time machine

sturmkatze said:

No thank you. I’ll start here. I wouldn’t mind living the 80s and 90s over again

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60’s/70’s for me.

I think 1967 was the last good year - after that things started going to heck. I was 20 years old, the cars were fast, the girls were pretty, and there were no computers.

Many of us had parents or grandparents who used horses, kerosene lamps, an outhouse and had friends and family who died in childhood. Childbirth was life threatening for mother and child, simple infections killed or crippled, and little medical things would plague you for life. I got those stories first hand. As great as the draw of simpler political and social times is I'll stay here with modern medicine, the grid. my 4x4 and live the past thru my 18th and 19th century arms. However knowing how to get by if the system goes down will be priceless. As the Scout's say "Be prepared"

The crabby old farts then would be complaining about how great it was in the old days, and how the kids are now stupid and worthless... just like today. No need for a time machine!!!

waksupi said:

Walking through the old cemeteries here, many kids died before they were one year old. The local cemetery has a listing of how everyone met their end, disease was a big factor.

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Have you noticed that the vast majority of deaths before about 1930 were in the winter months? I have also seen lots of old graves where a 16 to 20 year old mother and a newborn baby were buried side by side.

Whitworth said:

Many of us had parents or grandparents who used horses, kerosene lamps, an outhouse and had friends and family who died in childhood. Childbirth was life threatening for mother and child, simple infections killed or crippled, and little medical things would plague you for life. I got those stories first hand. As great as the draw of simpler political and social times is I'll stay here with modern medicine, the grid. my 4x4 and live the past thru my 18th and 19th century arms. However knowing how to get by if the system goes down will be priceless. As the Scout's say "Be prepared"

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One of my grandfathers was born in 1894 and died in 1993 at 99 years old. Farmed with horses, steam engine, and later a tractor. Did road grader work for the county in the 1950’s and 1960’s.
When he was in his mid-90’s I asked him what was the best invention to come along in his life. After about 3 seconds, he said that cars after about 1925 were good, penicillin, TV’s and telephones were good, “ But when we got that electricity, by God, THAT WAS ALL RIGHT ! Really changed things for the better “.

I really...really like electricity, too many times in the '80s I would have to go weeks without it.

Youngblood said:

Even with all the dangers to face, it would be hard to pass up on the true freedom of those times.

No building permits, hunting and fishing licenses, taxes-especially property tax (govt rent). Just to name a couple.

Seeing the amount of game and unspoiled and undeveloped nature. Herds of buffalo, salmon runs in damn near every stream. The American Chestnut trees still alive. Seeing indians in their traditional ways.

Id would go. I might die fast but id die in a real “Free Country”.

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I wouldn’t mind going back for a month or two, but that would be about it.

smoothshooter said:

One of my grandfathers was born in 1894 and died in 1993 at 99 years old. Farmed with horses, steam engine, and later a tractor. Did road grader work for the county in the 1950’s and 1960’s.
When he was in his mid-90’s I asked him what was the best invention to come along in his life. After about 3 seconds, he said that cars after about 1925 were good, penicillin, TV’s and telephones were good, “ But when we got that electricity, by God, THAT WAS ALL RIGHT ! Really changed things for the better “.

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When I was a younger kid, we lived in a very small 4 room house with no running water. Had a outhouse, though. A two-holer, no less!
I still remember how cold it felt to sit with my pants pulled down over one of the holes cut out in the wood boards in the winter, especially when it was well below freezing. Didn’t take long to do your business and get out of there. Wasps were always trying to build nests in there in warm weather, so we had to be on the lookout for them. Kept a flyswatter on the bench seat to deal with them. We had a steel white enameled “pot” with a lid and bail in my Mom and Dad’s bedroom for night use when the weather was bad.
My two main daily duties besides feeding the dogs was emptying the pot if needed, and hand pumping water for the house from the well outside and carrying it about 30 yards to the house in a 3 to 5 gallon bucket. In cold weather the water had to be drained out of the bottom of the pump to prevent freezing by removing the pump handle and plunger and reaching down inside lifting the flapper valve with my fingers to drain the pump body. When it was time to get more water, warm water was brought from the house to prime the pump after putting it back together.
We lived there from the time I was about 8 years old and moved into a small, new house that my parents had been saving for when I was almost 12.
Let me tell you, that new house felt like a palace! Carpeting, AC and central heat, a short hallway, full basement, and an INSIDE BATHROOM with a tub! At the previous house we took baths in a #2 wash tub and another one that was longer. Outside most of the time. I carried water to the house and Mom heated it up on the stove.
Saturday evening and Wednesday were usually bath days. (Had to be clean for church).
This was in the mid-to-late 1960’s, and as a kid, I really didn’t think much about the inconvenience of it all, even though most of the people we knew had all or most of the modern conveniences. A few still used outhouses.
All the above has made me a little more appreciative almost every day than most people still living of the creature comforts I have had since then. Those times when I was a kid were still not that bad compared to how people lived in earlier times.
Realistically, I'm glad I was born when I was.

