@Astraeus..

4 months ago

My great-aunt Wilda (grandmother's sister) was born in 1901. She married at 19, and by 20 she and her husband had purchased a rather large hotel in my hometown, which was a fairly prolific logging town at the time, located near the Ottawa River in Canada.

Their hotel was 3 storeys tall, and in a pinch could accommodate as many as 150 guests. Aunt Wilda's husband was the "owner" ostensibly, but every single aspect of it's running and management were handled by her for the better part of 5 decades. There was a girl working there in the early days who's entire job was to clean and refill the kerosene lanterns they used. She's one of the first people I ever heard about who lost a job due to technology, as the hotel purchased a generator to power modern (at the time) lighting some time in the late 1930's. They sold the hotel, IIRC, in the late 70's and Wilda's husband died around a decade later. She, however, lived to be 104, dying in 2005.

She was alive during the fall of multiple empires, the Ottoman, German, Japanese, and British most notably. She saw the fall of the USSR, lived through both World Wars, the Cold War, and a couple dozen other major national conflicts. In her lifetime the Pope changed 9 times, the British monarch changed 5, and she was alive from the 26th President (Theodore Roosevelt) through to the 43rd (George W Bush).

She was born before the first powered flight was achieved. Before the Ford Model A existed. Decades before the first transatlantic phone call. The first television "broadcast" happened when she was around 10. She would have been around at the time of the third bubonic plague outbreak, as well as 2 separate global Influenza pandemics. She was born before penicillin, bakelite (first synthetic plastic), nylon, cellophane, and FM Radio. Just about every single thing we'd think of as being a modern computer didn't exist.

During her childhood the absolute norm, especially in rural Canada, would have been horse-drawn carriages and dirt roads. A round-trip "overseas" would have been a matter of weeks, and the sort of thing only the very wealthy would do just for fun. Easy long-distance communication was mainly limited to a telegraph, and not the kind of thing you'd even be able to do from home.

Meanwhile, at the time of her death cellphones were fairly common, TV and internet were basically everywhere. You could get a flight across the ocean for less than a week's wages and get there in less than a day, and cars were damn near more common than trees.

All things considered, 1901-2005 saw that woman live through a mind-blowing contrast of times and technology. One of my very few, honest regrets in life is that I wasn't mature enough to be able to understand and appreciate that fact while she was still alive, because I can't imagine the kinds of stories and experiences she would have gladly shared with me if only I had been bright enough to ask and listen.

1.1K |