Mike Parker: The world a century ago
On October 7, my mom will celebrate her 98th birthday. The world today is much different than when she was born in 1928 – a decade or so after World War I and a year and a change before the Great Depression.
Mom grew up on a farm in Monroe County, WV. My parents took my brother John and me to visit Mom’s old homeplace only a few times as we grew up. To get to Mom’s parents’ home, we turned off a winding mountain road onto a gravel road.
After a couple of miles, Dad would get out of the car, open the gate to a cow pasture, drive in, get out again to shut the gate, and continue through the pasture. Next, he would carefully drive across a shallow stream, then up a path to the farmhouse at the top of a hill.
The first time I ever used an outhouse was at my maternal grandparents’ home. The first time I fetched water from a spring was when I visited them. I walked to the spring with two buckets. After I filled the buckets, I carefully jogged back – 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 at least two miles through fields and brush to reach Wickline School. Wickline was a one-room school housing grades one through eight. The school had only one teacher.
She brought her lunch from home. The students all drank from the same bucket and even used the same dipper. A pot-bellied stove heated the schoolroom where students 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” for 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 treatment existed for pneumonia, gonorrhea, and rheumatic fever. My mother was born just one year after 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 rare. Although the telephone was invented in 1876, the infrastructure wasn’t in place to make telephones available 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 does. Mobile phones were not even imagined. I remember visiting my grandparents in the West Virginia mountains. They had just gotten electric service. A single light bulb hung from the ceiling to provide light to the living room. Grandma Wykle 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 most of the cooking, as well as tending to her younger sisters and brother. She helped with the family garden, and she 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. As Dad’s health declined due to asbestosis complicated by emphysema, Mom took a job outside her home. John was in middle school, and I was in high school.
She didn’t start drawing her Social Security until age 65 because she wanted to keep working. Even after she started drawing Social Security, she worked part-time at a hospital until she was 80. She only stopped after she hurt her back trying to wrangle some laundry.
Whenever she has an issue with her cell phone, she says, “Well, I wasn’t born in this electronic age.” She could just as well say she wasn't born in the jet age, the space age, the television age, or the modern medical age.
Once, she discovered a small error that her bank had made in calculating one of her accounts. She called to resolve the matter.
“Are you an accountant?” the bank employee asked her, shocked that Mom had found such a small error.
“No,” Mom said, “but I went to a one-room school where they taught us to do basic math.”
The “Silent Generation” could also display a good deal of spunk.
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.
