History Adventuring

Although I usually travel backwards in time in this blog, today I want to go into the future, and look back. I want to try to explain what it was like "back in the day" when people took pride in their driving skills. Here we go... Since cars have been self-driving for many years now, some of you young folks have asked me to talk about what things were like back when the average person was expected to drive cars. I'm in my seventies now, and I might be my eighties (I'm not sure) so you have to bear with me, and rest assured that even people younger than me remember this. There was a time when driving skills, and the knowledge of what to do in traffic was very important to the average person, especially us men. I myself remember that getting my driver's license was a big moment in my life, and I got my first car soon after that. It really is hard to explain how much the average man cared about his ability to drive. You really couldn't even hint at a criticism of

It's the holiday season, and here in Phoenix, Arizona it's the best time of the year to visit. I call this "Chamber of Commerce weather" and it's just gorgeous. Phoenix has been a tourist destination for most of its history, and it brings in people from all over the country. This is just wonderful for the economy, but it can be challenging for drivers. No, I'm not gonna point fingers, or blame, it's just the way it is, and once you understand that, you can calm down a bit. Stay with me on this. Although traffic laws are fairly consistent all over the United States, their interpretation can vary widely. And since sharing the road is a social thing, it can be frustrating for people who have one idea on what the correct thing to do is, and other people who have different ideas. And this morning I was thinking about one of my favorite short stories, written by James Thurber, who described the time that he was a passenger in a car and realized that the driver w

I'm currently reading the "Red-Headed League", a Sherlock Holmes short story, which I've enjoyed several times before, but this time the phrase "an elderly man with red hair" caught my eye. And at the risk of sounding like a detective, which I'm not, I ask you to ponder that phrase, which must have made sense in 1890. Since I'm an elderly man now, in my sixties, I have a perspective that I didn't have the first time I read this story. Without giving anything away about the story, the fact that the man had vivid red hair is very important to the plot. But since my hair started going gray in my forties, and was completely gray by my fifties, I've been pondering how someone could be described as "elderly" and have vivid red hair. I just looked up the birthdate of the author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, which was 1859. The story was published in 1891, so Doyle would have been about 32, and presumably at that age he didn't know when hair

One of my followers on my history adventuring podcast casually used the expression "freak show" yesterday, and I knew exactly what he meant, in spite of never having seen a real freak show. I really didn't give it much thought until this morning when I was out pedaling around, and thought that it would be fun to time-travel back to old-time Phoenix and actually go to a freak show. I tried searching the keywords "freak show" at the Library of Congress site where I look at old Phoenix newspapers, and was surprised to find that it turned up nothing. But I know that freak shows were part of the circus, so I just found this ad from 1912. It must have been amazing to see. From what I've read, you could see all kinds of unusual things, including animals like giraffes, and elephants. And in addition to seeing what usually springs to mind at a circus, watching the acrobats, or clowns, you could go see unusual people. I don't see the word "freaks" in thi

One of the most confusing things about being a time-traveler is understanding how the use of certain words change. I recently saw a young woman on TikTok who was patiently explaining to me that the word "lady" isn't something that people should be using nowadays. And now of course I'm thinking of how I understood that word in my sixty-four years of time-traveling here on planet Earth in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and Phoenix. By the way, since I pride myself on being a gentleman, I want to stop and say thank you to the nice people at Duke University who scanned this billboard. And my original understanding of the word "lady" is the equivalent of gentleman (which is still a good word - I like being called a gentleman, and when I see a group of young men I say stuff like "Howdy, gentlemen!"). Back when I first heard the punchline to "Who was that lady I saw you with?" being "that was no lady, that was my wife!" it was funny because

I was watching an old movie from the 1920s on YouTube, and was surprised to see a reference to "railroad time". Specifically, the character was saying that that the ship sailed at a particular time, which he emphasised by saying "railroad time". And even though I had never heard the phrase before, I knew what it meant - right on time. If you weren't there at that time, you would miss the boat. Time-travel with me to a time when people had to be at the train station right on time, or the train would leave without them, and they'd be stuck until the next train. It must have been a very difficult thing for people to have to suddenly deal with, especially people who weren't "clock watchers", and who woke up at sunrise, that sort of thing. From what I'm learning, this attention to specific detail as it relates to time was something that the railroads insisted on, because they had a schedule to follow, and the distances that they covered were muc