LONGING FOR "THE GOOD OLD DAYS?" Stressed out from spending half your life stalled on the freeway? Annoyed when you open your email and 75% of it is spam ? Frustrated when you call a company for information and get caught in phone-tree hell like a rat in a maze, then you're suddenly disconnected and have to start all over? Do you feel your blood pressure rising when you're trying to have a quiet dinner in a restaurant and the inconsiderate jerk at the next table is hollering into his cellphone? Then when you get home your ex-spouse calls and tells you 12-year-old Jimmy was kicked out of school today for smoking a joint in the bathroom.
Take a break from the madness of the 21st century and enjoy Marta Hiatt's Remembrances of Times Past, (Northern Star Press, $15.95), a nostalgic collection of stories and photographs recalling the way life was in the early part of the 20th Century. Before computers and the Internet, when not everyone had a telephone, an indoor bathroom, running water, or even electricity, life was much less complicated.
This book is a sentiment al journey back to a time of Model-T Fords, stay-at-home-moms, vinyl long-playing records, telegrams, radio days, strict rules of etiquette, and manual typewriters. Hiatt has compiled hundreds of personal stories of "the good old days," in her new book, vividly illustrated with 250 photographs that bring the stories to life.
"My sister and I were reminiscing one day about how we used to spend almost all day Saturday helping mom pull the wash through a wringer several times to get the water out," Hiatt says. "What a chore that was! We also discussed how we had to make soap suds to do the dishes in the days before detergent was invented. We put the hard bar of soap in a small wire grate and swished it around for 10 minutes or so to get enough suds. After our talk I thought it would be interesting to put together an entire book about the so-called "good old days" by asking friends and family to contribute their stories."
In discussing "Sex and Social Mores," Hiatt explores the changes from Victorian prudishness to personal vibrators, and from corsets to Wonder Bras. She recalls: "The first airline stewardesses were hired in 1930 and were all registered nurses who wore uniforms that came below the knee. Their primary responsibility was the safety of the passengers in case anyone became sick. By the '40s stewardesses were no longer nurses, but were young and beautiful, were fired if they got married, were over thirty-five, got pregnant or gained weight. They also had to wear a girdle on the plane. Their sexuality was emphasized in Continental's ad stating "We Really Move Our Tails For You."
Dr. Hiatt compared her childhood to life today:
• You have a cell-phone, we had a party-line, and everyone on our line could listen in if they had a mind to, usually surreptitiously.
• You send email, we sent telegrams.
• You play your music on a pocket-size iPod, ours came on 12-inch vinyl records that had to be turned over to hear the other side.
• If you want information, you just Google it, but we had to search through index cards at the local library.
Hiatt's book is full of interesting, personal stories such as this:
"In our family we always ate meals together; mother and my sisters and I prepared them, and we cleaned up afterward too. Dad and my brothers retired to the living room where dad read the paper, and the boys played a game together, usually on the floor. Sometimes my mom played the piano after supper and we all stood around it and sang. We were creative; we played board games together as a family, and we invented games. On Sunday evenings we all sat around the table and listened to the radio together; programs like "The Lone Ranger," "Jack Benny," "Fred Allen," "George and Gracie Burns" and "The Shadow Knows."
"On Saturdays we would all pile into our new silver Pontiac convertible and actually go for a ride! We didn't have freeways, only highways, just two lanes, sometimes not even paved, and there were few cars on them because not many people could afford one. In the summer we would all go to the beach--it wasn't even crowded, and the water was clean. Or, we would go to the community pool at the YMCA. Those are my most pleasant memories of my childhood". – Bill Oaker, manager, born 1936, Grand Rapids
Hiatt thinks the biggest cultural changes were the hippie revolution of the '60s and the feminist revolution of the '70s, sparked by Betty Freidan's book "The Feminine Mystique." "After this," says Hiatt, "women gained a lot of freedom, and gradually achieved equality with men. Although there's still a long way to go, today we're even talking about the possibility of a woman president, so there have been enormous changes.
"After the so-called "hippie revolution" we went from being a very uptight society governed by religion and the rules of etiquette, to anything goes, and "do your own thing." This generation transformed our entire culture. We went from corsets to Wonder Bras, from bathing suits that covered a woman's entire torso, to bikinis and thongs, and from button-down white shirts at work to 'casual Friday's.' People were no longer fearful of 'what would the neighbors think?' or mortified if they made a social faux pas."
In the area of 20th century inventions Hiatt ranks cars and planes as probably the most significant. "They opened up the whole world. And then, in the latter half of the century we had computers and the Internet, which enabled instantaneous communication with the entire world. TV would be in there too, bringing us news of the world every morning and evening, instead of going to the local movie theatre on Saturdays to see black and white reels of what happened a week before, as I did when I was a kid. Of course the invention of computers depended on what was invented before them: transistors and microprocessors, which vastly shrunk electronic equipment."
Hiatt states: "Life was harsher in the 20th Century, but, if you think it was simpler, you would be right."
On the book's cover Art Linkletter says: "Remembrances of Times Past" will appeal to both a younger audience who will sometimes be amazed at the way things were, and older people whose own memories will be stimulated by reading these interesting stories, and viewing the photographs about the past. It's a great book!"