I think I posted this back in 1918, but probably not on this forum. Apologies if it's a repeat for some of you.
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100 years ago today, my dad was born. He only lived to 82, but the day still seems worthy of note. In some ways 100 years is a long time. In others, not so much.
Alex is four and some change, so technically he and my dad are 95 and some odd years apart. I don't think I am bending the laws of mathematics too much, when I round that up to say grandfather and grandson are separated by a whole century. I think about those one hundred years a lot.
My dad was born in farmhouse in the Texas Panhandle. No doctors or nurses. No epidurals. Heck, I don't even know who would have cut the umbilical cord. I can't fully wrap my head around all of that, but I can understand it enough to know what a dangerous time childbirth was for both woman and child back then.
The first thing to consider when contrasting Dad's birth to Alex's birth is the location.
One of dad's favorite songs to sing in the truck was a Woody Guthrie tune called Oklahoma Hills that included the lines: Way down yonder in the Indian nation; I rode my pony on the reservation; In the Oklahoma Hills where I was born; Way down yonder in the Indian nation; A cowboy's life is my occupation; In the Oklahoma Hills where I was born.
Little did he know one day he would have a grandson born in Oklahoma.
Alex was born in a hospital facility that no one could have ever even dreamed about back in 1918. We had a room full of doctors and nurses. A fantastic neo-natal ward and all sorts of modern monitors, tests and screenings were there for our benefit. Even with these facilities, I can't wrap my head around how tough modern day moms are either. Though I would never dare call it easy, thank God we have the means to drastically reduce the deaths of women bearing children by almost 99%.
It wasn't just childbirth that was dangerous. Dad had a sister that passed away as a teenager. Dad told me once that she had a bad headache and laid down and never got back up. When I was older, I was told it was an ear infection. These days you hear some folks judgmentally say, "Parents run their kids to the doctor for every little ear infection. What did they think happened in the old days?"
Well, I can answer that! Some kids died because of a simple ear infection. Now the worst part about the ear infection (aside from the bill) is the diapers that follow an antibiotic. I don't think there is a big line of people wanting to go back to the old days of ear infections.
I do know of one time that the doctor made it out to my dad's house. When he was a young boy, he had to have his appendix taken out. Once again, no anesthesia. They gave him a belt to bite on. It left him with what us kids thought was a second bellybutton.
I asked him once "did it hurt?" When someone tells you there is no such thing as a dumb question, you all now know there has been at least one.
Aside from the medical world, think of all of the ways the world has changed.
When my dad finally got a telephone, it was a party line, which means you shared it with several other houses. You counted the rings to know if they were calling your house. Other houses could listen in to your calls and if you had a call to make, you had to wait for their call to finish. I can't imagine the latter happening too often, though, because phone calls were expensive. One source says a transcontinental call cost the equivalent of $135/minute today.
I don't have to tell you that most of us call anywhere in this country for free or at least free on a per minute basis. Heck, it's only pennies a minute to call anywhere in the world and we can have video calls with most anywhere in the world for free. Not to mention that our phones do so much more than voice communications. We carry the world in our pockets and in the span of just ten years, we have gone from being amazed at this ability to considering it a fundamental right.
I also think about how much cars have changed. I'd love to take a teen age driver today and put him behind the wheel of the first car my dad drove and at the same time, put my dad behind the wheel of a modern day car loaded up with the latest gizmos and let them have a race. I'm pretty sure once my dad got past the keyless start aspect, he'd be on his way, albeit frustratingly so with all of the gadgets beeping at him. The teenager wouldn't get out of the parking lot.
I could cite a laundry list of things my dad's car didn't have that we would consider absolute necessities, but I'll just name one. He didn't have a defroster. He would drive with a candle on the dash and rub an onion on the outside of the windshield to try to control the frost.
When it came to school, my dad went to school for a while in the fall until the cotton was ready to pick. Then he had to drop out for the year to help on the farm. I think he made it to about the third grade before he dropped out for good.
He was really good at math and read well, but as I got farther into school and too big for my britches, I use to look down on his lack of education.
I can remember coming home from school and telling him I learned how FDR got us out of the Great Depression by priming the pump with government spending.
He just laughed and said "you think so?" Of course, I did. That's what my teacher taught me. He went on to tell me that those policies extended the depression and despite him having actually lived through it, I dismissed it. Now, being older and having much more exposure to Keynesian and Austrian economics, I often think back to how smart my dad was on matters like that despite being given so little opportunity to indulge in those studies.
