We’re making resolutions and lists like crazy, planning what we’ll do next year! It seems like the world has gone crazy.
Some professional athletes – subject of hero worship by children and adults alike – are sucking up steroids while getting paid millions of our hard-earned dollars; wars are being fought in the name of religions; more and more information, some mighty personal, is being stored in tinier and tinier little micro-chips; there’s no escaping GIS; health insurance costs require a second full time job and life just seems to be getting more costly, more outrageous and more out of touch. It makes one (almost) yearn for the good old days. No computers, no interfering into personal lives, when a hero was a hero, when life was a lot slower, a lot easier. Maybe.
Just think: nowadays, you can make a phone call almost anywhere at a pretty reasonable price. E-mail your friends and relatives every day, or several times a day and it is just about free.
A three-minute phone call from Denver to New York City, cost $11 a hundred years ago.
A hundred years ago, in the good old days, you could expect to live until you were 47 years old. In case you were expecting a phone call on that birthday, think again. Only eight homes in 100 had a phone.
Local towns fret about roads and keeping them in good shape, but that wasn’t such a big concern a hundred years ago when this country only had 144 miles of paved roads, there were only 8,000 cars and the maximum speed limit was 10 mph.
Yes, we hear a lot about those good old days – when the average wage was 22 cents an hour. A competent accountant could expect to earn $2,000 per year, a
dentist $2,500 per year, a veterinarian between $1,500 and $4,000 per
year, and a mechanical engineer about $5,000 per year.
A century ago, more than 95 percent of all births in the U.S. took place at home. Ninety percent of all U.S. physicians had no college education. Instead, they attended medical schools, many of which were condemned in the press and by the government as “substandard.”
Grocery shopping was a bargain, too, when sugar cost 4 cents a pound, eggs were 14 cents a dozen and coffee, 15 cents a pound.
Most people only washed their hair once a month, and used borax or egg yolks for shampoo.
Other facts from a century ago: Canada passed a law prohibiting poor people from entering the country for any reason. The five leading causes of death in the U.S. were pneumonia and influenza, tuberculosis, diarrhea, heart disease and stroke.
Only 6 percent of Americans had graduated from high school; two out of 10 adults couldn’t read or write, and marijuana, heroin, and morphine were all available over the counter at corner drugstores. According to one pharmacist, “Heroin clears
the complexion, gives buoyancy to the mind, regulates the stomach and bowels, and is, in fact, a perfect guardian of health.”
A century ago, 18 percent of households had at least one full-time servant or domestic.
Think of what America will be like in another 100 years.
See you next week.
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