As an old guy with most of my life behind me, I’ve been thinking about my past, which is 75 years of Wow. No worries, this is not a boring history class with lots of dates and places to memorize. There will be no test. It’s just some random disjointed thoughts about the stuff I’ve lived through that caught my attention, and that I can remember (advanced age and all). So, buckle up and come along for the ride as I wander through over seventy years of my most likely distorted memories. 75 years of Wow
It began in the 1950’s in the Midwest, an enchanting place filled with farms, hogs, corn, granaries, woods, a river, and a small town with a bank (for the farmers). I should probably also mention the two businesses that sold farm equipment, the casket factory and the rubber and gasket factory, although I’m not sure why. Main street in that place, which shall go nameless to protect the innocent, hasn’t changed in over seventy years. So far not much Wow. Sorry. 75 years of Wow
As a skinny little kid living in the seedy part of town, the so-called ‘valley’, I spent much of my time running away from bullies. However, my best friend and I also did a lot of outdoor stuff, canoeing, fishing, swimming, playing basketball and tennis. We made good use of those woods and that river. We had some real adventures, like the huge water snake in the canoe. And the time we got the brilliant idea to canoe over a six-foot waterfall, which almost ended me. In retrospect I wouldn’t recommend either one. My brain contains fond memories of the freedom of those early times, until I had to go to work at age 14. 75 years of Wow
I had some interesting jobs as a youth, working on an ice cream truck, working in a Pepsi bottling plant, driving a Pepsi delivery truck, bailing hay. I hated the hay bailing thing the most. The guy that hired me made me work on the wagon and stack the bails while he drove the tractor. He had a mean streak, and took great joy in making unexpected turns, causing me to fall off the wagon. He was a brute of a fella, huge chest and arms. When we stacked the hay bales in the barn loft, he would take them off the elevator one at a time and toss them to me. As a scrawny kid I was supposed to catch them and stack them. It was more like ‘dodge and stack’. I guess I was a survivor. 75 years of Wow
My life’s trajectory at that time was headed for work in the Pepsi plant, casket factory, or rubber and gasket factory. The most exciting thing that happened while I lived there involved the McDonalds that opened on main street. My family went there for lunch every Sunday after church, and it was a big deal. 75 years of Wow
Dear God, no wonder I ran for my life as soon as I could, went to college, and escaped the mind-numbing boredom of that place. I’m extremely grateful for that, as I have had a wonderful life full of blessings, a family of my own, a great career in the pharmaceutical industry, traveling all over the world. But if I want to know what it was really like back in 1950, all I need to do is travel back to my old hometown. Main street will be exactly the same as it was 75 years ago. That place is stuck in a time warp. 75 years of Wow
I realize that so far, I’ve failed to mention anything of historical significance, with the exception of McDonalds. I do remember some interesting things of note. For example, there were the drive-ins, both restaurant and theater. Once the car was invented, people appeared to want to spend a lot of time in them. Once I earned some money, and got my own car, I loved parking in the local drive-in restaurant and having a young lady come out and take my order. Eventually she’d bring the food back on a tray, attach it to my driver’s side window, and I’d pay her and chow down. The food usually involved burgers, fries, and milk shakes. Although in the Midwest there was this delicious thing call a fried pork tenderloin sandwich, a real artery clogger. If I was lucky, I might have a date with me. Although back then the guy usually paid, and those jobs I mentioned did not exactly pay top wage. 75 years of Wow
Then there was the drive-in theater. I love movies, and many a weekend I would take a date to the drive-in. I would stay for all three movies, take her home, and go immediately to work to start my Pepsi route at four AM on Saturday without sleeping. Oh, to be young again. The best things about the drive-in movies were the snack stand with hot, buttery popcorn and ice-cold soft drinks, and the fact that you could make out in the back seat if your date was willing. (You could also save money by sneaking her into the movie without paying if she was willing to get into the trunk of your car). It was a crazy time where porn was forbidden, but you could go to the drive-in, look at the cars parked near yours, and see all kinds of… Let’s just say if the movie was boring, and your date was not willing, the two of you were usually surrounded by all sorts of entertaining activities. I think this might be where some guy got the idea for the porn industry. 75 years of Wow
One thing I do remember of historic significance is that “One step for mankind” thing, where NASA sent men to the moon. That was Apollo 11 waaaaay back on July 16, 1969. On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong was the first man to set foot on the moon, and he planted an American flag there. I’m guessing the flag is still there. It’s baffling to me that as aggressive and competitive as the human race is, we haven’t gone on to Mars, and beyond. I looked online, and the online AI told me it’s because the Apollo program was very expensive (there were six missions altogether) and risked lives. 75 years of Wow