I also often think what fun it would be to be able to take my dad to see modern cotton farming. I bet his back would start aching at just the sight of fields with yields that have increased 16 times from what he grew up with. I think about the hours he spent sitting on a wagon full of cotton pulled by mules, waiting his turn at the gin as it pressed out a bale or two an hour. Oh how he would marvel at the gins running 70 bales per hour or more and some ginning 200,000 bales in a single season.
I could go on and on. I'm sure you could, too, with your own examples. And the best ones are not even related to technology. When my dad was born, his mom didn't have the right to vote. Alex's mom works alongside senators, congressmen, governors and other state and federal officials and they contact her to seek out her expertise.
We are safer. We are more food secure. We have made more progress on civil rights for everyone in the last 50 years than in all of human history before that. Literacy has skyrocketed. Life expectancy has increased. Let's all pause a moment to appreciate indoor plumbing!
We are not without problems, but so much has changed and we have so much to be thankful for…in just 100 years…in just the time between a granddad and a grandson.
But that isn't the modern narrative. The gratefulness of how far we have come and what made those advances possible is a tiny drop in pool full of discourse about the ails and flaws of our society. To be sure, we have both ails and flaws, but we spend so much time lost in them and validating our modern struggles, we have lost sight of how bad struggles can be.
We need the context of the past and the acceptance that life will always have imperfections to realize that we are living in a golden age. If we want to preserve that golden age, improve it and expand it to more people on this earth, we need to start by appreciating it.
So on this 100th anniversary of Bill Turner's birth, I'm going to spend some time appreciating all of the ways the world has changed for the better. And I'll spend some time appreciating all of the work my dad did for me in helping me to enjoy it.
And, lastly, I am going to spend some time thinking about the many ways his grandson is so very much like him, even though the world is so different. How they both point with their middle finger. How their eyes are the same shade of blue. How they share a sense of humor. How they both get down to business when there is work to be done. How much both of them like singing in the car.
And how no matter how hard he tries, Alex will never be able to fathom the world his grandson will be born into. Lets all do our part to making sure it's a good one by appreciating the one we have now.
-----------
100 years ago today, my dad was born. He only lived to 82, but the day still seems worthy of note. In some ways 100 years is a long time. In others, not so much.
Alex is four and some change, so technically he and my dad are 95 and some odd years apart. I don't think I am bending the laws of mathematics too much, when I round that up to say grandfather and grandson are separated by a whole century. I think about those one hundred years a lot.
My dad was born in farmhouse in the Texas Panhandle. No doctors or nurses. No epidurals. Heck, I don't even know who would have cut the umbilical cord. I can't fully wrap my head around all of that, but I can understand it enough to know what a dangerous time childbirth was for both woman and child back then.
The first thing to consider when contrasting Dad's birth to Alex's birth is the location.
One of dad's favorite songs to sing in the truck was a Woody Guthrie tune called Oklahoma Hills that included the lines: Way down yonder in the Indian nation; I rode my pony on the reservation; In the Oklahoma Hills where I was born; Way down yonder in the Indian nation; A cowboy's life is my occupation; In the Oklahoma Hills where I was born.
Little did he know one day he would have a grandson born in Oklahoma.
Alex was born in a hospital facility that no one could have ever even dreamed about back in 1918. We had a room full of doctors and nurses. A fantastic neo-natal ward and all sorts of modern monitors, tests and screenings were there for our benefit. Even with these facilities, I can't wrap my head around how tough modern day moms are either. Though I would never dare call it easy, thank God we have the means to drastically reduce the deaths of women bearing children by almost 99%.
It wasn't just childbirth that was dangerous. Dad had a sister that passed away as a teenager. Dad told me once that she had a bad headache and laid down and never got back up. When I was older, I was told it was an ear infection. These days you hear some folks judgmentally say, "Parents run their kids to the doctor for every little ear infection. What did they think happened in the old days?"
Well, I can answer that! Some kids died because of a simple ear infection. Now the worst part about the ear infection (aside from the bill) is the diapers that follow an antibiotic. I don't think there is a big line of people wanting to go back to the old days of ear infections.
I do know of one time that the doctor made it out to my dad's house. When he was a young boy, he had to have his appendix taken out. Once again, no anesthesia. They gave him a belt to bite on. It left him with what us kids thought was a second bellybutton.
