Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
Flushing Meadows, in Queens, a New York City suburb, was a busy place in 1939. It was the Empire State’s answer to the gloom, disaster, and suffering that an unbridled Wall Street had inflicted on America resulting in the Great Depression.
The 1939-40 World’s Fair was dedicated to the future, a brighter, more prosperous, more hopeful future. It didn’t quite have the impact supporters hoped for when the Nazis invaded Poland from the West and the Commies from the East in September of 1939.
Despite the actions of Stalin and Hitler, the fair remained a hopeful, exuberant event thanks to the majority of Americans favoring isolationism while ignoring the European carnage.
It’s always fun to look back in time and see what the people of that era thought the future would bring. The New York World’s Fair hit some targets right on the sweet spot. They predicted cell phones, albeit larger ones with big external batteries. Television was already in place with limited broadcasts in larger cities. Philo T. Farnsworth patented color TV back in 1926, but there wasn’t the technology in place to deliver it yet.
Other things like flying cars, automatic kitchens, limited working days and a leisurely society devoid of poverty were way off target.
The trend to predict a brighter future remained until around 1984. Now predictions are almost always dystopian, with destroyed, polluted landscapes and barren wastelands filled with pathetic survivors, preyed on by corporate monsters. If certain groups have their way, that could be our future very soon. Think of scenes from Terminator or Mad Max which were made in that era.
For most of us, the “World of Tomorrow” as they labeled the 1939 World’s Fair didn’t materialize.
We all dreamed of flying cars as seen in “The Jetsons”, but what we got instead was a car filled with buzzers, bells, and alarms to remind us of what we’re doing wrong.
Personal helicopters flying out of the backyard were popular visions of the future in the 1950s and 60s. We have something similar in “helicopter parents” who ruin youth sports, torment teachers, and are creating an entire generation of powder puffs. They’ve evolved into “snowplow parents” pushing everything and everyone out of the way of progress for their pampered little miscreants. Those backyard helicopters will have to wait.
The biggest change came in the kitchen. I remember my grandmother butchering and plucking chickens for dinner, cooking everything from scratch without a recipe and never having a bit of food left after the meal, all over a gas stove.
Now the kitchen abounds with pasta makers, air fryers, microwaves, specialty blenders, and every conceivable device. Most sit on the cupboard as people get delivery via Grub Hub or other providers off an app on their cell phones.
All that labor-saving technology, with no one using it is a waste. That’s a future the series “The World of Tomorrow” sponsored by Union Carbide in the mid-1960s never predicted.
Newspapers were once the primary source of information with trusted broadcasters like Edward R. Murrow, David Brinkley, Chet Huntley, and Walter Cronkite providing a bit of video on the evening news.
The newspapers all had their specific political slant, but they reported the events as they occurred. It wasn’t until 2016 that we heard the term “fake news” uttered constantly by the constituency of a man dedicated to never telling the truth.
The futurists predicted universal screens, as far back as the 1920s, not television but big public screens along the lines of Times Square. That didn’t quite become reality, though the Jumbotrons at big league stadiums are a marvel of technology.
Instead, we have “niche news.” News or rather entertainment as Fox News claimed when they were hit with a $787 million settlement now fills the market. If you have a specific political vent, you can find a group online that supports you. In doing this it has eliminated an educated, informed citizenry. That’s why high schools have become a philosophical battleground between far right and far left.
They didn’t have time for that in the 1930s and 40s when people first had to find something to eat and then when they began to slightly recover had to battle the Fascists for world control.
When you don’t have real problems, those looking for your vote will generate them for you by playing to your darkest fantasies.
The youth of today are so protected that they have few friends and lack social skills when they venture out into the cruel world. The sad fact is that some of them have 4,000 online friends, but don’t know anyone who would pick them up from the airport.
Regarding airports, and flying commercially, this would be perhaps the biggest disappointment of all for people from the past.
In 1979, I took a flight from Denver to Albuquerque as part of the University of Wyoming team to institute electronic registration. We took off from Denver and the flight attendants began delivering coffee, juice, and cheese omelets to everyone on board. Not just first class, but everyone on the flight.
They were picking up the final trays when the pilot announced we were about to land.
Today it breaks United if they provide anything aside from minuscule packets of five pretzels in a tiny foil-wrapped container and maybe a small plastic cup of pop. It sure isn’t the gourmet dining experience that Pan Am, Delta, United, and American offered until the early 1980s.
Watching Gunsmoke, Leave it to Beaver, Johnny Quest, and Gilligan’s Island are all collective memories of Baby Boomers and Gen X. Who could have imagined it would be an insult to tell someone to “Go watch TV.” But it is.
When it was ABC, NBC, and CBS with a smattering of science shows on fledgling PBS everyone was glued to the set for their favorite programs. Now with 500 cable channels, there isn’t anything to watch for most people, aside from reruns produced long ago by ABC NBC, and CBS.
Does anyone remember dreaming of owning a GTO, a Mustang, or a Camaro? We all did, they were the cars of your dreams. It’s doubtful that the teenagers of today share the same sentiments toward the beige, run-of-the-mill, identical SUVs marketed by every manufacturer. If you’ve seen one “Ford Pube” you’ve seen them all.
A final local comment on modern restaurants for Riverton, since Dubois, Lander, Hudson, and Midvale don’t suffer from this annoyance.
It’s been rumored that two more Mexican restaurants will soon open. That makes a total of seven in a town of around 10,000 people. Saturate the market much folks?
Along with that, we live in the midst of “Cattle Country” and the best place in Rivercity (perhaps the only place) to get a steak during the dinner hour is Ichiban, a Japanese steakhouse.
Seven Mexican restaurants, and no steak house, who could have predicted that? At least you can support the oil and gas industry the next time you want a ribeye.
Here’s to the future.