How Times Have Changed

I writing this article while being pressed for time, I hope that it is not reflected in my writing. I couldn't help but think about how different things are today, than they used to be. One of the very big differences that people of my age notice, is that the children of today don't seem to get out as much This leads to fatter and lazier kids. We just couldn't wait to get home from school so that we could go out and do all sorts of interesting things with our friends. We loved to play games like stoop ball, a game that has probably almost been forgotten by now. All the equipment that you needed was a Spalding rubber ball and a stoop The idea was for the person that was up to stand in front of the stoop and try and throw the ball at the point of a step. The further the ball went the more bases you collected. If someone caught the ball on a fly, you were out. I played this game for years as a kid, when I lived in Brooklyn, New York.

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I moved to Queens, New York and the kids there loved stick ball, baseball, football and especially basket ball. I was lucky enough to live across from a large wooded park that also had several basketball courts in it. I played basketball for years regardless of the season. Some days it was so cold that you would sweat and it would freeze instantly, all the while only wearing a tee shirt in harsh winter weather. The reverse was also true, I did the same thing in the sweltering heat of summer, when it got so hot that your feet would sink into the soft tar in some areas of the court. Can you imagine kids doing that today? The kids today rush home too, but they rush to get onto their computers, or games machines. We are raising a generation of couch potatoes. That doesn't make them bad, only heavier. I am glad that we didn't have these types of electronics in my day, because I would have probably done the same thing.

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Another thing that is very different are the cars. When I was younger, cars didn't have much on them in the way of extras, compared to the ones today. A base model of a car came with a steering wheel and a shifter to change gears. Today's base models would have been considered super luxury cars back then. Even the base model of a car, such as the Hyundai Sonata comes with power steering, power locks, power windows, power mirrors, air conditioning, a radio, a CD player and many other things. Many of these things were not available even on the best models of cars in those days. The Cadillac back then came with air conditioning, power windows that malfunctioned after a while, power brakes and a radio and maybe power bench seats. Cars were also a lot heavier. A full sized Chevrolet was considered a LIGHT car by the standards of the day, even though it was close to 4,000 pounds.

Cameras were completely different. They all used film back then and didn't have a lot of settings. My family had a Kodak Brownie box camera that they liked to use. It was nothing more than a box with a cheap lens on it and no settings that I can remember. It is funny, but we were able to get some decent photos out of that camera. It was almost like using a pin hole in a box to take pictures. Today we have digital cameras that are such a far leap from that time, that if one was ever shown back then, it would have seemed that it came from an alien race, or right out of Science Fiction. I am still amazed at these things and I am also amazed at how cheap they are becoming. There are still people around that these things seem like a miracle to.

Getting in to home computers just blows my mind when I think about how things used to be. When I was young, the only time we might see a computer was in a Science Fiction movie and it would fill a room. People from that era would never have believed, if asked, that someday computers would shrink down to a size that would fit on a desk, let alone a size that they could carry around with them. Even the head of IBM at that time said he thought that there might be a market for only a few computers. I think the figure that he used was 7 for the entire world. That is almost laughable now. You would have thought that someone that headed up such a cutting edge technological company would have had more of an insight into what might be needed in the future.

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Homes are another area where things have changed a lot. Homes used to be pretty simple places in my day. You didn't need much electricity, because there weren't many electrical devices to power. We had a light in each room and a radio. That was about it. A few people had electric heaters for the winter and fans for the summer. Homes today are completely different. Most homes have an entertainment center, heating that is regulated by an electric thermostat, air conditioning, kitchen appliances including electric stoves, washers and dryers and all sorts of other conveniences such as electric blankets, shavers, massage and heat chairs and more. We are the electric generation.

Even movies have changed and they have changed a lot. In old movies you just would not see naked people, let along people having sex. When you were shown a bedroom, it usually had separate beds. The effects in the movies were very primitive and today they are very lifelike. Most of the movies were in black and white and today they are in color and wide screen and sometimes even Imax. We didn't notice the difference, because that was all we had. There was a movie theater near us that used to show 3 movies and 21 cartoons on Saturday. They were older movies, but we kids loved them and so did our parents, because we would be in the movie theater all day. You are looking at a show that lasted for about 6 hours. I never could figure out how that theater made any money?

Yes we have come a long way since them and it seems that we have advanced hundreds of years in only about 50.