The Muddled Male

Growing Older

By Bob Stevens, The Muddled Male

         I was thinking the other day about how our world changes from generation to generation.  My dad, who was born in 1908, told me that young boys in his time believed that if you took a strand of hair from a horse’s tail and left it in a bucket of water it would eventually turn into a snake.  He grew up in Park City and remembered when the first motorcar came to town.  He said that it resembled a surrey with a large brass radiator and brass kerosene lamps mounted on each side of the windshield to serve as headlights.  The horn was brass and formed in the shape of a large, expanding spiral with a rubber bulb on the small end which the driver would squeeze to give a warning honk or to attract the attention of crowds he wanted to impress with his new motor-car.  Milk was delivered to the home by a farmer who walked from house to house carrying an open bucket of milk from which he would dip milk and pour it into whatever container buyers held out to receive their portion.  My dad’s window into the world when he young was a small crystal radio, which had to be adjusted continually to be able to hear anything.  There were no phones, TV, internet, or computers in my dad’s life until he was well into his adult years.

            I was born in 1935 and grew up in the farming community of Croydon and the adjoining cement plant town of Devils Slide, Utah.  From my observation of the animals in the field as we drove back and forth to Church I postulated that cows were the moms and horses were the dads.  The cows, after all, seemed to be more feminine than horses, except for Cliff London’s angry bull who I assumed was just an aberration to my theory.  Luckily some of the farm boys in Croydon acquainted me with farming “facts of life” before I shared my theory and looked like a fool.  I got my first car when I was fifteen, a 1939 ford which I paid my uncle Hetz to make the hood and trunk smooth with lead, lower the rear end to provide the obligatory “underslung” appearance, install a “Smitty” muffler for that low rumbling sound, and install moon hub caps and rear fender skirts to provide me with the “cool look” of the day.

            Our milk was also delivered to our house, but by a milkman who delivered it pasteurized and in sealed bottles.  The top three inches were always thick cream that we would siphon off using a glass tube formed in the shape of a “U” with a rubber disk on one end.  As we pushed the rubber disk and tube down into the milk bottle it would force the thick cream through the other end of the tube and into a glass.  All through my teenage years I never ate hot cereal except that it was covered with thick, thick cream and lots of sugar.  Ann, my wife, claims that eating like that, it was only sheer luck that kept me from having a heart attack by the time I was thirteen.  It was during my youth that margarine was created as an option to butter.  The farmers’ organizations, however, were influential in seeing that a law was enacted to prevent anyone from being fooled into thinking that margarine was butter.  The law required margarine to be sold in its normal color of white.  The buyer would then have to mix in coloring to turn it yellow if they wanted it to look like butter.  Some manufacturers included a packet of yellow powder that the consumer would have to mix in with a spoon.  My favorite was the margarine that came in a sealed plastic bag and looked like a bag of Crisco.  Inside the corner of the bag was a small gelatin capsule of yellow food coloring that the consumer would have to pinch to pop and then knead the bag to mix it into the margarine and turn it yellow.

            My window on the world in my youth was the radio, mostly through such popular programs of the day as Inner Sanctum, Fibber McGee and Molly, Sky King and The Thin Man.  Occasionally we would go to a movie where, along with Bud Abbot and Lou Costello meet Frankenstein, we would get to see the latest chapter of the Green Hornet that played as a never ending serial during the matinee movie each Saturday afternoon.  We had a crank telephone bolted to the wall and shared a party line with twelve other families.  It was only in my late teens when we moved away from the mountains of Devils Slide that rabbit ears could pick up a signal and allow us to own one of those brand new black and white TV’s.

            Compare all that to the world into which our great grandchildren are being born.  Gigantic flat-screen or curved-screen color-HDTVs.  The ability to stream movies anywhere you happen to be so long as you have access to the internet and either a TV, laptop, iPad, or smart phone.  Then there is texting, Skype, and very soon a smart watch that is even better than the radio wristwatch envisioned almost seventy years ago in a Dick Tracy cartoon strip.  Over these last several years I have gone through several computers and a bunch of smart phones hoping to keep up with my grandkids.  I thought I was doing pretty well.  Then this past week I observed one of my great-granddaughters, whose age is one-plus, packing a new iPhone and playing a game while walking around the house.  She isn’t yet two and I am approaching eighty.  She and I are both going to grow older, but she is going to become faster and smarter as she grows older, and I am going to become slower and….well, you know.  I guess I will never be able to keep up, so I have decided to just lay down and take a nap.  Now where did I leave my iPhone.  I need it in case my great-granddaughter wants to send me a text.