticut, living in Prospect. Then in 1975 I got a
job offer in Eastern PA. We moved here in June of 1975 and have now been here
for approaching fifty years.
My biological
grandparents passed at ages 68, 71, 75, and 81, so I have lived longer than
three of them already and am quickly approaching the age of the last one. My step-grandfather
is the exception as he lived until the ripe-old age of 93. My parents were
married for nearly 60 years and both passed away at that house in Wolcott.
Now, my children are in
their mid-40s and only 20 years away from retirement. My oldest grandson is in
college and the youngest is several years older than I was back in 1955.
Interestingly, despite
having moved away so long ago, I still remain friends with many of my classmates
from that small school. We communicate frequently, despite being scattered around
the country – it’s a rare day that I don’t see a message from one of them.
The technological changes
that my grandparents and my parents experienced may have seemed extraordinary
to them all those years ago. But in my lifetime, I’ve experienced changes just
as revolutionary. Just think what things like computers and instant communication
have brought to our world. Children the age that I was 70 years ago often have access
to smartphones of their own on a regular basis!
As my time here on this
earth grows shorter and shorter, I can’t imagine what changes my grandchildren
will see. The youngest ones may live until the next century (just 75 years
away!). And they will experience things that I can’t even imagine over the
intervening years. I won’t be around for those changes. But I’m glad that I’ve
gotten to experience all that I have!
When one is younger, time
moves much more slowly – after all, between the ages of 10 and 11 one gets to
experience 10% of their life. But that same year only represents 1.3% of my
life at this age, so the years seem to roll by so much more quickly.