I have my own theory. Some superior alien race must have contacted President Nixon back then and told him the moon was our limit. As a crazy violent race chocked full of lunatics (the aliens’ opinion, not mine) we were not welcome to wander into the rest of the universe. I’m guessing this is one of the secrets in that alleged secret book that is supposedly passed on from president to president. 75 years of Wow
This thing that I carry around in my pocket is called a cell phone, or an iPhone. It’s really a powerful computer. My youngest daughter and I took a cross-country trip in 2016 and visited an old Titan Missile base turned into a museum. I remember the huge control room, filled with computer equipment. The retired female astronaut that led the tour told us that our cell phones had one hundred times the computing power of all the computers in that room. Which is my lead-in to the telephone that we had in our home where I grew up. 75 years of Wow
In the 1950s, our first phone did not even have a rotary dial. And you shared the line with three other families in your neighborhood, so everyone knew what you were up to and vice versa. To make a call, one picked up the handset, and if you were lucky an operator from AT&T would say “number please”. I still remember my first home phone number, 3-9-3-red. How weird is that? My aunt worked as an operator for the phone company, and she gave me a tour of the place. Those switchboards had a kajillion wires, and to this day I have no idea how she was able to figure out the way to connect two people to talk to each other. It had to do with plugging and unplugging wires, but what a mess. 75 years of Wow
Then we got a rotary phone and a phone number that was all numbers so we could dial it in. This, as technological developments often do, eliminated a whole lot of jobs for telephone operators. Let’s not forget the phone booth, for those who wanted to make a call but were not home in reach of their phone. I remember fumbling to put the quarter in the slot, often dropping the coins on the ground, and never having the correct change. I also remember when some lunatic decided to see how many people he could stuff in a phone booth. Somebody else tried this same thing with a car, I think it was a VW bus. 75 years of Wow
Then someone got the idea to combine two of the greatest advances of my time, the car and the phone. It started with a phone that was wired into the car, so it ran on the car battery and was only portable depending on where you could take your car. I guess if you drove a Jeep, it was more portable than your standard Ford sedan. Then came the bag phone, a silly looking thing that literally came along with its own large battery in a bag which you carried in your car. But it was not directly attached to the car, so it was more portable, depending on how strong you were. The thing was heavy, almost the size of a backpack. 75 years of Wow
Then came the cell phone with its own antenna that would fit in a large person’s hand. Raising and lowering that silly antenna was a pain, and I always seemed to manage to irreparably bend mine at some point. Now my iPhone fits in my pocket, and I can talk to it, ask it questions, use it to turn on my lights, run my vacuum cleaner, drive my home security system, play music on my car sound system, and it even serves as a GPS so I always know how to get home (very important for an old guy like me). 75 years of Wow
There are cars that are memorable to me. My first was a 1969 Ford Mustang with a 250 cubic inch six-cylinder engine with 155 HP. I loved the car, because it was my first. However, I remember that whenever I stepped down on the gas pedal, I always wished for an auxiliary set of foot pedals like on a bicycle so I could make the thing go faster, or up a hill. The VW bus is another memorable vehicle. I always wanted one but couldn’t afford it. These appeared in 1950 and became famous during the Hippie years and the Viet Nam War era. Many of them drove around filled with marijuana smoke. Finally, the muscle cars by Dodge, Pontiac, Ford and Chevrolet. Those things would fly but were way out of my price range. 75 years of Wow
My wife and I bought a 1966 VW Beetle for our first car. I was 22 at the time, and it was Upstate New York where they salt the roads ten months out of the year. I remember to his credit that used car salesman tried to steer me away from that particular car. But I only had $900, it looked good, I was young and stupid, and I demanded he sell it to me. 75 years of Wow
After about six months I discovered that the dealership had packed the brakes (no longer legal) and painted over a literal rust bucket. The rust start coming through, parts started falling off, and the brakes went. The car also had no blower motor for the defroster, just a heater. So, you had to keep moving in order for hot air to blow over the windshield. Fortunately, I have long arms, because in the winter I had to open the driver’s side window and reach out with a rag to keep the windshield clean enough to see to drive (I did say young, and stupid). I once literally had to open the door and drag my foot to stop the car before we got hit by a train. 75 years of Wow
I’m happy to report that after that I did a lot of research and have become a car guy over the years. I traded that rust bucket in for a 1969 VW Beetle in very good condition, and it gave us many years of trouble-free transportation. It also had a blower with the defroster, so I no longer had to manually wipe off the windshield while driving. However, there was no screen in the blower fan. So, when snow piled up on the hood and I turned on the defrosters, some of the snow would come in with the air and it would literally snow in the car. I obviously still had a few things to learn at that point. Since then, we have had Ford Expeditions, Toyota 4Runners, and now we’re into Subarus, including my favorite, a 2018 Subaru WRX. I finally figured out the transportation thing, and it helped that I could finally afford something a little less rusty. 75 years of Wow