I asked him once "did it hurt?" When someone tells you there is no such thing as a dumb question, you all now know there has been at least one.
Aside from the medical world, think of all of the ways the world has changed.
When my dad finally got a telephone, it was a party line, which means you shared it with several other houses. You counted the rings to know if they were calling your house. Other houses could listen in to your calls and if you had a call to make, you had to wait for their call to finish. I can't imagine the latter happening too often, though, because phone calls were expensive. One source says a transcontinental call cost the equivalent of $135/minute today.
I don't have to tell you that most of us call anywhere in this country for free or at least free on a per minute basis. Heck, it's only pennies a minute to call anywhere in the world and we can have video calls with most anywhere in the world for free. Not to mention that our phones do so much more than voice communications. We carry the world in our pockets and in the span of just ten years, we have gone from being amazed at this ability to considering it a fundamental right.
I also think about how much cars have changed. I'd love to take a teen age driver today and put him behind the wheel of the first car my dad drove and at the same time, put my dad behind the wheel of a modern day car loaded up with the latest gizmos and let them have a race. I'm pretty sure once my dad got past the keyless start aspect, he'd be on his way, albeit frustratingly so with all of the gadgets beeping at him. The teenager wouldn't get out of the parking lot.
I could cite a laundry list of things my dad's car didn't have that we would consider absolute necessities, but I'll just name one. He didn't have a defroster. He would drive with a candle on the dash and rub an onion on the outside of the windshield to try to control the frost.
When it came to school, my dad went to school for a while in the fall until the cotton was ready to pick. Then he had to drop out for the year to help on the farm. I think he made it to about the third grade before he dropped out for good.
He was really good at math and read well, but as I got farther into school and too big for my britches, I use to look down on his lack of education.
I can remember coming home from school and telling him I learned how FDR got us out of the Great Depression by priming the pump with government spending.
He just laughed and said "you think so?" Of course, I did. That's what my teacher taught me. He went on to tell me that those policies extended the depression and despite him having actually lived through it, I dismissed it. Now, being older and having much more exposure to Keynesian and Austrian economics, I often think back to how smart my dad was on matters like that despite being given so little opportunity to indulge in those studies.
I also often think what fun it would be to be able to take my dad to see modern cotton farming. I bet his back would start aching at just the sight of fields with yields that have increased 16 times from what he grew up with. I think about the hours he spent sitting on a wagon full of cotton pulled by mules, waiting his turn at the gin as it pressed out a bale or two an hour. Oh how he would marvel at the gins running 70 bales per hour or more and some ginning 200,000 bales in a single season.
I could go on and on. I'm sure you could, too, with your own examples. And the best ones are not even related to technology. When my dad was born, his mom didn't have the right to vote. Alex's mom works alongside senators, congressmen, governors and other state and federal officials and they contact her to seek out her expertise.
We are safer. We are more food secure. We have made more progress on civil rights for everyone in the last 50 years than in all of human history before that. Literacy has skyrocketed. Life expectancy has increased. Let's all pause a moment to appreciate indoor plumbing!
We are not without problems, but so much has changed and we have so much to be thankful for…in just 100 years…in just the time between a granddad and a grandson.
But that isn't the modern narrative. The gratefulness of how far we have come and what made those advances possible is a tiny drop in pool full of discourse about the ails and flaws of our society. To be sure, we have both ails and flaws, but we spend so much time lost in them and validating our modern struggles, we have lost sight of how bad struggles can be.
We need the context of the past and the acceptance that life will always have imperfections to realize that we are living in a golden age. If we want to preserve that golden age, improve it and expand it to more people on this earth, we need to start by appreciating it.
So on this 100th anniversary of Bill Turner's birth, I'm going to spend some time appreciating all of the ways the world has changed for the better. And I'll spend some time appreciating all of the work my dad did for me in helping me to enjoy it.
And, lastly, I am going to spend some time thinking about the many ways his grandson is so very much like him, even though the world is so different. How they both point with their middle finger. How their eyes are the same shade of blue. How they share a sense of humor. How they both get down to business when there is work to be done. How much both of them like singing in the car.
And how no matter how hard he tries, Alex will never be able to fathom the world his grandson will be born into. Lets all do our part to making sure it's a good one by appreciating the one we have now.
