People today often look back over their lives and marvel at the amount of change they have seen. Typewriters to word processors. Adding machines to calculators. Piston airplanes to SST's. Black-and-while movies to Pixar. Ten inch TV's to maximum mega-screen digital dolby sound home enertainment. Sometimes the older of us even regret losing things of the past that have fond memories. Drive-in movies--victims of air conditioning and TV. Radio drama. Appliances that, if handled carefully, did the job better or more quickly, although probably more wastefully and, if not handled carefully, more dangerously.
Yet, all of these changes are merely refinements of things that have gone before. Cars and airplanes are bigger and faster. Movies and television are more spectacular and visually satisfying. Processes are faster, more efficient, and less damaging to the world in which they operate. But, few of the changes that we have experienced in your lifetimes have involved completely new and different technologies and processes. Things that were virtually unprecedented in the world. Things that dramatically changed the way people lived their lives. When I contemplate the changes, for good and bad, that I have had to deal with, and how that change has affected my life, sometimes I feel a little dazzled by it all. But then I think about my grandfather and the really fundamental changes he had to deal with.
My grandfather was born in 1885, the year that Benz patented the first automobile. He died in 1973, havingf lived to see men walk on the moon. I am utterly amazed at the number and radicalness of changes that man experienced. He was contemporaneous with the electric bulb and the automobile. He was 37 when he bought his first car. He antedated the airplane. He as in his 40's when radio became wide-spread and in his 70's before he owned a TV. He missed medical advances that could have made a major differences in his life. He lost a 17-year-old son to rheumatic fever, a disease that modern medicine has virtually wiped out. In the absence of sulpha and penecillin, he lost a brother to blood poisoning when a smallpox vaccination turned septic. He limped for over 50 years because when he fell from a high place on a construction site no one knew how to set a broken hip (all they could do was strap him to a board and hope).
The social changes in my grandfather's time were just as radical. Two major depressions (Panic of 1897 and the Great Depression). He built a business in the 20's and lost it in the 30's. Although never a rabid segregationist, he had all of the built-in prejudices of a Southerner, and the civil rights movement mystified him. The US fought five wars during his lifetime.
So, when I ever become sorry for myself because of the things that I have lost in my life, or overly proud because I have adjusted well and am taking advantage of the new and wizard things in my life, my thoughts return to my grandfather. Maybe I am not so great after all.