The other thing about the car industry that always makes me laugh, or cry, I’m not good with emotions, is the car bumper. To my mind, this was the beginning of what has now become a marketing technique of convincing the stupid consumer that something bad is really better. Think shrinkflation, for example. I remember when cars used to have steel bumpers. You could run into a telephone pole with a 1950s Ford and hardly damage the car at all. Then the manufacturers decided that plastic/fiberglass bumpers would be preferable, which is to say cheaper to make. The auto industry’s explanation was that the old steel bumpers were too heavy, and these new plastic things were lighter, resulting in better gas mileage. That’s great. Just don’t hit a telephone pole, or anyone with a steel bumper. 75 years of Wow
Then there’s all the wars. I lived through the Viet Nam War and was very lucky to have a high lottery number, and didn’t get drafted. I went off to college on an academic scholarship instead, one of my many blessings. It looked like that war would never end. Then there were a bunch of so-called skirmishes, like the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Falklands where the US was only peripherally involved, and on and on. 75 years of Wow
The big one during my lifetime was the so-called Cold War, where no one fired a shot. It was more of a spending war. The USSR had nuclear missiles, the US had nuclear missiles, and the two countries were playing a global game of chicken while spending each other to death. At one point President Regan came on TV and told us not to worry. If the nukes flew, all we had to do was hide behind a Volkswagen or a bush and we would be fine. I was glad to hear that, since we had that VW Beetle. 75 years of Wow
I remember all the high school drills where we were taught how to hide under our desks. There were no bushes in the classroom. There has been the War in Iraq, the Afghanistan War, another one that went on forever, and on and on. I really don’t have much to say about war, other than I genuinely pray that men and women someday learn to use their God-given free will for something better than killing each other over land, religion, politics, fill-in-the-blank. But what the hell do I know? I bought a 1966 VW rust bucket. 75 years of Wow
The other thing that comes to mind is the Covid-19 Pandemic. My wife and I moved to Florida in 2019. It started in late 2019 when I ended up in the hospital and almost died. I finally recovered, started getting my strength back. In March 2020 my wife and I took the Subaru WRX for a trip across the state to the Tail of the Gator, a fun to drive curvy road on the Gulf side. We were only gone overnight. When we arrived back home in St. Augustine the next day Covid hit the news and was declared a full-blown pandemic. 75 years of Wow
My wife and I thought about repeating that trip and hoping that when we returned the second time it would reverse the pandemic thing (I believe that’s called magical thinking or being delusional). Anyhow, you’re all familiar with the pandemic…wear mask, carry hand sanitizer, wash hands until they bleed, treat life like you’re living in a BL-4 containment facility…repeat. As old folks, we mainly stayed home. When we did go out, we wore masks, did the hand sanitizer thing, and when we got home immediately disrobed, washed the clothes, took a shower…you get the picture. It was important to make sure the home security cameras were off when we arrived in the house for obvious reasons. 75 years of Wow
Since Covid my memory is a little fuzzy. Perhaps I have that long-Covid thing? Seems like it’s mainly been about electing a president that ended up being like four years of the movie “A Weekend at Bernie’s”, millions of illegal immigrants in, electing a president that people love to hate, millions of illegal immigrants out. I avoid the news like the plague. Apparently half of the country hates the other half of the country and vice versa. I just want to have fun and enjoy my few remaining years. 75 years of Wow
The things that have impressed me most since Covid are the three tropical storms/hurricanes my wife and I have lived through. I must admit, my wife is much braver than me. During all three storms, she kept assuring me that everything would be okay. It was especially difficult for her to talk to me, because I was hiding under the bed. Truthfully, we knew this was a risk before we moved to St. Augustine, and we still love it here. It’s also a beautiful place for me to write my comedy murder mysteries. It’s become home. That’s not exactly a notable historical event, but it is important to us. If not for that superior alien species, we could have ended up spending our final years on Mars, or beyond. I’m pretty sure I prefer the beach. 75 years of Wow
If you’ve enjoyed this blog post, perhaps you’d also like my just recently launched new book titled HOLY CRAP. In this one, Dr. Jason Longfellow, PI and his nurse wife Chelsea are looking for a safe place to live. They move to a city called INTOXICATION JUNCTION and enroll their daughters in a private Christian school. What could possibly go wrong? To find out, go to johnjjessop.com to get a link to buy the book on Amazon. Take a look at my other comedy murder mysteries while you’re there. I remain convinced that laughter is the best medicine. I am a retired pharmacologist, so I should know.