When my grandpa was a young child, he had no phone to endlessly scroll through or watch his favorite show from a streaming service like people can nowadays. Life was a lot different back then; he had to find other things to occupy his time rather than what most of us do nowadays. Technology has advanced substantially over the past few decades; it was almost like another world when he was just a 7-year-old kid in the 1960s.
Back then, people had to find different things to do in their free time, such as playing marbles or learning a new skill like chess, listening to the radio, and more. Living in a poor neighborhood, my grandpa found interest in listening to his old radio or watching the morning TV at an old lady’s house. TVs were quite expensive, a luxury for only rich people to enjoy, but the old lady with the only TV in town let all the kids watch it, including him.
“Well, we listened to a lot of radio, especially on the weekends, Saturday and Sunday. There were actually comedy programs and musical programs, mysteries, things like that… Some people had television but I think when I was six or seven I was living in a small town and there was only one television and so everyone kinda gathered around in the morning and watched television. Television got popular maybe in the 1953 to 1954.”
Technology wasn’t even close to what it is nowadays. Technology has affected everyone and everything differently. Most people don’t balance their checks in their checkbooks, people have AI to write essays for them, and even simple things like the clothing you wear were probably machine-made. Nowadays, people have technology to assist in almost every aspect of life.
“We didn’t have nearly the amount of technology that you have today. The technology we had were basically telephones, television, and radio. There were no computers, there were no cellphones; there was a dial phone and that was about it. If we needed an answer to a question we had to go to a dictionary or the library and actually read the answer, we had to actually do research (said sarcastically).”
Over the past decade, things have changed drastically. My grandpa went from living in a tent in the woods to getting a cell phone just this year. Life is just different nowadays for everyone, now he sits at home watching his TV in my mom’s basement and listening to his favorite good old NPR news station.