Jim in Wisconsin said:

I think 1967 was the last good year - after that things started going to heck. I was 20 years old, the cars were fast, the girls were pretty, and there were no computers

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Zapadach said:

Let's see....medical advantages..... well doctors giving pills rather than telling their patients they have to stop eating the junk they eat. No more house calls, or that exercise and diet will cure the majority of ailments Americans suffer from. Do you know, before 1914, very few of Americans suffered from heart disease, except congenital problems, as in the case of Robert E.Lee. I think I would do just fine 200 years ago, don't forget everyone were not trappers or mountain men. Just before the Civil War 80 percent of Americans lived on farms. They were eating home grown food, and Americans did not become a beef eating society until after the Civil War. They ate barn yard meat and vegetables from the kitchen garden. Or they hunted wild game on the Woodland areas by the farm. How do I know I wood do fine 200 years in the past ? Because I live like that now, I have not been to a doctor in over 20 years, and when I did go to a doctor, it was for a DOT physical required by my employer and the law. My blood pressure is great, my energy is great, I take no pills of any kind, and I still enjoy a sip of bourbon occasionally. I exercise several times a week, and I am stronger than many men half my age, and I am just shy of 70 years of age. Sorry for the rant, but I truly believe most people are selling their lives short by buy into all the manure the medical business tells them.

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Not to be smart but I had a good friend who was the same way. When he finally went for the pain in his back he found out he had advanced prostate cancer. If you're all alone in the world you can think like that but at 68 he left behind a widow. For me the big "C" wasn't about me, it was about the effect on my family. For years I got by with " you can pee a hole in the snow and you're not blind" company and FAA physicals but as you get older you need more. Getting slapped in the face with cancer is bad enough, finding out when it's too late to do something is even worse. YMMV

Nostalgia is well and good, and it's fun to remember some of the good things, but I was born before Pearl Harbor, raised on a subsistence farm, and although we raised and gathered enough food so we always had something to eat, we were poor folks. I remember working hard every day. We raised hogs and chickens, grew vegetables, and gathered whatever fruit and nuts we could find. My mother canned fruit and veggies, plus we had bins of potatoes and onions, barrels of pickles and salt pork, a smokehouse with hams and bacon. Every room in the old farmhouse had kerosene lamps and lanterns for when the power went out. We did have indoor plumbing and water was piped into the house from two natural springs. I remember when my father and a neighbor dug the trench to pipe the second water from the second spring in. They did it by hand. Plowing was done every spring with a mule-drawn plowshare and then disked the same way. The fields between the house and the dirt road were mowed once a year by men with scythes,
earlier by my father and a neighbor and later by me too.
As a boy, I had my own scythe and sharpening stone, my own double-bit axe -- and my own work shoes. My favorite toy was my Daisy Red Ryder, and later the .22 I inherited from an uncle. My "fishing rod" was a sapling I cut myself until Dad got me a telescoping fly rod one year for my birthday.
We had electricity when it worked, lanterns when it didn't.
Our house was heated by a wood-and-coal burning furnace that had to be fed with a shovel and stoked by hand. We cut, split, and stacked several cords of wood every year for the winter months. The first phone I remember was a wooden box with separate mouth piece and ear piece, both Bakelite, and a crank on the side to get the operator's attention. We didn't have an automobile until I was ten so we walked to town when we needed to go and walked back. There was no television yet, but we had a big old wooden RCA Victor radio on a table in the living room and listened to broadcasts in the evening often.
It was a good, wholesome life but it wasn't easy. I'm very grateful to have had the experience but I wouldn't go back.
I nearly died with whooping cough one year but was saved by the new doctor in town who gave me penicilin.

Jim in Wisconsin said:

I think 1967 was the last good year - after that things started going to heck. I was 20 years old, the cars were fast, the girls were pretty, and there were no computers.

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You need to get out more often, Festus.

smoothshooter said:

Not to mention no toilet paper.
The stench and general unsanitariness would be apalling when around most other people.
The prevailing state of feminine hygeine would keep me celibate.

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Q: What did folks use for birth control in the "Good Ol' Days"?

A: Nudity.

