PA 28-180

[Arnold]

I recall from another thread that someone is looking for one of these. I found this on the bulletin board at 9N1 (Van Sant airport, Erwinna, PA).



Don't even need to write stuff down any longer, just take photos with your telephone. I remember growing up thinking 'boy my grandparents have seen incredible changes in their lifetimes.' When they were kids the telephone and the electric light had just been invented, radio and tv were still years or decades away, horses were the most common form of transportation and doctors still made house calls (actually they still made house calls when I was a kid). I thought, wow I'll never see such changes in my lifetime. Well I was wrong. I've seen the electronic digital computer go from newly invented, barely affordable, made from tubes, to putting in my pocket a computer more powerful than the entire computing capability of NASA when they sent a man to the moon and it is also a telephone and a recording device and a playback device and a camera and . . . I'll stop there. I was wrong, I have seen and will continue to see just as much change as my grandparents did.

 

[jsstevens]

My grandfather (on my Dad's side) was born in 1889. He was 14 when Orville and Wilbur did their thing at Kittyhawk. He lived to see men on the moon, radio, television, color television, pocket calculators and power tools (he was a carpenter). I marvel at how much he'd seen.

My wife & I have been married 29 years. On the 25th anniversary of our first date, I bought the 25th anniversary edition DVD of "The Jazz Singer" (the remake with Neil Diamond) - the movie we went to see on our first date. While watching the movie, we realized he was hanging around the phone waiting for a call. Wait! No cell phones! I see the changes (I work, and have worked for most of my adult life, in the computer business) but they don't register as so ubiquitous and far reaching until I look back.

Hmm.

John

 

[AggieMike88]

Telling the youngsters that you walked to school uphill both ways in the snow doesn't really impress them any more.

What works is telling them that the video game of choice was Pong. And that you even paid 25-cents for the priviledge.

And the secret language of teens was ig-pay atin-lay, not "OMG!! WOOT! I TOTALLY PWEND U! C U L8R!! ROFLMAO!"

Inventing Swear Words video

 

[Dan Thomas]

An old guy who died here a few years ago at the age of 102 had been born in 1900 or so. When he was a young boy very few people had ever seen an airplane fly or a car or an electric light. A few people in the cities, maybe. Most folks still lived in rural areas. He said that the biggest change he saw was in his own field, agriculture. The invention and development of the combine, which reduced the task of harvesting a quarter-section from ten or fifteen men taking several days to one or two men doing it in an afternoon, and neither of them working very hard.

When I fly on an airline, especially from, say, Winnipeg to Calgary (700 nm or so), I look down at the prairie and think of those homesteaders in their Red River carts in 1870, taking all spring and summer to make the trip that I make in less than two hours, and I don't suffer heat or cold or dust or hostiles or predators or disease or injury or a rough ride and hard ground under my blankets, but I complain about the tight seating and lousy coffee and being 15 minutes late on arrival. Go figure.

Dan

 

[steingar]

Biggest change in American history was when folks moved from the farms to do agricultural work to the cities to do industrial work. Changed their whole way of life. The stuff we do now pales in comparison, though it is neat.

 

[fgcason]

When I fly on an airline, especially from, say, Winnipeg to Calgary (700 nm or so), I look down at the prairie and think of those homesteaders in their Red River carts in 1870, taking all spring and summer to make the trip that I make in less than two hours, and I don't suffer heat or cold or dust or hostiles or predators or disease or injury or a rough ride and hard ground under my blankets, but I complain about the tight seating and lousy coffee and being 15 minutes late on arrival. Go figure.

We've turned into a bunch of whiney softies - the whole lot of us. Anyone who says otherwise is completely out of touch with reality.

Early this summer I wasn't having a lot of fun driving the back low use sort of highways of far west Texas. They were some of the worst roads I've been on since Colorado which wins my crappiest roads award. When I finally got to NE Arizona I decided to quit whining about anything that's vaguely passable at all from then on. I found a section of the original Route 66 that according to the locals dates back to the 1920's. I rode my motorcycle on it for about 3 miles each way. Brutal stuff. Later I found another much better section west of Flagstaff and rode it for about 5 miles. The second section of road was still being used occasionally so it was probably more like the road when it was the main route through the area. Even that section was still rough and not to be taken lightly. I was riding my street motorcycle like a dirt bike yet I couldn't help thinking that this was how it would have been in the 1930's, 1940's and even into the 1950's. Rutted, no pavement, no roadside rest areas, no facilities, washed out in places, no wallyworlds or glitzy five star hotels...It was just a dirt road that looks like what you'd find on a farm through the northern AZ desert next to a bunch of telephone poles.

Picture: Route 66 at the Painted Desert just north of I-40. See the road? It's there. Look for the faint path just to the left of the telephone poles. Seriously.

 

[Ghery]

Telling the youngsters that you walked to school uphill both ways in the snow doesn't really impress them any more.

My kids didn't believe me when I told them I did that, until they went to college where I grew up and found first hand that Dad wasn't as full of it as they thought. I had to go over the hill that the main part of the WSU campus is on to get to high school. Up hill, then down hill. Each way. And it snows in eastern Washington.

