Neolithic Ages

I really know little about pre-history, but I know quite a bit about skewed perspectives. For example, as a very young adult, I considered Biblical times to be just this side of the stone age. Turns out, I was way off base there. Those folks were on the exact same cognitive level as we are today, just lacking much of the current technology.

As a matter of fact, it took me a long time to understand that the two World Wars were anything but ancient history, even though I knew my father had fought in WWII and both grandfathers in WWI. How old was I when I realized I was born just eight short years after WWII ended? Granted, when I was 8 years old that was an actual lifetime. But at 71, eight years was yesterday.

Still, enough has changed in my lifetime to cause today’s youngsters to envision me being dragged by the hair by some club-carrying hairy man dressed in a rough looking animal skin. That’s not true, not for me, for my parents, my grandparents, or even for my great grandparents. And there are photographs to prove it!

Just to frame some perspective, let’s nail some dates to important technology involved. I would rank photography as one of the earlier technologies that brought us into “modern” times. Photography was invented in 1822, one hundred years before my mother was born and 98 before Dad’s birth. In fact, I have a photograph of my grandmother’s mother as a baby, probably taken sometime after 1865, after the end of America’s Civil War. Grandmother (Dad’s mother) was born in 1901 (19 years before my dad). So, by the time that photo was taken, photography had been evolving for some 40 years and coming into common usage, although only by professional photographers, and not in color. That’s not the Stone Age.

By the time I was growing up, color photography was advancing. In fact, Kodachrome film had been invented in 1935, when my parents were teenagers. This allowed color images to be seen on a screen in a darkened room using a color slide projector, not unlike the moving picture shows (movies). But only wealthy people had such equipment. For the next several decades more people were able to own portable cameras that could take color pictures on film that was sent off to a lab to be printed. The first digital camera didn’t exist until 1975, when I was 23 years old. Until the 1990s, digital cameras were prohibitively expensive. Eventually, in 2000, the camera phone was invented, marrying another modern technology to photography, the telephone, which was invented in 1876 and progressed in a similar fashion as the camera over nearly 14 decades, resulting in our current super-computer cell phones.

Appliances and devices taken for granted today were either non-existent or in much less advanced form in my childhood.

A snapshot of the Baby Boomer’s (those born after WWII) childhood looked something like this. The term “play date” wasn’t invented until the 1990s (for my children’s generation). We just went outside and scoped out who was available to play.

Barring horrific weather, we played outdoors all day (when not at school), riding bikes, strapping on our ball-bearing roller skates to our saddle shoes, drawing hopscotch and 4-square boxes on the sidewalks with chalk, playing jump rope. We had doll carriages and Hula Hoops, cap gun six shooters, and matchbox cars. We climbed trees and took our books and lunches up there with us. Some were lucky enough to have tree houses in their yards. In the mid-60s kids started cannibalizing their roller skates, nailing the wheels onto 2×4 boards to fashion home-made skateboards.

We played baseball, wiffleball, and dodgeball in the street in front of our houses. Someone would yell, “Car!” and we’d all move to the curb and let it pass through. We had swing sets and tetherballs in the back or side yards, and a basketball hoop mounted over the garage door. We had pogo sticks!

In the winter we wore thick heavy snow suits and stuffed our shoe-clad feet inside snow boots, dragged our sleds and flying saucers out into the yards and up the nearest hill. Dad was at work and Mother was snug in her warm house. Parents trusted their children not to be too stupid at play.

If the weather was brutal enough, we invited our friends over to play indoors. We had record players, books and comic books, crayons, paints, colored pencils, board games, sparkly batons, chests full of costumes for make-believe play, wooden blocks, Lincoln Logs, erector sets, and electric train sets that took up the entire basement floor.

The heat didn’t keep us inside. Most houses didn’t have central air in the 60s. I remember going to two different schools in southern California, neither of which had air conditioning. We just melted to our chairs and desks and had to peel ourselves off!

We wore shorts and skimpy tops, ran barefoot, and rolled in the grass. When we got sweaty, we’d find someone’s sprinkler to run through or turn on the hose and spray each other.

By the late 1950s most homes had a black and white TV in the livingroom or den, around which the family gathered to watch special TV shows a few short hours each week. By the mid-1960s it was becoming more common for families to replace the black and white TV with a color TV. If a family in the neighborhood bought one of these, they might invite the neighbors in at 7 o’clock on Sunday evening to watch the Walt Disney show in color!

Every house had at least one radio and by the mid-60s the small transistor radios were becoming very popular as teenagers could take them to the beach or to the pool with them and listen to rock and roll!

Perhaps the generation that saw the most technological advances of all times was my grandparents’. Let’s just look at Grandmother, Bernice Marian Blackmon Hartley, born July 1, 1901; died October 28, 2001. She lived just over a century.

The car had been invented in the 1880s, before her birth, but until Henry Ford’s Model T (1908-1927) began production in America, the average person had no hope of owning a car. Dad told a story of the excitement when his father bought a car when Dad was 14 (in 1934). But two days later, he returned it to the dealer because the house of his dreams came on the market and it was more important to buy that house than to own a car. I can’t say for certain what transportation Granddaddy used before that, but I heard stories of him riding a mule around when he was a Methodist Circuit Rider (traveling preacher).

But Granddaddy died fairly young compared to Grandmother, so let’s look at the changes she witnessed in her lifetime. Although the camera, telephone, electric wiring, and the automobile had been invented before 1901, they were not available to the general populace in Grandmother’s youth.

In her lifetime, she saw the invention of the airplane (1903), and people gradually shifted from the horse and buggy to the family automobile. It took decades, but the wall-hung party-line telephone finally made it out to the farms and rural areas of America. Fifty years after Thomas Edison introduced electric lighting, most American homes were still lit with gas lights and/or candles. In 1925 about half of American homes had access to electricity. The electric radio could then enter the home (and the cars in the 1930s), as broadcasting began around 1920. By 1934, 60% of households had an electric radio. Although lower income families still used their ice boxes into the 1940s, by the late 1930s they were being replaced by refrigerators. In 1908 the first commercial electric washing machine was introduced and had greatly evolved by the time homes had electric wiring and indoor plumbing (which had become more commonplace by the 1930s)!

The advances began coming so fast they were tripping over each other during Grandmother’s life. She started out riding horseback to a one-room schoolhouse with a potbelly stove and kerosene lamps. She watched the men of her generation decimated by WWI, followed by the hard times of the Great Depression (1929-1939). Without catching a breath, she watched her sons march off to WWII. In disbelief she read about the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  In her time, she raised five sons in a home with the latest electric appliances, owned her own car, flew on jet planes, and watched (on a color television set powered by nuclear energy) the first man walk on the moon in 1969! Unheard of!!! Not possible, not even imaginable!

And since her death in 2001, house phones with landlines have practically disappeared. Everyone has a cell phone that takes pictures and has more computing power than was on the space mission that carried those men to the moon!

Technology has exploded and changed so much in our society, perhaps too much. For with the technology came new toys, expanded sedentary entertainment, access to unlimited information including pornography and perversions visible to our children that we never would have imagined existed. Some would say that our world has lost its very soul in the race for “more.”

How about if we use all of this technology to restore a real and caring, moral society? If the will is there, so is the potential to accomplish it. Let’s not blow ourselves back into the Neolithic Age.