By Robert Dacey
As our daily lives become engulfed in required and complex technology, elders like me find some comfort in recalling the good ol’ days of our younger years.
The aging audience for our memories keeps shrinking, yet the memories have some value as we forge into a technology-loaded future. As children growing up in the 1930s and into the 1950s, we survived without Alexa, driverless cars and electronic social media. Face-to-face conversations were the pathways to human interactions. There was no book between faces.
We were bombarded with marketing and advertising messages via print and broadcast media, but we also had the mental room to consider who we were, where we were and where we may be going. For some of us, we simply enjoyed the sunrises and sunsets across our urban and rural landscapes.
In our historic urban environments, it was a common experience to spend hours each day waiting for and riding in trolley cars and buses to get to and from school or work. Children were expected to vacate their seats to accommodate women and the elderly.
Recycling of paper and metal was a new idea during the 1940s of World War II. Urban and rural households saved newspapers for bundling and pickup. Tin cans were flattened and boxed for recycling as well. Public school classrooms became recycling centers that received awards for high levels of participation in collections of paper of all kinds.
Rationing of needed and desired products was simply part of the era. Cigarettes were rationed for the general public in order to make them more available to members of the military. A black market of “smokes,” by the pack and the carton, developed rapidly. Rationed gasoline for aging cars required window stickers and coupons to allow the purchase of needed fuel.
Television began replacing radios as a necessary informational and educational resource. First-class mail would not need more than a 3-cent stamp per ounce.
The memories of an elderly and aging generation have value in contemporary times. Some of their inspirations will last forever. Today, the learning curve of the younger generations is much steeper and more complex, with more twists and turns.
We can’t go back to the good ol’ days. We can only remember them and value them for containing portraits of the multiple pathways that have created our current todays and tomorrows.
Sunrises and sunsets will continue to identify the beginning and end of each new day. Technology will continue to nudge what was once science fiction into mainstream daily life.
Just remember, today’s details of daily living will eventually become the younger generation’s version of the good ol’ days.
Robert Dacey, 83, is a retired artist and writer who has lived in Boulder County since 1959. His email address is RobertDacey@me.com
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