During My Lifetime

I'm fortunate. I was born at a time of ongoing momentous changes for mankind, many of them beneficial and many of them not. Somehow I got to thinking about everything I've lived through and seen and thought it might be interesting to list it all. So here goes.

I was born during World War II just before the A-bomb was dropped. That's what it used to be called although it was originally referred to as the atomic bomb. World War II was regularly called The Second World War and World War I was frequently spoken of as The Great War or the war to end all wars.

I remember Dewey losing to Truman when I was probably in kindergarten. As usual in my choices, I chose wrong when asked who I thought would be elected opting for Dewey, if for nothing more than to hide my ignorance as well as to fit into my peer group. I remember neighbors bringing a copy of the newspaper delivered to their country-road mail box showing Dewey holding a newspaper declaring his victory overhead. One of the great gaffs of the century that.

I've seen fields plowed and cultivated with horse-drawn equipment and corn fields hand picked, the shucked ears tossed into a horse-drawn wagon with a bump board about four-feet high on one side. The ears of corn tossed against it bounced into the wagon. I learned to tell the proficiency of the picker by the frequency of the ears banging against. A good picker could pick, shuck, and toss an ear into the wagon about every four seconds by my reckoning and remembrance.

I've seen men broadcasting seed in the field by hand and have seen wheat and oats mowed with a scythe. The scythe was then being replaced by sickle mowers which consisted of a long blade with serrated teeth that slid back and forth between guide bars as the mower was pulled first by mules or horses, and later by tractors. Hand broadcasting was replaced with planters that laid the seed down in rows and covered it with dirt, to be replaced in turn by drills. How drills work I don't know since I haven't used them or seen them work. The first planters seeded two rows at a time, then came four, six, and eight-row planters. For many years they all had iron wheels with iron lugs and wooden or iron spokes, to eventually be all iron, and then giving way to rubber tires on steel rims. One of my strongest memories is that of a very wet and muddy spring after a hard Midwestern winter that left an iron-wheeled tractor mired to the hubs in a old corn field the farmer was attempting to plow. It took a couple of weeks of drying out and a four-horse team, along with someone operating the tractor, to pull it free.

The first planters were weighted with rocks or scrap iron--anything of weight--to help get the right depth of penetration into the earth for depositing and covering the seed. That changed for a mechanical design which allowed the adjusting of each individual seed depositor to desired depth by moving a lever up or down on each. That too has gone through a number of refinements to the point that now the depth planting is set by a computer which measures the soil temperature and moisture content and also sets the depositor's soil penetration accordingly.

I've seen the reaper which, horse drawn also, picked up the mowed grain or hay and redeposited it on the ground in a tepee-like sheaf of stalks bound together near the top for later collection. During the first generation of the reaper, men bound the sheaves by hand. These were carted to a threshing machine which separated the grain from the stalks, blowing the straw into high hay stacks in the fields where the gigantic machine and crew awaited the shocks to be threshed. The grain collected in a hopper to be loaded into wagons for delivery to a barn and it's wooden grain bins which were simple rooms inside. The large haystacks piled up from the threshing were later pitchforked onto flat hay-rack wagons, with racks on the front and rear, and the hay was taken to the barn where it was put into the mow at the top of the barn pitch forkful by pitch forkful. Threshing was an area affair with the threshing machine running a route from farm to farm. Everyone in an area whose grain was processed by the steam-operated monster helped on all of the neighboring farms. The men and older boys worked in the fields and the women of the families prepared meals and took care of the children. Boys, and sometimes girls, not old enough to work with the men but old enough to be responsible, carried snacks and cold drinks pony-back to the threshing crew.

The reapers and threshing machines were replaced by combines which do all of the work in one pass. At first the combines could cut and remove the grain from as few as four rows of wheat or oats but today can reap the grain from many times that number. The chaff from the reaping used to be blown onto the ground for later raking and baling. The baled straw would be used for straw bedding in the barn. The bedding was for animals allowed to shelter there during harsh weather and for covering the floor of the milking parlor, or room where the cows were milked by hand, later by electric milking machines. Later, the chaff was just left on the ground to decompose adding biological material to the earth as well as helping to keep it softer and more aerated.

I've seen automobiles lose their running boards for the sleeker look of not having them. The first cars were designed along the lines of the buggies everyone was used with the vestiges of the design being the running boards. When the went, the auto industry stopped being restricted by the buggy concept. I've also seen the divided front and rear windows of cars become single panes and have witnessed the loss of the wing window, a loss I grieve because of the stream of cooler air it directed into the car was also lost. I've seen the overhead cam cause the disappearance of the flat-head engine and have watched plastic and aluminum replace rubber, wood, and steel in cars. I seen flat clear windows replaced with curved and tinted safety glass. I've seen leather and cloth replaced by plastic and man-made materials called cloth. I've also seen pride of ownership shift from how fast, powerful, and gas consuming a car was to how sleek and gas saving it is. I've also seen open windows and free-flowing air replaced by closed windows and air conditioning in addition to simple radios being replaced with body-vibrating stereos which can be heard and felt from blocks away in the city and a mile away in the country. I've seen the classic delivery trucks, pick ups, and the woodie station wagon homogenize into vans of all sizes and conformations. I've seen the classic military jeep become an over-sized atrocity for high-income earners, or the pretenders, as well as a consumer statement. And I've seen the term country become urban. I've also seen the population ratio of dependence on agriculture change from about 80/20 to 98/2, meaning that the larger number to the left of the slash is the portion of the population dependent on the smaller portion which produces its food. It frightens me.

I've seen single-engine, twin-engine, and four-engine airplanes take command of the skies. I saw my first contrail when I was about seven-years-of-age. My older brother was looking into the very blue sky one sunny day and almost cloudless day and I asked what he was looking at. He said he was watching a jet. Looking up, I asked him what a jet was. He told me it was a new kind of plane, but he couldn't explain it when I asked him how it was different from the planes I knew about. But it's single contrail up there was what he pointed out first and then the silvery spot slightly ahead of the wispy streak. Subsequently, I've seen the demise of the propeller-driven passenger plane and the advent and ascent of the passenger jet. I've seen as well the growth, proliferation, and expansion of airports though out this country as well as the world. I've seen passenger planes develop from from a capacity of a dozen or so passengers to being able to transport hundreds of people along with huge volumes of mail and other cargo. I've seen the speed of passenger aircraft increase from a plane being able to travel the length of Illinois in three to five hours to cross-continent flights of about the same duration.

I realize at this point that I can't list all of the changes in a single blog. Much less can I talk about what I've learned or felt through witnessing the changes. But among them, the worst thing I've witnessed is the utter contamination of the planet brought on by industrialism and rampant consumerism in the name of giving mankind a better life and higher quality of life. I've also seen concomitant with industrialism and consumerism an increased definition between the have and have-not classes. Thinking about all of the primal native groups I've studied, I see that wealth is a matter of perception to start with. In the primal groups, wealth can be the number of wives or hogs a man or woman owns--even husbands in a few societies. In technological societies, wealth is the illusion of owning numbers called money. And that illusion is so much more powerful and corruptible than almost any other force existent in mankind's present.

This is where I close. I've seen many changes and I don't believe many to have been for the betterment of anyone or anything.

Think it through.