85

I recently turned 85. I really did not expect to last this long. When I turned 70, I wrote a contemplative essay that attracted some attention. For 85, I mostly have only an old man’s boring reflections on how much has changed.


I was a teenager before I saw a television and a college student before I saw a pizza. The first television was on only two hours a day and there was only one station in town.


I can remember when bib overalls were the usual clothes of working men. And when mules and wagons could regularly be seen. And when a lot of city streets were not paved.


I can remember party-line telephones, and kerosene pumps, and a lot of tobacco-curing barns.


When I graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1963, it was still customary to give every graduate a Bible (King James).


When I was 10 or so, I could ride the bus (10 cents) downtown and spend the day reading comic books, watching movie serials (25 cents), and eating hot dogs with Nehi orange. Nobody dreamed that a child alone would be molested.


My maternal grandmother had 9 children and my paternal grandmother 5. Most couples I have known in recent years had 1 or 2 children and quite a few have none at all.


I can remember when my hometown boasted of our skyscraper-- 17 stories tall.


I can remember when BB gun fights between boys were commonplace.


Boys carried pocket knives to school and nobody thought anything of it.


No male carried an umbrella. To do so would have required a response to ridicule. The first time I saw it was in college and then only with fraternity boys.


When I first arrived at UNC, dormitories were 3 students to a room and there was one large bathroom for the entire floor. Having a phone never occurred to us. We did have a small TV where we could humourously watch “Lone Ranger” reruns before getting a full supper meal at the cafeteria for 35 cents.


I can remember when UNC-Greensboro was the Women’s College of NC. Of course, it was a weekend destination for UNC-Chapel Hill boys. Women students had to sign out and in and had to be back by 11 p.m. Nobody could imagine coed living quarters.


I saw the last college “panty raid”-- 1963. You probably don’t know what that is, but it was quite common in a certain period. Many students were veterans and did not welcome civilian discipline.


I remember many students cheering when the JFK assassination came on the radio. I also remember Walter Kronkite, “the most trusted man in America,” immediately announcing that Kennedy had been shot by “right wing extremists” in Dallas.


​When I gave up college teaching in 2006, undergraduate students could not do one-fourth of the work that they routinely did when I began in 1971. Of course, university presidents, a particularly bad bunch of con artists, were bragging that we were becoming ever more “excellent.”