How is life different today compared to when you were a child?

Responses to a Grandchild

               Imagine a world when there was no television, no computers, no internet, and no cell phones. No, I am not talking about the late 19^th century when my grandparents were children and the automobile had yet to be invented. Nor am I talking about the period between the end of World War I and the commencement of what became World War II when my parents were children living for the most part through the Great Depression when, although automobiles were available, few could afford them. I am talking about 1942 through 1959 when I was a child.

              I recall becoming aware of the existence of televisions sometime between my 12^th and 14^th year. My closest friend’s family – a family that I considered to be wealthy since the father owned the only department store in our town of about 2,500 people – purchased the first television in town. They invited close friends to watch which is how I came to watch television for the first time. I recall trying to figure out how a picture being made in New York City traveled all the way to Clinton, Tennessee as we watched the Ed Sullivan Show. On the other hand, that mystery of transmission was about the only thing I found interesting about television. Watching comedians and singers on Ed Sullivan could hardly compete with playing touch football, or tag, or hide and seek, or cowboys and Indians in the back yard with my brothers and neighbors.

             In any event, my family received its first television by winning a church raffle (raising money for Baptist missionaries) when I was starting my senior year in high school. The only time we watched the television was Walter Cronkite and the CBS news during the week and See It Now with Edward R. Murrow on Sunday nights. Mother and Dad watched the Ed Sullivan Show, but my brothers and I would retire to my bedroom to listen to the radio (as we had done since it became my first purchase with my newspaper delivery profits). For us, television could not compare with the fun of listening to the adventures of The Lone Ranger or The Cisco Kid, or the humor of George Burns and Gracie Allen or Amos and Andy, or the terror of The Shadow. They had been our path over six years for awakening our imagination envisioning scenes based solely on dialogue and, at least before I left for college the next year, a path with which television could not compete.

            Without computer games or television to distract, we entertained ourselves in those years with outdoor games (of so many varieties it is unjust to name the few I recall) and, when faced with a rainy-day, indoor games that I would invent using a deck of cards, including my brothers’ favorite, Major League Baseball. Yes, I made index cards of every starting player on each of our favorite teams (plus the New York Yankees who we all hated) using statistical information from the World Almanac on each player and 50 cards from the deck. In other words, if your batting average was 300, then 15 of the 50 cards would be designated as hits with 3 as doubles (if 20% of your hits were doubles), etc. May sound boring, but it used up the time and formed an early math lesson for my brothers.

            Thank God, we did not live in Oregon or Washington and thus our rainy days were rare. The outdoors is where my childhood was spent when my mother was not insisting that I practice the piano. We hated the call to come in for dinner. It meant the fun we were having with our neighbors and each other was over for the day. However, the next day when school was over, there we were again, gathered in someone’s yard selecting the next game we would play with each other. Needless to say, when they chose Cowboys and Indians, my brothers and I chose to be the Indians.

           I cannot recall us ever stopping our play over an argument – and, of course, there were disagreements from time-to-time with voices sometimes raised in volume but always resolved amicably. And for good reason. We needed each other for our mutual entertainment. Those days with our friends plus my involvement with sports as a team member from age nine going forward, prepared me for the teamwork that would be required in my professional life.

          Life without computers included life without calculators. They did not exist during my childhood. The first desktop calculator was introduced in 1961 and cost $1,000. The first handheld calculators from Texas Instruments cost $395 when introduced commercially in 1971. Technology advances being as exponential as they are, banks were giving away handheld calculators when you opened a checking account by the 1980s.

         Accordingly, you calculated numbers manually. Mother used to have me count the student attendance records she was required to keep and report along with the grades every nine weeks. She marveled t how quickly I could complete the tedious assignment. I never understood her amazement since it was so simple to do. She apparently thought I added up each student days in attendance. Far from it. Each marking period had 45 days (5 days times 9 weeks) less holidays. I simply counted the days without check marks and subtracted from the total for that period.

           My brothers once complained to our parents that I failed to do math problems the correct way – in other words, the way they taught at school. It was true that, for example, I added 396 + 224 + 74 by the following technique: 3+2 = 500; 90 +20 = 110; and 6 +4 +4 = 14 making the answer 624. Stores and gas stations loved selling things for $X.99. So, faced with four items all for $X.99, I would add the numbers comprising X and subtract four cents. Why would you add all the rows of 9s to get an answer where the potential for error was greater. Adding $10.99 + $32.99 + $12.99 + $6.99 as $60 minus four cents, or $59.96 always seemed cleaner and less likely to contain an error.

          In any event, I was wary of calculators later in life unless you triple checked your numbers. The calculator did not report how many numbers you had punched in and there was no way to check whether you had punched the wrong key. When I started my firm, I drove the bookkeeper crazy on Saturday mornings when we paid bills and reconciled the accounting records. Numbers had to be checked from A to Z and then again from Z to A and again from A to Z. She caught on quick. She presented me with a paper list of the numbers so I could check the calculator manually. If her number using the calculator agreed with my manual calculation, we could move to the next item. Point being? If you grow up trusting your mind without the aid of a machine, it is hard for you to trust a machine. I did not trust Excel’s auto calculator until I had manually confirmed its correctness several times.   

         Of course, cell phones did not exist. Moreover, telephones were expensive. A long-distance call was charged as a certain amount for the first three minutes and then ten cents a minute thereafter. In 1951, the first three minutes of a call from New York City to Los Angeles cost $3.57. At the time, a ticket to see a movie in Clinton, Tennessee was ten cents. A bag of popcorn was five cents and a six-ounce coke was ten cents. If you wanted to call California on a telephone, you were going to have to forego movies with popcorn and a coke for fourteen weeks.

       Accordingly, a long-distance phone call was reserved for business or a special occasion. I do not recall talking to anyone my age on the telephone when I was a child. If you wanted to talk with someone, you either walked or rode your bike to see them. Talking with people was always face-to-face.

       My grandparents lived forty and sixty miles from us. I do not recall talking with them on a telephone when I was a child. We either visited them, or I wrote a letter to them. Indeed, the habit of writing letters was so ingrained that when I was in college, I wrote each grandparent and each of my four aunts one letter each month and wrote my parents a letter each week. Looking back, my childhood may explain why I resisted cell phones and was so hard to get on a landline. My clients were forced to agree that they wanted 100% of my attention when I was working on their cases, accordingly, they understood that I did not allow my concentration on case presentation and planning to be broken by telephone calls. They also agreed that I always returned their calls within a reasonable time.

        With all the communication options available today, including Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, not to mention internet streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+, it is no wonder that people seem so divided and deaf to each other’s points of view. If your daily life does not depend on getting along with playmates, some of whom you do not particularly like, you can afford to be rigid in your views. If you are a conservative, then never watch NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, or MSNBC. If you are a liberal/socialist then never watch Fox News or Fox Business.

         I simply thank God I am eighty years old and no longer have the energy for the fellowship of my friends or enemies – most of whom are in Elmwood in Birmingham, or whatever plots they inhabit wherever they are. I pity the future of a humankind so reliant on technology. I understand that it saves time and is more efficient, but at what cost.

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