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April 4, 1945; boy that seems like so many years ago. Sixty-four to be exact since I was born at Mount Vernon General Hospital. Don't bother looking it up, there is no such place anymore. I don't suppose there's much chance I'll see another 64 years, but I would certainly appreciate a few more good ones before I go to whatever reward there is set up for me (grin).
It's been an interesting span of time. I was born just a few days before President Roosevelt (FDR) died, only a few months before WWII ended with the surrender of Japan. I remember quite a few years as a kid where there was no TV in the house. We'd sit in the kitchen some evenings and listen to shows on the radio. I remember The Green Hornet and The Shadow. I remember listening to Let's Pretend and You Were There records on our record player. They were 78s, not 33s or 45s. Took several records to tell a whole story. Our first TV was a huge console with a small B&W screen; at least to me the console seemed huge. We got this TV when I was probably in the 3rd or 4th grade. No cable or FIOS back then; we got permission to put an antenna on the roof of the lumberyard next door and then ran the antenna wires across the street to the house.
Still no computers, but I was here for the first electronic calculators. They didn't do much and to begin with they were pretty expensive. I always told my first wife that as soon as I could find one for under $100.00 I was going to buy one. Got one in the 70s sometime at the Bon Marche (also no longer around) for $99.99. It could add, subtract, divide and multiply. And it had to be plugged in. My first computer was, as I remember, in 1982. That's when I bought an Osborne 1 portable computer, small monitor and dot-matrix printer for just over $2,000. This computer had no hard drive (they were another $2,000 for only 5 Mb of storage).
I don't remember a time we didn't have a telephone, but when I was a kid in LaConner, the phones were all 4 or 8 party lines. When you wanted to make a call you had to make sure no one else was using the phone in one of the other homes. It wasn't until my ex and I moved to Seattle after my US Army service that we were finally able to get a private line phone. Now, just in our family, we have a regular phone with extensions in 4 rooms, and we each have a cell phone. Oh, and three computers for two people.
Wonder what my parents, much less grandparents would think of life today?
