How Old Is 81?

     In a few days I will turn 81. How old is that? Consider:

    The family car, a '49 Plymouth, had running boards. My sister Linda and I would run down the front walk when we heard Dad coming home after work and jump on the running boards to ride the rest of the way down the driveway.

    Flour came in cloth sacks. My mother made dresses for Linda and me out of flour sacks. 

    Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy were the dolls of the day. Pre-Barbie, pre-Cabbage Patch.

L to R: Linda, our sister Sharon, and me
at Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy's wedding

   The milkman left milk in glass bottles on our doorstep. In rural Kentucky, where my grandparents lived, the bread van pulled into the driveway once a week.

    Our telephone was on a party line. There was still an operator you could talk to. 

    We wore white gloves to church.

With my sister Linda, 16 months older, in matching
dresses. (Linda ia also wearing a sweater.)

    We wore crinolines under our skirts, as in this picture taken before the 7th-grade graduation prom. (There was no middle school. We went from 7th grade at Liberty Guinn Elementary School to 8th grade at Sandy Springs High School, where we were called subfreshmen.)

My date was Gary McClosky, as noted in the margin.

   At dance lessons we learned the waltz and the fox trot. Later we learned the jitterbug.

    When I worked for my father during my teen years, his secretary advised me to learn shorthand so I could take dictation from my boss when I became a career secretary. I learned Gregg shorthand, the system invented by John Gregg in 1888. I did not become a career secretary.

    When travel by air became available, while I was in college, women dressed up to fly, just as they did a century earlier to take the train.

    In my childhood, oranges were special treats, avocados and artichokes unknown. I had my first artichoke when I lived in England in my early twenties. I had my first avocado two years later, when I moved to California with the hippy movement.

    I learned to type on a manual typewriter, aa Royal, while I was in high school. Later I used an electric Olivetti, then reverted to the Royal during those many years I didn't have electricity at my house.

Royal typewriter at left, sitting on top of my treadle
sewing machine in the house I built in the early '70s

    It all seems like such a long time ago.