Mike Parker: Living in a different world
Tomorrow, October 7, my mom, Irene Parker, will celebrate her 97th birthday and draw another year closer to the century mark. Today’s world is much different than when she was born in 1928, a decade or so after World War I and a year and change before the Great Depression.
Mom grew up on a farm in Monroe County, WV. As my brother John and I were growing up, we visited her old homeplace only a few times. To get to her parents’ home, we turned off a mountain road onto a gravel road. After a couple of miles, Dad would get out, open the gate to a cow pasture, drive in, shut the gate, and continue through the pasture. Next, he would carefully drive across a shallow steam and then up a path to the farmhouse that stood at the top of a hill.
The first time I ever used an outhouse was at my maternal grandparents’ home. The first time I had to fetch water from a spring was when I visited them. I would walk to the spring with two buckets and, after I filled the buckets, carefully jog back to the house. It was the only running water my grandparents ever had.
Mom told me she loved school and rarely missed a day even though she had to walk with other children several miles through fields and brush to arrive at Wickline School. Wickline was a one-room schoolhouse that housed grades one through eight taught by one teacher.
She brought her lunch from home. The students all drank from the same bucket and used the same dipper. A pot-bellied stove heated the schoolroom where the pupils toiled away at their lessons. The older students often served as mentors and tutors for the younger ones.
While I was a product of the “Baby Boom” generation, those born between 1945 and 1965, my mother was part of the “Silent Generation,” those born from 1928 through 1944. The “Silent” label refers to their image as civic-minded conformists. Time Magazine coined the term “Silent Generation” to describe them in 1951.
Mom was born the year Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, the dawn of the age of antibiotics. When she was born, no effective treatments existed for pneumonia, polio, and rheumatic fever.
Although the Wright Brothers achieved the first heavier-than-air flight in 1903, my mother was born just one year Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927. The jet engine was not developed until 1952 – two years after I was born.
When Mom was growing up, telephones were a rarity. Although the invention of the telephone dates from 1876, the infrastructure was not in place to make telephones available in homes in any general sense. The first rotary dial telephone was developed less than a year before my mother was born.
Televisions were unknown, computers were the size of a library and could not do what today’s pocket calculator can do, and mobile phones were not even imagined. I remember visiting my grandparents once in the West Virginia mountains. They had just gotten electric service. A single lightbulb hung from the ceiling to provide light to the living room. Grandma still cooked on a wood stove.
As part of the “Silent Generation,” Mom was raised with a work ethic far beyond what most people have today. As the oldest girl, she was tasked with doing most of the cooking, as well as tending her younger sisters and brother. She helped with the family garden and fed the cows, pigs, and chickens my grandparents raised for milk, eggs, and meat.
When my brother and I were small, Mom was a stay-at-home mother. When Dad’s health began to decline as his asbestosis complicated by emphysema worsened, Mom took a job outside her home. John was in junior high school and I was in high school
She did not draw her social security until age 65 because she wanted to continue working. She worked part-time at a hospital until she was 80. She only stopped after she hurt her back trying to wrangle some laundry.
Every time she has an issue with her cell phone, she says: “Well, I wasn’t born in this electronic age.” She could equally say she was not born in the jet age, the space age, the television age, and the modern medical age. What the “Silent Generation” lacked in technological expertise they made up for in tenacity and a work ethic.
Happy Birthday, Mom! May the Lord continue to bless you.
Mike Parker is a columnist for the Neuse News. You can reach him at mparker16@gmail.com.
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