IPhones, Birthday Parties, Three Shorts And A Long

Dear Byron,

We did it! We all got together to celebrate your first birthday. Mommy and Daddy invited a bunch of their friends and their kids. We ate hamburgers and bratwurst. We sang "Happy Birthday" to you and we each enjoyed a piece of your cake.

Speaking of cake, you had a great time messing with it. You got it all over your face and hands. It was a good thing Mommy put that bib on otherwise you soon would have had it all over your shirt as well.

Here's a picture of you with Mommy, Daddy, your two sets of grand parents, with GGMa and me on the left.

By the way, I took the picture with my iPhone. When I got home I finished up your first year book. As you'll soon learn, Apple has an application that enabled me to choose from all those pictures we took this first year and turn it into a memory book. It should be waiting for you when you arrive at our house. I sent it off by email yesterday. They wrote back at once to tell me it will be completed in less than a week.

One more thing. When GGMa and I got home the Monday after the big weekend, we went to a banquet sponsored by Pregnancy Assistance Center North. That's an organization near us that helps young parents who find they're not ready to raise a little baby like you were only a year ago. Anyway, at the banquet I won a drawing for an iPad! Yup, me. I won it and now I have another gadget. This is getting ridiculous. I can take photos with the iPad too.

All that goes to remind me again of how things have changed since I was your age way, way back in the 1930s. Sure we had cameras and radios and cars, but nothing like what you will grow up with, nothing at all. We certainly did not have anything even remotely like my iPhone, the gadget that is also called a smart phone, because it is also a computer in my pocket. And nobody even thought about an iPad or a computer and all the other stuff that's so common now.

Let me tell you about the telephone we had on our farm. It hung on the kitchen wall and looked just like this.

When we wanted to make a phone call we had two choices. We could either make the bells up on top ring by turning the handle on the right or we could click that holder on the left up and down a couple times until we got the telephone operator. Let me explain.

There were actually a bunch of people on our phone line. We knew somebody wanted to talk with us if we heard the bells ring in a certain way. Our ring was three shorts and a long. In other words, if somebody turned that handle on the right to make three short rings and then kept turning and turning it to make one long ring, we knew they wanted to talk with us. All we had to do was pick up that earpiece on the left and talk into that round mouthpiece in the middle.

Of course, any one of the people on the ten or so other farms could listen in or even join in the conversation of they wanted to. It was what they called a party line. It was a little like setting up a multiple party conversation today—sort of.

Things will keep on changing as you grow up, Byron. That's the nature of technology. I can only hope and pray that when you are an adult lots of folks will use these discoveries to help and bless others rather than hurt and destroy.

For now, those concerns are a long way into the future for you. Meanwhile, we all look forward to a good time laughing, telling stories and eating cake at your next birthday party.

Love you,

GGPa

Photos From Byron's First Year

Dear Byron,

Well, it has happened. You are now one year old and working on your second. This weekend we'll all be celebrating your birthday and we're looking forward to eating your first birthday cake. Your Mommy and Daddy are planning a big get-together of family and friends.
Here are a few photos we've pulled together from that first year.

Remember when Daddy and Mommy took you to the beach?

Grandma Cheryl certainly had fun. 

And so did Grandpa Derrick. 

And I thought you were pretty good at making faces at Christmas time. 

GGMa Sylvia tried to teach you piano. Not now? . . Well, maybe next year. 

Yup. I agree. All in all it was a great year.

But maybe a little exhausting too. 

Anyway, we're all looking forward to another great one, especially now that you are soon going to live with Mommy and Daddy in our town. 

Love, 

GGPa

Yo-Yo And Byron's First Birthday

Dear Byron,

Only a couple days now and you'll be ONE YEAR old! Wow! Where did the year go?

I've been pondering what I might get you for your birthday. This may sound crazy, but I actually thought about getting you a very, very old toy that has nothing to do with modern day electronic gadgets. I'm talking about a yo-yo! I had lots of yo-yos when I was a kid.

The Yo-Yo came to the USA only a couple years before I was born. There's even a National Yo-Yo Museum in the northern California town of Chico. They have the world's biggest collection of yo-yos from around the world. Here's a picture from their website of the "Big-Yo", the 1982 Guinness Book of World's Records largest working wood yo-yo, weighing 256 lbs.

Scaled-up Replica of the 3-in-1 No-Jive yo-yo by Tom Kuhn

The yo-yo as a toy (known as a bandalore) had been used for centuries. It may be the second oldest toy in the world (after dolls). There are ancient Greek yo-yos made of terra cotta in museums in Athens and yo-yos are pictured on the walls of Egyptian temples. The yo-yo was popular with such important warriors as Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington. It was first patented in 1866 by James L. Haven and Charles Hettrich. The word yo-yo is actually a Tagalog word, the native language of the Philippines, and means 'come back.'

Pedro Flores was the single, most important person to introduce the word 'yo-yo' to the United States. Flores was a native of Vintarilocos Norte, Philippines. He came to the United State in 1915. He attended the High School of Commerce in San Francisco 1919-1920. Then he took up the study of Law at the University of California - Berkeley and the Hastings College of Law in San Francisco. 

