School days in the 1940s and 1950s were considerably different than now.
People in my age bracket would be wise to jot down some of the things they recall about their school days, because the differences between then and now are dramatic and their personal memories and experiences will be priceless to anyone doing research. Our collective memory truly is history.
I became more aware of this when I was talking with a young person about my school days and mentioned “standing in line to get vaccinated” and saw the blank look on the young person’s face. “What do you mean?” he asked.
First, I couldn’t recall what diseases I had been vaccinated against. I muttered the variety of things, which used to be dangerous and in some cases fatal: polio, whooping cough, scarlet fever, diptheria. He had no idea what I was talking about. I mentioned the “DPT” shots that babies now routinely receive to prevent diptheria, pertussis (whooping cough) and tetanus. Finally I remembered the other dread disease – smallpox – and explained how it had wiped out many indigenous civilizations all over the world. Locally, houses where someone had smallpox would be quarantined; many people died.
In 1980, the World Health Organization announced that smallpox had been eradicated in the world. Maine stopped mandatory vaccinating for smallpox in the early 1970s, but when I was a child school children received vaccinations or inoculations for both diptheria and smallpox by the time we were in primary school.
As I told him about smallpox and showed him the old scar, I was asked about scarlet fever, polio, diptheria, measles, chicken pox and even mumps. I tried to impress on him how lucky today’s children are that they (and their parents) don’t have to fear such things. We don’t hear much about polio today, but when I was in school we all knew someone who either had polio or had succumbed to it. Some of my schoolmates had been crippled by polio and always used crutches – mighty awkward getting onto school buses and into schools before it became routine for public facilities to be handicapped accessible.
As I was doing this, it occurred to me that I was actually giving a history lesson of sorts. It is up to us senior citizens to keep the memory of our childhood alive – one way is to record our recollections. Hardly a one of us didn’t have measles or chicken pox. We could tell others what it was like to keep the rooms dark, to have those itchy places soothed with a mixture of baking soda and water.
Today we’re hearing about bird flu and instructions are being prepared for what to do in an epidemic. If we had the memories and records of the early 1900s when the flu epidemic was raging, that historic information might be very helpful.
You might think that your experiences are of no interest, that everyone you know went through the same thing. True, everyone you know who is your age – but for the younger generation, it’s all new! So, start writing!
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