Whitworth said:

Not to be smart but I had a good friend who was the same way. When he finally went for the pain in his back he found out he had advanced prostate cancer. If you're all alone in the world you can think like that but at 68 he left behind a widow. For me the big "C" wasn't about me, it was about the effect on my family. For years I got by with " you can pee a hole in the snow and you're not blind" company and FAA physicals but as you get older you need more. Getting slapped in the face with cancer is bad enough, finding out when it's too late to do something is even worse. YMMV

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There are forms of cancer that effect some people that you can not do anything about, but the vast majority of cancer patients are suffering from not taking care of their own health. If you don't smoke, there is a real good chance you will completely avoid, lung, mouth, and throat cancer. If you don't abuse alcohol, you can avoid liver cancer. Before the American diet reached Asia, prostate and breast cancer were unheard of. Now they are starting to have the same health problems the U.S. has. If you examine the parts of the world where people live the longest, you will find that people eat much differently than Americans, and the cancers that so many fear, is practically none existent, as well as heart disease. Unfortunately very few doctors tell their patients any of this, or don't know it themselves. And the medical business does not push it, because there is no money in it. It pays for them to keep people sick. That is why you should educate yourself about your body, and how to keep it healthy. One last thought, if I may, people do not trust the government, nor politicians, nor judges or even the police, but they will willingly, without any question give themselves over to medical business. Once again, I am sorry for the rant.

Whitworth said:

Not to be smart but I had a good friend who was the same way. When he finally went for the pain in his back he found out he had advanced prostate cancer. If you're all alone in the world you can think like that but at 68 he left behind a widow. For me the big "C" wasn't about me, it was about the effect on my family. For years I got by with " you can pee a hole in the snow and you're not blind" company and FAA physicals but as you get older you need more. Getting slapped in the face with cancer is bad enough, finding out when it's too late to do something is even worse. YMMV

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Whitworth said:

Not to be smart but I had a good friend who was the same way. When he finally went for the pain in his back he found out he had advanced prostate cancer. If you're all alone in the world you can think like that but at 68 he left behind a widow. For me the big "C" wasn't about me, it was about the effect on my family. For years I got by with " you can pee a hole in the snow and you're not blind" company and FAA physicals but as you get older you need more. Getting slapped in the face with cancer is bad enough, finding out when it's too late to do something is even worse. YMMV

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Back before showers were prevalent, and baths were for Saturday night - IF you lived in a house, people, well, for our times, people STANK!

But you stank also, just about the same as everyone else.

Women used cloth rags, or fleece, and generally did wash the part of the body a bit more than the once weekly bath. They were generally much more modest than women today. Look at early 20th century pictures of people swimming, or enjoying the beach - full cover bathing suits were sure popular.

Don't know how long I would have lasted back in the 18th or 19th centuries. I was a blue baby when born, and while in the Philippines ages 10-12, had both Malaria and Dengue Fever. But, I wouldn't have gotten the pleasures of visiting Vietnam for a year in my early 20's, would I? That pays me well these days, however - and all tax free! No tribute to the King!!!

Love the period's firearms, not the living style.

Zapadach said:

There are forms of cancer that effect some people that you can not do anything about, but the vast majority of cancer patients are suffering from not taking care of their own health. If you don't smoke, there is a real good chance you will completely avoid, lung, mouth, and throat cancer. If you don't abuse alcohol, you can avoid liver cancer. Before the American diet reached Asia, prostate and breast cancer were unheard of. Now they are starting to have the same health problems the U.S. has. If you examine the parts of the world where people live the longest, you will find that people eat much differently than Americans, and the cancers that so many fear, is practically none existent, as well as heart disease. Unfortunately very few doctors tell their patients any of this, or don't know it themselves. And the medical business does not push it, because there is no money in it. It pays for them to keep people sick. That is why you should educate yourself about your body, and how to keep it healthy. One last thought, if I may, people do not trust the government, nor politicians, nor judges or even the police, but they will willingly, without any question give themselves over to medical business. Once again, I am sorry for the rant.

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Anyone who honestly believes that any legitimate doctor in the US would want to keep a patient sick in order to make money from that patient is a fool. Name one, or post a link, please.

smoothshooter said:

Not to mention no toilet paper.
The stench and general unsanitariness would be apalling when around most other people.
The prevailing state of feminine hygeine would keep me celibate.

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I can almost guarantee that nobody was eating psy back then.

B P Arn said:

Anyone who honestly believes that any legitimate doctor in the US would want to keep a patient sick in order to make money from that patient is a fool. Name one, or post a link, please.

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Since you have resorted to name calling, I will not ingage in conversation with you. I suggest you do your own research, like I did.

A lady in the late 1800s….
As the guy said In Josey Wales, if one of you has to…,

Zapadach said:

Since you have resorted to name calling, I will not ingage in conversation with you. I suggest you do your own research, like I did.

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Works for me.