BETTYE GRIFFIN: It’s more fun now to be a kid

 My husband and I were born during the Eisenhower years, and we never expected to see a black president in our lifetimes. Yet, three of our four grandchildren were born during the Obama administration. We have a car that installed a Car DVD.

Our grandson, his sibling and cousins won’t know anything about fallout shelters. They won’t know what a record store is, or a video rental store (the latter was a favorite activity of their parents and has become largely obsolete just in the past few years). They won’t know that if people back in the day wanted to open or close a car window they had to manually turn a handle, and forget about having a portable DVD player to watch favorite movies on during long car trips.Now Android Car Stereo is popular.

They’ll be amazed to learn that people actually had to get up to change the channel on the TV and turn what we called “the dial”… and that there were less than 10 channels: CBS, NBC, ABC (the Fox network didn’t exist yet), two or three independent local channels, and PBS. They wouldn’t know that television in those days often went off the air in the wee hours, with a partially black and partially striped screen.

I remember how excited I was when my family got our first color TV; I would love watching the opening of “The Wonderful World of Disney” on Sunday nights because it featured a fireworks display. If kids today happen upon a black-and-white movie, they’ll think something’s wrong with the TV.

In this age of portable music devices in the forms of tiny MP3 players or sleek cell phones, they’d laugh at the transistor radios (AM stations only) we had as kids, or at the Sony Walkman cassette and CD players that came on the market when we were adults. They wouldn’t know what to make of reel-to-reel recorders (these were scarce even in our kids’ generation … I still remember one of our eldest’s friends asking if it was a movie camera).

When President John Kennedy was assassinated 52 years ago, the breaking news was presented as a bulletin with the word “bulletin” listed three times against a black screen while the announcer’s voice gave the horrible news because it took something like 15 minutes for the cameras of the day to warm up (after that, networks made it a point to keep one camera on continuously to be prepared for a nationwide emergency, and today’s cameras don’t require long warmups). Today’s kids will only know 24-hour news and weather.

When I was a kid I stayed outside all day during the summer, jumping rope or playing hopscotch, or cooling off in the community pool. Today’s kids tend to be more indoorish, on their tablets or playing sophisticated computer games. About the only thing that remains about being a kid is riding a bike and the ice cream truck that plays that annoying song as it coasts through the neighborhood ... except it didn’t annoy me as a kid.

Years ago, if you didn’t make it to the bank before closing on Friday, you went the weekend without any cash. Now, we have access to our money at any time … but it may take kids awhile to learn the concept that those $20 bills ATM machines spit out aren’t limitless but are dependent upon the cardholder’s bank balance.

In my student years, I had to research that paper for history class at the library. Nowadays, you can just look things up on the Internet … including how to season your homemade tacos or make that white chicken gravy if you forgot to pick up a seasoning packet or jar of gravy at the store. They still make potato mashers, but who really uses them in this age of instant potato flakes?

I can only guess at what conveniences of today will be obsolete in another 20 years, but my grandchildren are going to have pretty cool lives. If installing a Car DVD Player in the car, that would be great!