 

[PilotAlan]

Telling the youngsters that you walked to school uphill both ways in the snow doesn't really impress them any more.

What works is telling them that the video game of choice was Pong. And that you even paid 25-cents for the priviledge.

[gratuitous Monty Python reference]

Michael Palin: Ahh.. Very passable, this, very passable.

Graham Chapman: Nothing like a good glass of Chateau de Chassilier wine, ay Gessiah?

Terry Gilliam: You're right there Obediah.

Eric Idle: Who'd a thought thirty years ago we'd all be sittin' here drinking Chateau de Chassilier wine?

MP: Aye. In them days, we'd a' been glad to have the price of a cup o' tea.

GC: A cup ' COLD tea.

EI: Without milk or sugar.

TG: OR tea!

MP: In a filthy, cracked cup.

EI: We never used to have a cup. We used to have to drink out of a rolled up newspaper.

GC: The best WE could manage was to suck on a piece of damp cloth.

TG: But you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor.

MP: Aye. BECAUSE we were poor. My old Dad used to say to me, "Money doesn't buy you happiness."

EI: 'E was right. I was happier then and I had NOTHIN'. We used to live in this tiiiny old house, with greaaaaat big holes in the roof.

GC: House? You were lucky to have a HOUSE! We used to live in one room, all hundred and twenty-six of us, no furniture. Half the floor was missing; we were all huddled together in one corner for fear of FALLING!

TG: You were lucky to have a ROOM! *We* used to have to live in a corridor!

MP: Ohhhh we used to DREAM of livin' in a corridor! Woulda' been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woken up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House!? Hmph.

EI: Well when I say "house" it was only a hole in the ground covered by a piece of tarpolin, but it was a house to US.

GC: We were evicted from *our* hole in the ground; we had to go and live in a lake!

TG: You were lucky to have a LAKE! There were a hundred and sixty of us living in a small shoebox in the middle of the road.

MP: Cardboard box?

TG: Aye.

MP: You were lucky. We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six o'clock in the morning, clean the bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down mill for fourteen hours a day week in-week out. When we got home, out Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt!

GC: Luxury! We used to have to get out of the lake at three o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, go to work at the mill every day for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would beat us around the head and neck with a broken bottle, if we were LUCKY!

TG: Well we had it tough. We used to have to get up out of the shoebox at twelve o'clock at night, and LICK the road clean with our tongues. We had half a handful of freezing cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at the mill for fourpence every six years, and when we got home, our Dad would slice us in two with a bread knife.

EI: Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing "Hallelujah."

MP: But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe ya'.

ALL: Nope, nope..
[/gratuitous Monty Python reference]

 

[AggieMike88]

[gratuitous Monty Python reference]

[/gratuitous Monty Python reference]

I'll see your Monty Python, and raise you a Wierd Al.

Weird Al Yankovic: Off The Deep End - When I Was Your Age (YouTube.com link)

Let me tell you sonny
Let me set you straight
You kids today ain't never had it rough
Always had everything handed to you on a silver plate
You lazy brats think nothing's good enough...well

Nobody ever drove me to school when it was ninety degrees below
We had to walk butt-naked through forty miles of snow
Worked in the coal mines twenty-two hours a day for jus half a cent
Had to sell my internal organs just to pay the rent

When I was your age
When I was your age
When I was your age
When I was your age

Let me tell you something
You whiney little snot
There's something wrong with all you kids today
You just don't appreciate
All the things you've got
We were hungry, broke and miserable
And we liked it fine it way...heh

There was seventy-three of us livin' in a cardboard box
All I got for Christmas was a lousy bag of rocks
Every night for dinner, we had a big ol' chunk of dirt
If we were really good, we didn't get dessert

When I was your age
When I was your age
When I was your age
When I was your age

Didn't have no telephone, didn't have no fax machine
All we had was a couple of cans and a crummy piece of string
Didn't have no swimming pool when I was just a lad
Our neighbor's septic tank was the closest thing we had

Didn't have no dental floss, had to use old rusty nails
Didn't have Nintendo, we just poured salt on snails
Didn't have no waterbed, had to sleep on broken glass
Didn't have a lawnmower, we used our teeth to cut the grass!

What's the matter now sonny?
You say you don't believe this junk?
You think my story's wearing kind of thin
I'll tell you one thing- I never was such a disrespectful punk
Back in my time, we had a thing called discipline!

My dad would whip us every night 'til a quarter after twelve
Then he'd get too tired, and he'd make us whip ourselves
Then he'd chop me into pieces, and play frisbee with my brain
And let me tell you junior, you never heard me complain

When I was your age...​

 

[steingar]

The sad thing is I'm getting so old I don't even recognize the songs he's parodying.

 

[PilotAlan]

I'll see your Monty Python, and raise you a Wierd Al.

I will yield for content, but not for presentation

 

[Ghery]

The sad thing is I'm getting so old I don't even recognize the songs he's parodying.

+1. Me, too. Sad, isn't it?

 

[jmcsherry]

That's a parody ?? Oh, nevermind.