An old Askville post: the good old days

I was born in 1964, so TV was pretty much ubiquitous as I was growing up - albeit most people had black & white TVs. Remember when it was a big deal for a program to say it was "in COLOR!"?

For a couple of years we didn’t have a working in my house when I was young, because we were poor (my father was a grad student), and I’d broken the TV when I was 3. So yes, we spent a lot of time listening to the radio, playing games, and reading. I think it was good for me, to be honest, and I wish that I could give my son the same experience. But both he and my wife hate it when I try to turn off the TV.

When I was sick I’d stay in bed and my mother would bring the old radio upstairs. I’d spend the day listening to the vaporizer gurgle, watching the windows steam up, and listening to those great old shows on WOR: Bob & Ray, Jean Shepard, the CBS Radio Mystery Theatre hosted by E.G Marshall (""Until next time, pleasant ... dreams?"), and popular music from the 1940s and 50s.

It was wonderful. And now there’s nothing like it on the air.

I don’t remember house calls, but I do remember the wonderful local stores we used to have! Joe’s Luncheonette. Local pharmacies. Little mom & pop places, each run by the people who owned it, each unique. There was so much more variety back then, so many options! These days, everything is the same. When you go out to shop or eat, you have to go to one of two or three "competing" chains, each as dull and sterile as the next (and like as not all owned by the same multinational corporation).

Somewhere along the way, so much variety and flavor was sucked out of American culture and the economy. I think that forests are a good metaphor: many of our wonderful old-growth forests, filled with an astonishing variety and depth of life, were cut down. They were replaced by the lumber companies with "forests" consisting of trash pine, specially engineered to grow as quickly as possible to provide saleable (but inferior) lumber and pulp for the mills. But thanks to the incredible lack of diversity in those "trash forests", a single new disease can wipe out the entire population like wildfire. And unlike in an old-growth forest, animals do not live there, and soil nutrients are devastated and not renewed.

The same thing has happened to business in America. Almost all the little stores are gone. Want a pharmacy? You’ll do business with CVS, Rite-Aid, or Walgreens. Want to go out to eat? McDonalds, Burger King, or Wendy’s if you’re poor, Applebees, TGIF, Chilis, or some other identical chain otherwise.

That’s why I appreciate Rhode Island, where I live now: it’s so small that there’s still some local variety, regional flavors and businesses which have survived simply because it’s not (yet) worth it to the big chains to come in and plow all the local flavor under.

But I don’t know how much longer it will last. Our children and grandchildren will never know the incredible variety that America had, and lost. Their lives will be much poorer for it.

An old Askville post: the good old days

I was born in 1964, so TV was pretty much ubiquitous as I was growing up - albeit most people had black & white TVs. Remember when it was a big deal for a program to say it was "in COLOR!"?

For a couple of years we didn’t have a working in my house when I was young, because we were poor (my father was a grad student), and I’d broken the TV when I was 3. So yes, we spent a lot of time listening to the radio, playing games, and reading. I think it was good for me, to be honest, and I wish that I could give my son the same experience. But both he and my wife hate it when I try to turn off the TV.

When I was sick I’d stay in bed and my mother would bring the old radio upstairs. I’d spend the day listening to the vaporizer gurgle, watching the windows steam up, and listening to those great old shows on WOR: Bob & Ray, Jean Shepard, the CBS Radio Mystery Theatre hosted by E.G Marshall (""Until next time, pleasant ... dreams?"), and popular music from the 1940s and 50s.

It was wonderful. And now there’s nothing like it on the air.

I don’t remember house calls, but I do remember the wonderful local stores we used to have! Joe’s Luncheonette. Local pharmacies. Little mom & pop places, each run by the people who owned it, each unique. There was so much more variety back then, so many options! These days, everything is the same. When you go out to shop or eat, you have to go to one of two or three "competing" chains, each as dull and sterile as the next (and like as not all owned by the same multinational corporation).

Somewhere along the way, so much variety and flavor was sucked out of American culture and the economy. I think that forests are a good metaphor: many of our wonderful old-growth forests, filled with an astonishing variety and depth of life, were cut down. They were replaced by the lumber companies with "forests" consisting of trash pine, specially engineered to grow as quickly as possible to provide saleable (but inferior) lumber and pulp for the mills. But thanks to the incredible lack of diversity in those "trash forests", a single new disease can wipe out the entire population like wildfire. And unlike in an old-growth forest, animals do not live there, and soil nutrients are devastated and not renewed.

The same thing has happened to business in America. Almost all the little stores are gone. Want a pharmacy? You’ll do business with CVS, Rite-Aid, or Walgreens. Want to go out to eat? McDonalds, Burger King, or Wendy’s if you’re poor, Applebees, TGIF, Chilis, or some other identical chain otherwise.

That’s why I appreciate Rhode Island, where I live now: it’s so small that there’s still some local variety, regional flavors and businesses which have survived simply because it’s not (yet) worth it to the big chains to come in and plow all the local flavor under.

But I don’t know how much longer it will last. Our children and grandchildren will never know the incredible variety that America had, and lost. Their lives will be much poorer for it.