Being an older man in old-time Phoenix

As someone who has been drifting into his senior years for quite a while now, I'm comfortable being described as an older man. There's an important distinction between "older man" and "old man", and I would dislike being called an old man, unless of course you were a cheerful RAF pilot during World War II.

And now I'm thinking about how it would have been to be an older man in old-time Phoenix. And my best guess is that it would have been about the same. When, exactly, someone becomes "older" of course depends on the ages of the people look at them. People didn't live as long back in the day as they do now, and with the widespread use of tobacco, and less dental care, I'd imagine that people started looking older, by our standards, younger, if you follow me there.

If we time-travel back to 1904 (that's the Fleming Building there, on the northwest corner of Washington and 1st Avenue), and be older men, we may be respected by the young whipper-snappers, or scoffed at. We would know stuff that takes age to learn, like how and when to file a report with the Sheriff (for example) or how escrow works, or where to get the best interest on a savings account. We would know how to hitch up a team, but wouldn't have the slighted idea how the new technology of "automobiles" works. Age would have probably taken a lot of our teeth, and chances are that we would whistle when we talk, which would make the young folks giggle. "Yessiree, ssssonny, you can get good interesssssst on your ssssavingssss at the Phoenix National Bank!"

Speaking for myself, while I'm prepared to me an older man, and am happy to be there, I really can't imagine being an old man. And by that I mean decrepit, dazed and confused, maybe sitting around all day complaining about the government, or trying to remember what I had for breakfast. And I know that day will come for me, but it's off in the future. I plan on getting older.

Thank you for getting older with me!

If you like pictures of old-time Phoenix, please become a member of History Adventuring on Patreon. I share a LOT of cool old photos there, copyright-free, with no advertising. Your support makes it happen! Thank you!

Click here to become a Patron!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is ...
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the...
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me...
Read more