Life was quite different just a century ago. Can you imagine as much change in the next hundred years. Yet it will probably be an even greater change. Technology is not just continuing, it is still accelerating. Think of that as you read.

Life, a Century Ago.

My Dad was born in 1905, somewhere near the location of what is now the town of Alva, in the northwestern corner of the large area known then as The Oklahoma Territory. This was near the end of the era in which that was just a Territory. It became a state somewhat more than a year after Dad was born. That is probably why one of my great great grand fathers had an Indian wife, probably Cherokee. When my father was very young, my grandfather supervised a crew of Mexican workers, working on the railroad, Later, Grandpa had a number of other occupations. When Grandpa ran a dray line (the predecessor to the trucking companies of today), Dad, as a teenager, worked on that dray line. Later, Dad worked as a carpenter, on bridges and other such projects, before he was called to the ministry. But I am getting ahead of my story.

Life was pretty wild in those early days of the State of Oklahoma, at least when compared to the blandness of today. Grandpa once came home after dark and knocked on the door of his cabin by the railroad tracks. Grandma was home alone and had the door locked. When she asked who he was, he pretended to be one of his Mexican laborers and drunk. She told him to get lost and refused to open the door. When he got more insistent on getting in, still pretending, she warned him to get away from the door and, when he didn't leave, split the door in two with an axe. Grandpa dropped the Mexican accent and all pretense, immediately.

One afternoon, when Dad was pretty young, he and his brothers came home from fishing. Dad didn't get his fish hooks cleared of all bait and put away thoroughly. That evening, dinner was interrupted by a cat, which was running away with Dad's fishing pole. The neighbors accused them of leaving it out deliberately, because the cat had been raiding Dad's family's chicken house.

Another story about that cat starts with the chickens making a fuss. As they went out to investigate, Dad and his younger brother, Steve, saw the cat run under the house. They had a shotgun, already loaded with rock salt, just for this situation. Steve went to the access hole on the other side of the house, while Dad watched the near one. When they looked under there, from opposite sides, they could not see the cat in the dark under there. After warning Steve to get away from the hole, Dad stuck the double-barreled 16 gage shot gun under the house and pulled both triggers at once. Steve said the cat shot out from under the house as if it had been shot out of the gun, but the cat wasn't the only one affected. Dad's mother had been sweeping the floor just above the blast area. She screamed at the noise and later said the whole floor seemed to rise a half-inch and the rug lifted even higher. This sort of thing must be why mothers get gray.

One Halloween, Dads younger brother, Steve, got into a little trouble with the neighbors, when he rolled a dray wagon wheel down the hill from their home place. These things were big and wide and very heavy. This one knocked down several fences and destroyed a chicken house, among other things, before being stopped by a tree. Had it missed that tree, it would have stopped inside a house that was just beyond the tree.

Another year, Steve decided to make a real noise for the fourth of July. He made himself a cannon, from some water pipe that was lying around the place. First, he drilled a hole through one side of a "Y" in a tree trunk. He inserted the pipe and then capped it on the back end. He pushed the back end back against the other side of the "Y"in the tree. He had already drilled a small hole near the back end of the pipe. On the morning of the fourth, he tamped a big load of powder into the thing and followed that with a large bolt. When he lit the powder, the bolt was blasted across the road, through a 2 X 4 in the neighbor's garage door and half way through a 2 X 4 in the back wall of the garage. Fortunately, the neighbor had already gotten his car out of that garage and left for work.

One time when their sister, Evalenabelle, was cooking breakfast for just the two boys, she decided to sprinkle quinine on their eggs, just for fun. Uncle Steve took a big bite and then made an awful face and complained bitterly, about the taste. Because this situation was so common, Dad immediately guessed what was going on, tasted his and declared there was nothing wrong with them. Then he tried Uncle Steve's. Saying there was nothing wrong with them either, he ate half of them and his own and then left the table. He was hiding behind the door, waiting, when his sister came to the table and tasted them, for herself. When Dad started laughing, she chased him all over the house saying she was going to kill him. That is the kind of family they had.

Uncle Steve became a mechanic, after he was grown and Model T Fords were becoming popular. He was a very big man, with huge hands and he didn't seem to be much bothered by electric shocks. When he needed to check the ignition system of a Model T Ford, since he had no instruments, he would set the hand throttle to hold the engine speed a bit above a fast idle and then grab all four spark plugs. His diagnosis depended on how strong the electrical jolts felt, as the engine died.

One day, Uncle Steve was working on the family "T". Dad was watching and Grandpa was sitting on the front fender, smoking his pipe and reading the newspaper. Uncle Steve had it running and was ready to test the ignition. He looked at Dad and took Dad's hand in his. Dad stood clear of the metal fender and touched the back of Grandpa's neck. Dad says the pipe went about twenty feet straight up, the newspaper went all over the farm and then he and Uncle Steve ran all over the property with Grandpa in hot pursuit.

It really was a different life, then. Dad remembered the first time he saw an automobile. At that age, seeing an airplane was uncommon for me. He remembered his first radio. I remember my first computer. In the year 2104, what?

Tom S.
Hermit on the Hill

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