Sept. 09, 2002 - 13:52 PDT

THE WONDERING JEW

Smoke Signals

In my spoiled way of life I sometimes have to visualize living without a telephone, radio, television with not even Pony Express mail service. Writing letters by candle light, using sealing wax to seal them and then trying to find a way to get them where you wanted them to go. Then figuring out if you could afford the postage.

It is so hard to put myself in that boat. Back in the early days ordinary folk like me had no access to libraries, no novelty store that carried magazines or paper back books. Might be that if you lived in a town there would be a daily newspaper printed there. But you would know that the news would be old by the time you read it.

The only books available would be the ones you bought yourself or those given to you as presents. Books could be exchanged by friends of course. But still, the amount of reading material available to a person was limited compared to the present day.

I can remember straining to hear sound from a crystal set radio my uncle built, I was somewhat disappointed that it was hard to hear and the quality of music was not nearly as good as the sound issuing from our Sonora victrola. But it was radio, sound detected from a source far from the little box with the coil of wire, a few other things and a headset. Dad's first real radio was an Atwater Kent three piece rig, the battery box, the loudspeaker and the radio itself. We used that until he got a Philco cathedral style table top set.

Our first phone was the candlestick type, one would take the receiver off the hook and wait for the operator to do her Lily Tomlin bit and connect you with your number.

When I was young, air mail came into being here in the Denver area. Night flying was in its infancy here also. The road from Denver to Colorado Springs, Colorado was lined with electric beacons to guide night flying aircraft. I was told that mail was flown at night. Those who told me did not know what that was so, I do know that there was no passenger traffic then. So, mail was truly snail mail, it came by train to the Terminal annex here in Denver and then to the main Post Office. Took awhile, but arrived eventually.

One connection to the world and its news were the movie theaters. The first ones I saw were silent movies. I remember Hoot Gibson movies and some of Lon Chaney's silent pictures. A pianist thumping away down in front of the theater. They were people who were super good at mood music, they could fit the music to the action on the screen. With the "talkies," came the Newsreels, film for them came by train but even so were fairly recent stuff. Later the double feature movies came along, two shows, a newsreel and a cartoon show. A good way for us kids to spend a Saturday afternoon.

Magazines were in most drugstores in the neighborhoods, but comic books were yet in the future.

Nowadays air travel can put one at the source of the breaking news in a matter of hours. At home you have a telephone, radio, and television. Most all first class mail nowadays is transported by air. Mail and magazines delivered to your door.

This is the age of communication for sure. Seems to me the only trouble is that nobody really wants to hear what is being said. For the progress made in actual communication facilities there seems to have been little progress in the art of listening. Might just as well be using Smoke Signals . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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