I’m turning 69 next month. As I review life from this lofty perch, I’m amazed by all the changes I’ve seen and experienced since 1951.
Take toothpaste. When I was a kid, there were about three choices: Crest, Colgate or Pepsodent. You didn’t need to spend an hour choosing between whitening toothpaste, sensitive-tooth toothpaste, natural toothpaste, kids’ toothpaste, flavored toothpaste, etc.
I googled “types of toothpaste” and found that Colgate now has 32 varieties. If we ran out of toothpaste when I was a kid, Mother had us use table salt or baking soda to brush. She said it was imperative to clean our teeth after multiple bowls of Sugar Frosted Flakes. She also warned us we’d get “sugar diabetes” if we kept downing all that cereal.
Jeans. Back in the ‘50s and early ‘60s, my sisters and I mostly wore dresses, but for outdoor play we had dungarees. Basic denim pants. Sturdy. Cheap. Rolled up at the ankle. Now jeans are a high-end fashion item, and there are more jeans styles and varieties than Colgate could ever dream up. Mother diligently mended holes in our dungarees.
Today, holes and tears in your jeans are de rigueur. And there’s a corollary: the more rips, the higher the price. Here’s some script from a current online ad for men’s jeans sold by an upscale department store: “EV Ripped Low Fit Jeans. Price $855. Free Shipping.” The ad copy goes on to read, in part: “roughed up with heavy shredding and repaired rips.” Well, I guess it’s a win. You do get free shipping.
Telephones. Most of us have smartphones we carry around everywhere today. I’ll be the first to admit … when I accidentally leave my iPhone at home, I start to feel panicky. I might miss a text. Or a phone call. Or horror of horrors, I’ll miss checking my Facebook page for the 1,000th time of the day.
The first telephone I remember was a wall phone in our kitchen in Vincennes around 1958. It was considered modern at the time because it was an ugly green color, instead of basic black. It had no dial.
My widowed mother thought having a party line would be a worthwhile savings, so my sisters and I had fun with that. When you wanted to make an outgoing call, you had to lift the receiver and ask the operator to connect you.
If you picked up the receiver and your party line buddy was on a long blab, you had to wait. Best option: Keep lifting the receiver to pester that line-share buddy until they hung up. Remember the Princess phone? “It’s little, it’s lovely, it lights!” Mother, always mindful of cost, would never spring for one of those.
Technology and the internet. What’s to say? It’s changed the world like greased lightning.
As I consider all that’s changed in my lifetime, there’s a flip side to it, and it’s darker. There are things that move too slowly or never seem to change.
Women are still asking for equal pay for equal work. There are children in our great and wealthy country who go to bed hungry. A college education is still out of reach for many, even though more jobs call for university degrees. Affordable child care is a pipe dream. Health care is a luxury for too many. Gun violence makes the papers every day. Discrimination in numerous forms still infects our society.
In the years I have left, I’ll go with the flow when it comes to things like phones, toothpaste, jeans and the pace of technology, but I’ll keep working for change where it really matters. As the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once quoted, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Sharon Mangas can be reached at sharon.d.mangas@gmail.com.
