Antiquity

I look at pics posted online (Dirty Old Boston) and think “oh, that looks like a million years ago” only to read the caption stating it’s from the late 70s/early 80s. Jesus, I was in my 20s then—late college, carnival and then my first years in Boston. I did the math, 1980 was 42 years ago. Christ I’m old!

Just to make me feel even more antique—I was born in 1958, 64 years ago. A person who was 64 in the year of my debut on planet earth would have been born in 1894. The crew includes:

• Actress ZaSu Pitts, (love the name)
• Norman Rockwell
• Comedian Moms Mabley
  
• Bessie Smith, Empress of the Blues
• Jack Benny
• James Thurber, my first favorite cartoonist/writer 
  
• Nikita Khrushchev
  
• Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s Deputy Führer
• Choreographer Martha Graham was born in 1894. She died in 1991. Just imagine all the horrors and innovations she saw!

What happened in 1894?

• New England Telephone and Telegraph installed the first battery-operated telephone switchboard, in Lexington, Massachusetts.
• Coca-Cola was sold in bottles for the first time.
• New Zealand enacted the world's first minimum wage law,
• Women in South Australia become the first in Australia to gain the right to vote and the first in the world to be elected to Parliament.

Nothing astoundingly earthshaking but in the last decade of the 19th century:

• The Wounded Knee Massacre went down in 1890.
• 1891—In New Orleans, a lynch mob storms the Old Parish Prison and lynches 11 Italians who had been found not guilty of the murder of the local Police Chief.
• 1892—Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite premièred.
• 1893—New Zealand becomes the first country to grant women the right to vote.
• 1894—the Swiss Army knife was invented.
• 1895—Volleyball was invented (without which I would not have broken my leg, jumping up to spike a ball at the same time as a big guy who landed on top of me).
• 1896—Marie Curie discovered radioactivity.
• 1897—Bram Stoker wrote Dracula, inadvertently giving birth to sparkly vampires.
  
• 1898—H. G. Wells published The War of the Worlds.
• 1898–1900—The Boxer Rebellion in China.
  

And my grandparents were born. Grandpa lived to be 99 years of age. In his near century of life he saw the invention of:

• radio and television
• windshield wipers
• the Model T
• fortune cookies and cornflakes
• insulin and penicillin
• the pop up toaster
• Band-aids
• Technicolor
• canned beer and aerosol spray cans (without which we wouldn’t have spray cheese to put on crackers to munch with our canned beer)
• LSD was synthesized on November 16, 1938

  

  illustration by Sharm Murugiah

• helicopters
• Emile Gagnan and Jacques Cousteau invented the aqualung.(without which we wouldn’t have the brill song and album by Jethro Tull)
• the atomic bomb
• Tupperware
• Frisbees
• Velcro

And a whole fuck-ton of other good and/or execrable shit (like freeze-dried coffee…YECH).

There were also two World Wars, all before 1949, the year Grandpa turned 50.

So, what were we talking about? Oh yeah, oldness. Did you know, in 1972, the year my mother was diagnosed with neurofibromatosis type 2, the disease had only recently been discovered. Much of my own early treatments (evals and surgeries) were based on what the docs had learned from examining and operating on my mother and an older cousin.