Few people today realize how much progress has been made just in my lifetime. When I was a child, people didn’t have refrigerators. They had iceboxes. A man would come everyday to deliver a block of ice to put in your ice box to keep things fresh. I remember a farmer who had a square, silo type building, in which he had blocks of ice stacked, with a heavy layer of sawdust between each layer of ice to keep them from freezing together.

There were no such things as automatic shifting in automobiles. When I learned to drive, the challenge was to learn to shift gears smoothly with the clutch. Windshield wipers were driven by the engines vacuum, and when you climbed a hill the windshield wipers stopped. Tires all had inner tubes to hold the air, and everybody had an inner tube patching system so they could patch them when you got a flat tire.

Us kids made rubber-band guns from the old inner tubes. When you bought a new car you had to break it in at lower speeds for a while to properly wear the cylinders in, to get a better life from them. If you put 50 thousand miles or so on your car, you would have to have new rings put on the cylinders to keep from burning too much oil. The cylinders were not as perfectly formed as they are now with the help of computer systems.

The streets in town were not plowed in winter. People put chains on their cars’ rear wheels for traction. We lived on Buffalo Street in Gowanda. I recall getting new ice skates for Christmas, and on Christmas eve about 9 o’clock, I put them on and went skating on Buffalo St, as it was covered with hard packed snow-ice from the traffic. Our neighbor was the town public utility man. He had a large truck. I would go with him to the railroad depot to load his truck with cinders from the railroad engines. On the hills going out of town I rode on the back of the truck spreading the cinders on the road while he backed up the hill. I don’t think trucks with snow plows were very common at that time. I don’t think we had chain saws either. I remember in winter helping a farmer saw trees for his fireplace. It required two men to handle a two man saw, which was needed to fell large trees.

I graduated from high school, served a year in the Navy in Japan, and enrolled at U.B., before any of us ever heard of television. Eager to become a part of the newest technology, I got involved. Of course at that time there was no such thing as relay satellite systems high in the heavens. For many years there were only three local TV stations available in Buffalo: Channels 2, 4, and 7. Computers, at least for public consumption, were unheard of. An electric fan was the only type of air conditioner.

Electronics was all handled by vacuum tubes. I recall going to an engineering seminar in Kansas City in 1948, where the lecturer was informing us on the new invention of transistors. I recall he had a radio built entirely of transistors. When he turned it on it produced a station immediately, which amazed the entire audience. The tubes always needed a warm-up period. Now they group several transistors in one unit for many functions. Transistors may break down, but never wear out.

Technology has now advanced to where it has become a wild distraction to many. We have so many meaningful, and meaningless, toys that we have little time to take life as seriously as we ought. We have come to believe that we are masters of the world, and even the universe. Yet most of us have very little understanding of how it all happens, and we still have a lot to learn. I wish you well. May God bless America.

Richard Westlund is a Collins resident. Send comments to editorial@observertoday.com