At 85, I marvel at the innovations in my lifetime. My first memory of one was the television. Just a TV set, with three stations and no remote. Three stations that operated only for a few hours each day. At night, the stations signed off with the National Anthem and went black. Ours was a Zenith round table TV like the one below. It had black and white images.
It was with this new TV that the voices and characters on my radio programs suddenly had real bodies and faces. And it was amazing to me even now thinking back, how much those images fit those that my mind had formed. Even today we can see those mental images come to life when a good book is made into a motion picture. In this latter example, they are not always as true as my first ones were. For this reason, I rarely go to see a movie featuring any book or books that I have read.
From Books to Movies
A case in point is the Jack Reacher movies. I am an avid reader and I have read every one of Lee Child’s books featuring Jack Reacher. In the books, Reacher is a pretty substantial man of over six feet. Alas, in the movies, they chose Tom Cruise, a much smaller man, to play Reacher. I just could not bring myself to go see the movies, although people told me Tom Cruise did a good job. It just wouldn’t be the same.
But I digress from the topic that I started to write about. I want to show you all how life has changed in the eighty-plus years I’ve lived. However, my first ten or so years were spent during World War II, when there were rationing and shortages rather than new household items.
One of my strongest memories of that time was when my dear Mother tried to make a can of Spam into a festive Easter meal. She topped the canned meat with brown sugar and cloves and baked it. Let’s just say it was not my favorite meal of all time.
At the end of the war, there was one major invention, which was pretty devastating – the Atomic Bomb. It ended the war, but with a great loss of lives. I hope we never have to use anything similar again.
Innovations In My Life In the Kitchen
Following the war, new things began to pop up. The pop-up toaster was just one of them. Automated electric coffee makers, pressure cookers, electric can openers for example. Can you imagine opening cans using the utensil shown on the right? I think they may still sell them, although mine has been electric for more years than I can remember.
The pressure cooker was a great innovation, allowing meals to be prepared in much shorter times. At first, though, they were a bit intimidating. Now, we have the crockpot and fancy air fryers and electric roasters, including that wonderful appliance – the microwave.
How could we have managed without the microwave? I heated my baby’s bottle in a pan of water on the stove. It took about ten minutes, which was much longer than a hungry baby wanted to wait.
We went from mixing cake batter with a spoon, to the electric mixer and then the smaller electric hand mixers. One of these smaller electric hand mixers was my brother’s wedding gift to me. The one he gave me was in it’s own little cupboard that I could mount on the wall. I cherished that mixer for its entire life. Now we have fancy blenders to do some of the mixing.
The kitchen has really seen a lot of upgrades in my life, but amazingly, I still use my grandmother’s cast aluminum Dutch oven for a lot of my cooking from roasts and stews to a great batch of homemade vegetable beef soup. I also use my grandmother’s hand graters for slicing and grating cheese. They are much handier than the blender and easier to clean.
Innovations in my Life with The Telephone
In my lifetime, I have gone from a black rotary telephone on a party-line, to a new Android cell phone. We graduated from the rotary phone to a push-button phone along the way and, also, the cordless portable phone. But now we’ve cut the cable entirely, although I still have friends that are holding onto their “landlines” tightly.
The method for placing the call has also chanced with the cell phone. You no longer need to listen for the dial tone. I recently saw a video of a couple of kids today trying to place a call on a “land line”. They would press the number using the buttons and then pick up the receiver and not understand why they weren’t being connected. A dial tone was a totally foreign concept.
The Long Distance Operator
Also, in my lifetime, I worked as a long-distance operator. Way back then, in order to call someone out of your immediate area, you had to dial “O” for the Operator. Then give her the number you wanted to reach. I don’t remember that we even had area codes back then. I was that operator and I had a panel in front of me with lots of holes and a bunch of cords that were used to connect the two parties.
You could even make a “person-to-person” call so if the person you wanted to talk to wasn’t there, you didn’t have to pay for the call. Long-distance cost money by the minutes you talked. And people could call from a telephone booth, but they had to have a lot of coins.
As an operator, I had to learn to tell the different coins – Nickle, dime, and quarter, by the sounds they made when they were put into the coin telephone. I had to add up the coins until the person put in enough to pay the cost of the call for THREE MINUTES. After three minutes, I had to interrupt the call to collect more money before they could continue to talk.
The Automobile
Of course, in my lifetime there has been considerable change to cars, but the basics are pretty much the same. They have two or four doors, and four wheels and tires, and most still run using gasoline. The first cars I remember had batteries, after the time when you had to crank them to get them to start. However, I learned to drive in a “standard transmission”. Learning to coordinate the clutch and the accelerator took a bit of skill. And putting in the clutch when speed was reduced to keep the car from stalling also required some skill. In order to get my first license, I had to drive that car up a steep hill. Stop in the middle of the hill (without stalling) and then continue up the hill. The “automatic transmission” was a Godsend and much easier to learn to drive with.
Innovations in Transportation
Of course, there have also been changes in transportation. I took my first airplane ride in 1947. I remember the date because my youngest brother had just been born. We were treated to an airplane trip from NYC to Cleveland when my father changed jobs. The over-night car trip would have been too long with an infant.
The airplane was a DC-3 propeller plane and took three-plus hours. And it was exciting. Now I think a direct flight probably takes around 60 minutes.
We have also had the Concorde which made the overseas flight in about the same time as that old trip of mine.
Also for early transportation, we also used the train when we went to visit my Mother’s sister. The train trip from NYC to Pittsburgh was overnight. It was complete with a compartment (small cabin) about six or seven feet square. It was just seats during the day but at night the conductor came. He made the seats into a bed and brought down bunk beds from the ceiling. The compartment also had a sink and toilet all in the same room.
In the morning we got to go to the dining car for breakfast. Just besides watching the country go by out the window, there was one part of the trip through the Pennsylvania mountains that was called Horseshoe Bend. Depending upon where your car was on the train, you could see either the engine or the caboose when we went around that turn. Again, it was an exciting travel trip for a young girl. I was about seven or eight.
Conclusion but certainly not all of the Innovations in my Lifetime
This is not nearly a complete list. As I write this, I remember more and more. It certainly has been an exciting near-century of living for me. I guess the most exciting part of it has been keeping up with everything. I didn’t mention computers above, which were my career for thirty-plus years. Those years are documented on other pages within this website. Click here to read them. Of all the centuries in my lifetime, I guess the fifties were the most exciting as I graduated from high school, went off to college, got married, and gave birth to a child.. David Halberstam in his book The Fifties documents a lot of the unique times in The Fifties.