Many of us have living
grandparents who have lived through and
remember some of the most
significant events of the last century. A
good example here would be my
grandmother, Mary Thomas. Grandma died
ten years ago, but the history she lived through and taught me about
from the observer's
perspective was pretty
astounding.
Grandma was born in
1906, in
Indiana to a
farmer and his former
schoolteacher wife, just three months after the
1906 San Francisco
earthquake. Before she was three months old, a
tsunami struck
Hong Kong, taking over ten thousand lives. Before she was four
months old
S.O.S was declared the
international distress
signal. On her first
Christmas eve, the first radio broadcast
was made. During her first year of life the
tuberculosis vaccine was
developed, the
President of the United States made the first out of
country trip by a sitting president (to view the
Panama Canal under
construction), and the city of San Francisco again made headlines when
it came close to sparking an international diplomatic incident by
ordering segregated schools for Japanese students.
During my grandmother's
childhood and
adolescence,
Albert
Einstein expounded his
theory of relativity,
World War I was
fought, the
October revolution occurred, bringing about the rise of
communism in the world, the
Titanic sank, and the great
Influenza
epidemic ran rampant through the world. Among the flu epidemic's
enormous number of victims: my great grandfather.
History touches
home.
As my grandmother progressed into
adulthood, the first working
television was created.
Charles Lindbergh made his amazing flight
across the
Atlantic Ocean.
Penicillin was discovered. Southern
Ireland became an independent nation. The
United Kingdom saw its
first
Labour party government,
flappers did the
Charleston and
the
Lindy hop, and
Prohibition made a lot of criminals into very
rich men. Artistically speaking, the
Art Deco and
Surrealist
movements saw their advents.
As a young woman, Grandma watched the headlines as the
jet engine was
invented. She blinked in surprise when the planet
Pluto was found,
nuclear fission discovered, and the death of
capitalism was
proclaimed. In horror, she was witness to
Joseph Stalin's murderous
Great Purge, saw
Adolph Hitler rise to a position of power in
Germany, married my grandfather, watched
World War II erupt, and
gave birth to my father and my uncle. She saw
Gone With The Wind and
The Wizard of Oz when they were freshly released films.
She worked in a factory making
ball bearings, joining so many
American women as they emulated
Rosie the riveter to help keep
America producing what it needed for the
war effort and to keep the
Americans at home taken care of. She watched as her husband sailed off
to war as an officer in the U.S.
Navy. She was one of the lucky ones
who watched him come safely into
harbor again, too.
She saw the creation and deployment of the first
nuclear weapon, used
on
Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, the only instance ever of nukes being
used as a
weapon of mass destruction. She was
disgusted. She saw
the creation of the nation of
Israel, and the constant low level
warfare that has raged over it ever since.
Grandma lived through the invention of the computer. the Rise and Fall
of
Communism in the
Eastern bloc, the first space flights, the day
that
Neil Armstrong put his foot on the moon, the explosion of the
space shuttle
Challenger,
Elvis Presley, the
psychedelic haze of
the 1960s, the
Richard Nixon administration and its
Watergate
scandal, two world wars, Korea,
Vietnam, and
Gulf War v.1.10. While my grandmother was living,
UNIX and
C were created.
She was alive when the
Berlin Wall was erected, and watched with tears in her eyes as it was torn down.
The point of this listing of the events that occurred during one
woman's
lifetime is that far too often we younger generations tend to
close our ears to our older folks because we have no patience to listen
to them recounting their memories. In so doing, we miss out on so much
that we could learn from these living
history books. When I sat down and really
listened to what Grandma had to tell me, it was
fascinating stuff.
If, instead of closing our ears and our minds, we opened them, we might
learn something of worth. We can see history through the eyes of
another
human being, with a personal slant to it. It isn't all about
dry facts and figures, names and dates. History is alive. History might
be sitting right there in the other room, watching the
soap opera du
jour.
Why not go and find out?