Right Turns
I have lived long enough to remember Muhammad Ali, Johnny Carson and Vietnam. Elton John, Farrah Fawcett and the arrival of major league baseball free agency.
Some of those things are still with us. Some aren’t. And some have changed so completely that explaining what they once were requires the sort of historical context normally reserved for the Roman Empire.
I remember the Interstate highway system being new. There was an actual thrill to riding in my grandfather’s aircraft carrier-sized Chrysler pushing 80 in the left lane. Today, the left lane is occupied by some dude in a Prius doing 64 while apparently negotiating a trade agreement on his phone.
Cars themselves were different. Power steering and automatic transmissions were luxury options. My first car had neither. I would flex my 16-year old biceps in social settings. “Lifting weights?” came the query from chums and girls I hoped to impress.
“Nope. Right turns.”
I remember gas wars. The lowest price I recall was 17.9 cents a gallon, which at the time was roughly half price. There were giant signs along the road announcing this, because gasoline stations were engaged in the quaint economic practice of a concept known as “competition.”
I remember the controversy over whether we should be allowed to bring electronic calculators to class. There was genuine concern we would become dependent on them and lose our ability to do math. Today, a kid carries access to all recorded human knowledge since the dawn of civilization in his back pocket. Sort of makes worrying about whether he can calculate the square root of 92 seem whimsical.
My first baseball glove was broken in by putting a ball in the pocket, wrapping the glove tightly and piling about a dozen volumes of the Encyclopedia Brittanica on top of it. Turns out the entire accumulated knowledge of mankind doesn’t weigh what it used to.
I remember vending machines that accepted a dime and a nickel, and through an ingenious sequence of gravity, balance and mechanical levers, dispensed an ice cold glass bottle of full calorie, sugar-infused Coke without electricity, Wi-Fi, a password or a software update.
I remember wearing a suit and tie to work.
Airlines that were routinely on time. Smoking on airlines that were routinely on time, though I’m comfortable leaving that memory behind.
I remember watching the NBC Nightly News and not spending the next 45 minutes investigating whether Tom Brokaw was making it up.
Len Dawson, Mike Livingston, Bill Kenney, Todd Blackledge, Elvis Grbac/Rich Gannon, Trent Green, Alex Smith and Patrick Mahomes. It’s not a Chiefs quarterback list, just a way of carbon-dating my life.
And in my lifetime, my first president was assassinated.
Language changed, too. Honesty became “transparency,” personnel gave way to “human resources,” and we didn’t get as worked up over problems when we described them as “challenges.”
We also gained plenty along the way. Medicine got better. Cars got safer. Information that once required a trip to the library now arrives before we’ve finished typing the question.
But I wonder whether we lost a few things, too.
Patience, maybe. The benefit of the doubt. The willingness to not know something for five minutes.
I don’t pine for glass pop bottles, manual steering or cigarette smoke at 30,000 feet. And I certainly don’t want to go back to a world in which a set of encyclopedias represented the outer boundary of what I could know.
What fascinates me is how little notice we took while the world was changing. Nobody announced the last time I would use a pay phone, unfold a roadmap, turn an ignition key or pick up a newspaper to learn something I didn’t already know.
There was no ceremony. No moment of silence.
We just did those things one day.
And then we didn’t.
Mike Matson’s column appears every other weekend in The Manhattan Mercury, and he seeks the second thought as host of ‘Within Reason,’ Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays at 9 a.m. on NewsRadio KMAN.
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