The Olden Days of Yesterday…And I mean YESTERDAY

Ad advert for Bell Telephone, 1910.

“The Bell System has become the nervous system of the business and social world. The comfort it affords the women in the homes of American cannot be measured. The mother of children can find out where they are at any hour of the day and HOW THEY ARE, even though their visits carry them to the country village or the city hundreds of miles away. The husband on a trips talks to his wife from the hotel room. There is a world of comfort knowing you can talk together at a moment’s notice whereever you may be. There are 6 billion calls over the Bell System every year. Many of these are comforting calls from afar whose actual money value can no more be reckoned than the value of the happiness one man has and another cannot buy…..

Well, this ad, from 1910 era, is relevant to Flo in the City (my novel in progress based on the real life letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/ )in so many ways, I don’t know where to begin! On some level, it sums up the key theme of my novel.

The Nicholsons had a telephone which they used for local calls, for ordering from the general store, etc, but the telephone was rarely used for long distance purposes, even with all the problems the family had in this period, and even if Mother Margaret was determined to keep track of her kids, wherever they may have been.

But this ad, which employs the same marketing strategy used to promote the cellphone (and many other new technologies) 100 years later, plays on fear, and the most fundamental fear of all, a mother’s fear for her children.

It plays into the sociological patterns of the industrial era, as well. Families were breaking up. In the Eastern Townships of Quebec, within the ‘anglo’ community, this was happening on an especially large scale, due to lack of work for the younger generation.

That’s why the Tighsolas letters exist and that is also why they have historical relevance. The Nicholsons were archetypal, representative and not an exception. They were middle class in a time the middle class was growing, but also under great stress, being buffeted around by uncertainty. Like middle class families today, let’s face it!

Anecdote: the other day, as per usual, as I left for a short drive to the grocery store, my husband asked me if I have my cell. (I don’t use it much.) I said yes. But I had to laugh. ‘You didn’t worry when I took our really crappy second hand rust buckets years ago, say, to Montreal, say in an ice storm, say with our small kids in the back, and today you are worrying when I take my rather nice new Malibu, with the OnStar “big brother” package, a few kilometers to Loblaw’s in nice weather.’ (During the infamous Ice Storm of 1998 or was it 99, I actually drove to Montreal on the barren ice-caked highway, out of desperation as we had no heat in the burbs.)

I guess the more ‘protective’ technology we have, the more fear we have! I joked at the time, but it isn’t that funny, is it? It’s kind of ominous in a Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451 way.

And here’s a less foreboding thought I just had the other day: Technology is moving so fast that ‘kids’ today probably see no difference between the ‘olden days’ of 2005 or the olden days of 1905.

The 33 lp is as much ancient history as the wax cylinder victrola. My cell phone (which was my son’s first or second one) is as old a technology, to elementary school children, as that first wall mounted oak telephone box with its hand crank. (We actually have one of those mounted at our entrance:we use it to hang our keys and such. My husband ‘found’ it as a kid in an abandoned farmhouse. In short, to them, History was just Yesterday, or Last Week. So they are as likely to be interested in the 1910′s as in the 1990′s. It’s all the same.

I thought about this because a social studies teacher from BC uses my Tighsolas website in his classroom. He finds the letters on the website very useful to teach about the Laurier Era, as they provide ‘authentic’ accounts of life back then… Now, my 60′s high school text book, Canada Then and Now, contained just a couple of paragraphs about The Laurier Era. (I know, I found a copy.)

How times have changed: Imagine if students today had access to just 3 paragraphs of information about the 60′s instead of piles, mountains, megatonnes of information, almost too much to deal with.

In the few years of working on Tighsolas, I’ve seen an exponential growth in the amount of primary and secondary information just on the 1910′s. Indeed, what I can’t find today, I can wait and usually find within the next year.

Yes, times have changed: Back in elementary school, in the 60′s, when I was assigned a project on life in another country, the only pictures I had access to where out of Travel Agent brochures. So, I did a lot of projects on Trinidad and Tobago, where life was sunny and oh so perfect! Today, a student can talk to a child in another country, although the very poorest children are still isolated and voiceless.