What's going on with you, part II...

[pbrower2a]

(01-03-2020, 02:35 PM)Tim Randal Walker Wrote: I find it a bit odd to be living in the decades off the twenties.

To me the twenties were a quaint period during the early twentieth century.

I think of the 'Twenties, and I can hardly avoid thinking of a time that I know through others. The only roar that any of my relatives knew of the 1920's was that rum-runners used the road (first Michigan 23, which became US-112 in 1926) that went through town on the way from Detroit to Elkhart, South Bend, and Chicago. The local sheriff was too scared to do anything about that. It was a great time to be rich or middle class... but there wasn't much of a middle class in those days. It was easy to get work -- of course it paid little, and the 60-hour workweeks of genuine toil wore people down. Paradoxically it may have been the Great Depression that compelled the Establishment to lengthen the norms of education, to curtail working hours, to get the elderly (often industrial accidents waiting to happen due to slowed reflexes and addled minds) out of industry and into retirement. Real estate was cheap by current standards, but in view of the long hours of hard toil one could hardly get to enjoy it if one worked to pay for it. If one was a housewife, the single-family house was a place in which one could hardly get away from. Cooking, cleaning, and children -- and avoiding the beating that a husband could deliver if one's cooking wasn't up to par for some reason -- and he could get away with it. And let me remind you that although the Harlem Renaissance was going strong, then so was this:



Yuck! We can all be grateful that that group basically disintegrated before it had the chance to do large-scale genocide as did other fascists

It says something about me that prominent people of the time (Sir Winston Churchill, Igor Stravinsky, Charlie Chaplin, Marc Chagall, Bertrand Russell, Georgia O'Keefe, Robert Frost, Helen Keller, Herbert Hoover, Irving Berlin, ira Gershwin) lived at least deep into my first decade of life. But should I live a long life like one of theirs I might be around into the 2040's and be a real dinosaur.