Memories Of The Past

 





     Growing up in the 1950's there were many things that we just took for granted, they were plain ordinary things, very common place. Take for instance, every body had a telephone but unlike those of today it was wired into the house, your voice was transmitted thru the mouth piece over wires that were hooked to other wires attached to tall poles that ran along the road on into oblivion. We also had small screen TV's that plugged into the wall and generally had tall antennas attached to the outside of the house, the picture was often grainy, black and white and you could only get three channels and programming stopped at midnight.
     My point is, there were so many things that my generation took for granted that my grand kids will never believe existed. Every now and then I run across something else that is so rarely seen and I feel sorry for this latest generation - they will never know what they are missing.
     Last week Kay and I were in South Georgia and Kay wanted to get something for the grand kids that would show them about the things we saw and where we had been. Now let me say that it would have been easy to just dial them up on Kay's super duty full of all kinds of apps smart phone and swing it around so they could instantly visually see everything that we were seeing but that would be to easy and Kay would rather put a more personal touch to the communication - we are a little old school.
      When I was growing up in the 1950's, communicating with each other was done by one of several different ways. Of course the number one way was talking, easy enough to do if the involved parties are in the same room if not you have to go to another form of communicating, the telephone. Telephoning someone was easy just pick up the receiver and stick your finger into the rotary dial finger hole matching the other persons phone number and dial the seven digit number. Utilizing the telephone to talk with someone far away was easy but not cheap especially if you had to factor in long distance charges and if they were not home when you called there was no voice mail so you had to call back later.
     Now another way to communicate with someone who lived away from you was to hop into the family car and drive over to see them, of course if you called them beforehand you might have figured out they were not home when they didn't answer thus saving yourself a trip. In the case of someone living way far away like about 2000 miles, driving was still an option if you had maybe two weeks just to get there and two weeks to get back. The interstate system as you know it in 2018 was invisioned by President Dwight Eisenhower in the early 1950's , work on the interstate system continues as I write this story, it is never ending.
     All of this leads us to the most generally used system of long distance communicating - writing.
Writing as a form of communicating was around long before telephones, twitter, skype, e-mail and whatever else we use today. Writing was easy, just write your thoughts on to a piece of paper or two or three, place the paper into an envelope with the address you want it to go to and stick a stamp on it. The postal service will pick it up from your mail box and deliver it to anywhere in the world sometime in the next few days or weeks or months, not to worry tho, they will deliver the mail no matter how long it takes.
     My Grandmother Riggan was a big writer, she would write half a dozen letters a week plus pay bills via the U.S. Mail, first class postage was a whopping three cents per letter back in the 1950's. When she didn't have much to say Granny often used what was then called a penny post card .
     Strangely enough a penny post card cost only a penny but it cost two cents to mail. Post cards were much like there name, they were a three by five card that was blank on one side so you could write whatever you wanted to say and on the other side you wrote the address you it wanted it to go to and placed a two cent stamp in the corner. A smart person could write a three page letter on a post card simply by writing very small, the problem was that every Tom, Dick and Harry that handled the card could and often did read what you wrote.
     Granny lived out in the country on what was called a rural delivery route and instead of a street address she had a box number. The postman would drive up six days a week and pick up the mail, because it was so far to the post office she would leave the postman a note and some money and he in turn would leave her postage stamps and post cards. Now days you go to a site on line and create post cards, birthday cards, Christmas cards and cards of all occasions and send them via e-mail, twitter, text or whatever it is.
     Post cards were also found in drug stores, gift shops, gas stations and hotel lobbies everywhere, these were called picture post cards because they had a picture on one side usually of some local scenery or something picturesque. They were funny, they were serious and they were beautiful. People would go on trips and buy these cards and send them to friends and relatives with a short note on the other side. They would say things like " wish you were here " or " arrived safely ". The big thing about picture post cards was that people saved them, My Grandmother had a couple of shoe boxes full of them and I would spend hours looking at them, these things were literally works of art just Google "Vintage Postcards " and see for yourself.
     So to bring us back to the original line of thought, Kay decided she wanted to send each of the grand kids a picture post card pertaining to where we were and what we were doing on vacation. Turns out that finding picture post cards is not as easy as it once was, we went to three different convenience stores, one had no cards, one had several cards but the pictures depicted were of places over 50 + miles away. The last store had two different cards, one was a map of the Georgia coastline showing the names of the barrier islands  and the other card was of Dolphins with "From Georgia With Love " written across the picture. They were not exactly what Kay wanted but but she made it work by putting an "X" on the map to show where we were staying and writing that we saw Dolphins on the other card, we signed Grandmama and Mr. Mike on the cards to Benjamin and Abigail and signed Grandpa and Mrs Kay for the cards to MJ and Matthew.
     It is sad to see another part of the past slowly disappear, what is even more sad is to see a way of communicating ones feelings of love disappear. The Grand Kids will be thrilled to get the cards and one day they will remember that we loved them enough to send them, indeed it is the simplest things that bring back the greatest of memories.