My Changing World

by Norm Solomon

          Because my parents were older than most, our combined experience spans more than a century, and there have been many changes in that time.  The most dramatic changes have been in transportation and communication, changing the world into what Marshall McLuhan called “a global village.”

          For example, when my father emigrated from Syria, he traveled by boat and train across a continent and an ocean in three weeks.  By contrast, when I returned to Syria a little over a century later — by jet transport from Portland to San Francisco, Paris and Damascus — I did so in less than two days!

          My mother’s parents traveled by covered wagon from Logan, Utah, to their homestead in McCammon, Idaho, south of Pocatello.  A few years later, my mother had a distinct recollection of seeing her first automobile.

          History and economics are the foundation of my academic training; so, I have a feel for history in general and economic development in particular.  I was impressed to learn that when the Columbia River Highway was built in 1907, there were only 13 miles of paved roadway in Oregon outside of Portland.

          I had heard an old-timer speak of his family moving from Coos Bay to Salem during the Great Depression, with gravel road all the way to Eugene.  So, when Uncle Wilson told me of the family’s move from Idaho to Oregon in the 1920s, I chimed in that it was gravel road all the way to The Dalles.

          “No,” he corrected, “there was no gravel.  It was dirt road!”

          The biggest change in ground transportation in my lifetime was the construction of the National Defense Highway System, begun by President Eisenhower in 1954.  As a young Army major in the 1920s, Eisenhower had led a convoy of various military vehicles from Washington, DC, to San Francisco.  The point of this experiment was to see how rapidly troops and equipment could be deployed from coast to coast and to observe obstacles encountered.

The simplest problem to solve was inconsistent road numbering.  The convoy would get lost because road numbers would change when crossing a state border or sometimes even a county line.  The immediate remedy was to declare and number a U.S. highway whenever state roads crossed more than one state.  Thus, U.S. Highway 30, which used to have a dozen different numbers, runs from Atlantic City, New Jersey, to Astoria, Oregon.

President Eisenhower’s vision was to someday get massive troop movements from coast to coast in three days.  So, his dream was realized a quarter-century later in what has come to be known as the Interstate Highway System.  Two of my childhood memories are of vacations to Yellowstone Park and to California, with the first leg of each journey ending within Oregon.  Since then, I have driven from Bakersfield, California, in one day and frequently travel to Utah in one day.

Jet aircraft first made their appearance toward the end of World War II, about the time I was born.  As a teenager, I went with my Explorer Post to see one of the first civilian jet transports at Portland International Airport.  In 1963 I flew to Paris on a Church mission, and a few of the older missionaries coming home had come to Paris by propeller-driven plane.

When I was a child, long-distance calls always seemed to carry bad news.  They were so expensive that they were typically only resorted to in time of urgency.  With the advent of satellite transmission and direct-distance dialing in the 1960s, long-distance rates began to fall.  At about this time, a friend of mine called from Paris to Portland, with a cost of $135 for 25 minutes.  (When we account for inflation, that call would have cost more than $500 in today’s money!)  Another friend had an operator hang up on him when he tried to call Los Angeles from a small city in Belgium.  Today, such calls are commonplace, no longer involving the intervention of an operator, and incur only a fraction of the cost.

Medical science has made enormous strides in my lifetime, with polio, smallpox and tuberculosis largely wiped out in modern industrial countries.  I still recall the long lines to get the Salk vaccine against polio when it first became available, too late for three of my friends — Pam, Richard and Bob.  Today, medical researchers are grappling with newly emerging illnesses, most notably HIV/AIDS and mesothelioma.  Of course, traditional challenges remain:  Cancer, various strains of flu, and the common cold.

A change that emerged in my early childhood was suburbanization, made possible by the advent of the second family car.  When I was born, Portland had only three suburbs of any size — Vancouver, Hillsboro and Oregon City — and they pretty well functioned as their own cities.  In the earliest days of my childhood, I recall the time that Mom and I got stuck in the mud in Beaverton.  You cannot do that anymore, since Beaverton has been largely paved over!  My high school chemistry teacher had a farm out in Tigard; I don’t think you would find any of those anymore either.  Gresham, which had only about 1,000 inhabitants when I was born, has since become one of Oregon’s largest cities.

Our family was one of the last on our block to get a television set.  A couple years before, our family had gone down to the grand opening of Portland’s first television channel — KPTV, UHF channel 27.  Mom thought it would be a great idea if Jay and I put on a song and dance to get “discovered.”  But the crowds were big, and we were ignored.  After that, I would occasionally see television at a friend’s house, but acquisition was a low priority in the Solomon household at the time.

After hearing TeleKing ads on the radio, I finally called the company and told them our family wanted a television set.  The operator asked to speak to my mother.  Mom acquiesced to my initiative, and a salesman called with a bulky, heavy device that cost $400 and would get only one channel.  But when the TV was turned on, the show playing that Monday evening was “I Love Lucy,” featuring Mom’s favorite comedienne, and she was enthralled.

We had heard about KOIN Channel 6, Portland’s first VHF channel, but did not know how to get it on our set.  Finally, my tech-savvy sister LaVerne flipped a switch in back to VHF and turned the dial to 6 in front, and viola!   When I left for my mission to France, Portland had five television stations, and folks in Paris were all gaga over deuxième chaine, their second channel.  Today, both cities have hundreds of channels from which to choose.  And I found large satellite dishes adorning the humblest homes in my father’s village in Syria.

There have been a multitude of other changes introduced in my lifetime, but I am barely aware of them and take most for granted:  Automatic transmission, video recording, front-wheel drive, remote controls of all kinds, power steering, high-speed dental drills, cell phones, anti-lock brakes, microwave ovens, automatic dishwashers, convection ovens, Teflon coating, electric can-openers, hand-held calculators, automatic light switches and door openers, ad nauseum.

What have been the biggest changes in my life?  Prices, obviously.  While I was in graduate school studying economics during our greatest bound of peacetime inflation, one of my colleagues made the classic comment:  “I remember when only old folks remembered when prices were low!”  Real estate prices have been especially rampant.  My mother, who once bought a pair of homes for $800 each, never dreamed that her little boy would grow up to live in a quarter-million-dollar home!