My Life's Strory

What is your life's story?  Do you have one to tell?  Is your life worthy of a story?

I knew at an early age mine was!  How could I know?  I knew because my mother Frances and my Aunt Eileen were always saying "we should write a book!"  This would usually follow some semi to very colossal event that we just experienced.  When you are four or five every event is colossal!

I have a good memory; at least I think I do.  When talking about the past with family members they say, "Really, you remember that?  Now that you mention it I do too."  Perhaps we are just making it all up.

I think my memories are real and fairly accurate.  I remember back to three and four years old.  Not a whole lot but a few bits and pieces.  Perhaps enough to write my life's story?  We shall see!

I am sixty four years old.  Is that old?  I don't know; refer to Blog "It's All Relative." Sixty four may or may not be that old; in terms of technological and life styles changes, it is very old!

The last ten years have brought about mind staggering changes.  I have a 32 Gigabyte iPhone, unless you were Warren Buffet, you could not have purchased that much memory ten years ago.

Step back in my story to 1950.  My parents were renting a huge two story home in the middle of Denver's exclusive County Club area for about thirty dollars a month.  The house was heated with a coal furnace.  The coal was one dollar a ton!  Our kitchen stove was a cast iron wood/coal fired beauty.  Yes!  You had to light a fire in the stove, in its fire box in order to cook or bake.  We had a Franklin stove, another wood/coal stove in the dinning room.  It would keep the chill off, so you would not have to fire up the big furnace in the basement.  There is a certain romance to warming a frigid room to a comfortable temperature, with these old cast iron stoves.

My Dad's car was a 1928 Chevrolet Coupe, complete with a rumble seat in the back!  Think about it, now 1950 and driving a 22 year old car!  Not that it was strange to have and old car like that, there were plenty of them around ; there were not many, if any new cars made during World War II, driving old cars was the norm.  Memory?  Yes, I remember taking a screw driver and poking a hole in the radiator of the old Chevy.  After watching the water run out for a few moments I ran into the house and told my Dad, " the car is going piddle."  He came out, took a look, he agreed that it was indeed going "piddle".

Are you serious, "cooking on a wood fired stove?"  Yes I am!  What else may we talk about?  You shared your phone line with 2, 4 or 8 other family's.  It was called a party line.  The phone company, Mountain Bell, did not have the equipment or enough wires running out (each line needed its own two wires) for everyone to have a private line.  Everyone on the party line had their own "ring," so that you would know when the call was for you.  You could listen in on the other party's calls, they would listen to you as well.  You could always tell when someone was eavesdropping, as the quality of the sound would be degraded.  When you wanted to use the phone and someone else kept yapping away, you might ask them to hurry up, or just keep picking the phone up, creating a click in their ear, hoping they would get the hint and free up the line.

"Sharing phone lines, are you nuts?"  It gets better!  There was no such thing as a copy machine, calculator or cell phone.  If you wanted to copy something you could type on a sheet of paper with a piece of carbon paper between it an another sheet of paper.  Carbon paper was a thin sheet of paper impregnated with ink.  When the typewriter key hit the top sheet of paper it would indent the carbon paper against the next sheet, making a copy.  You could put three of four of these together, however the the bottom sheets would be blurred.  With typewriters there was no corrections!  Whatever you typed, is what you got.  You could make multiple copies with a mimeograph machine.  You would type a master copy on a stencil piece of paper.  The Stencil was placed on a round drum on the mimeograph machine.  There was a hand crank you would turn and it would work like a little printing press, churning out a new page with each crank turn.  This process used mimeograph fluid to transfer the image to a special paper.  This fluid had a solvent, paint thinner, alcohol type smell.  It is probably the reason half the people my age have cancer.  Every school test you ever took was on one of these printed papers.  They would pass out your test and you would get high on the fumes!

No calculators and no cell phones!  No more writing this evening; time for bed.  More of my story later!