He later dropped out of school, had a variety of jobs and developed his vision for the yo-yo's potential when he read about a man selling a ball attached to a rubber band, who made a million dollars. He remembered the game yo-yo which was played for hundreds of years in the Philippines and he thought it had a good market possibility in the U.S. Mr. Flores was quoted saying, "I do not expect to make a million dollars; I just want to be working for myself. I have been working for other people for practically all my life and I don't like it." 

In early 1928 Flores went to Los Angeles and asked a wealthy Philippine for assistance in manufacturing yo-yos. His friends thought him crazy and he returned to Santa Barbara with only his dream. Being a true entrepreneur, at the age of 29, on June 9th, 1928, he applied and received a certificate of conducting business for the Yo-yo Manufacturing Company in Santa Barbara. On June 23, 1928, he made a dozen yo-yos by hand and began selling them to neighborhood children. 

From those humble beginnings, the yo-yo went on to became a national craze, with contests everywhere. Flores later sold his interest in his yo-yo manufacturing companies for more that
$250,000, an absolute fortune in the days when I was a little kid.

Donald F. Duncan was the guy who bought out Flores' companies and the name yo-yo. He introduced the looped slip-string, which allows the yo-yo to sleep—a necessity for advanced tricks. During the 1950s, Duncan introduced the first plastic yo-yos and the Butterfly® shaped yo-yo, which is much easier to land on the string for complex tricks.

Maybe in a few years I'll really get you a yo-yo and you can enter yo-yo competitions. Who knows? You might even become national yo-yo champion. 

Well, just a thought. Maybe for now we'll get you a toy easier to play with. In any event, we're all giving thanks for this first wonderful year. 

God bless and keep you, dear Great-Grandson! 

Love ya, 

GGPa

Sunday Is No Longer The Day Of Rest

Dear Byron,

A couple days ago, I heard from your daddy that he, your mommy and you will soon be moving to the city where GGMa and I live, because your daddy has a new job here. Needless to say, we're excited. We'll get to see you a lot more than we have during this past year. As I've noted earlier, things are always changing. Today I'd like to tell you how weekends have changed since I was your age.

When I was a kid growing up in Minnesota in the 1930s and 40s, Sunday was a 24-hour stretch of family time when liquor was unavailable, church was the rule and shopping was impossible. Instead of working on Sunday afternoons we'd go visit some of our relatives and friends. Of course, being farmers, we still had to care for the animals and milk the cows, but generally speaking, Sunday was a day of rest for the entire family.

Laws enforcing the use of Sunday or the Sabbath were called "blue laws." The first occurrence of the phrase blue law was found in the New-York Mercury of March 3, 1755, where the writer imagines a future newspaper praising the revival of "our Connecticut's old Blue Laws". The term "blue laws" originally applied to laws enacted by the Puritans in seventeenth-century Connecticut to regulate moral behavior (especially what people must or must not do on the Sabbath), laws which often called for rather harsh punishments to be applied to offenders. Blue laws typically specified penalties for moral offenses such as failure to attend church on the Sabbath; lying, swearing, and drunkenness; and the playing of games (such as cards, dice, and shuffleboard) in public.

They also made laws with severe punishments for crimes committed on the Sabbath and regulated the sale and consumption of alcohol. Violators of blue laws might be assessed monetary fines, be whipped, be forced to spend time in the stocks, have body parts burned or cut off, or even receive the death penalty.

But America has changed, and it dragged Sunday and the blue laws along with it. Although Sunday still means worship and family time for millions of Americans, today it also means things it once didn't back in my youth—12-packs of Bud, the NFL on TV, catching up with the week's accumulated errands, kids' soccer games, shopping for Apple's latest iPad at the mall and moving through a 24/7 culture.

"Today, for a lot of Americans, Sunday's just another day you have to go to work at Wal-Mart," said John Hinshaw, a labor historian at Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pa. The Protestant notion of Sunday as a day of rest began to change in the 1800s with immigrant laborers, many Roman Catholic, who saw things differently. Many were devoted to "a Sunday that took a very different shape: church in the morning and leisure in the afternoon," said Alexis McCrossen, author of "Holy Day, Holiday: The American Sunday," published in 2002 by Cornell U. Press.

The 20th century brought pushes toward a shorter workweek, and a major work-reform law passed in the 1930s created more down time. This made Sunday like every other day. As a result, commercial culture really took hold of it, as it had on the other six.

Today, 37 states permit Sunday sales of liquor, according to the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States. The Council boasts, "Reforming outdated Sunday sales restrictions on distilled spirits has been one of the Distilled Spirits Council’s most successful legislative initiatives at the state level. Since 2002, 15 states have joined the list of states allowing Sunday sales: Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, and Washington." Notice that the list includes Massachusetts, where some of the earliest moral-conduct laws were passed. My own growing-up state, Minnesota, is still working on the idea. All four surrounding states allow it.

We have erased the older distinctions between workdays and the day of rest. The Bible gives us a long history of how the original Israelites were forbidden to work on the Sabbath or Saturday, the seventh day. I've published a study of that topic. I've titled it Day of Rest. In my short book I suggest that we all have a lot to learn from the Third Commandment and the laws that grew out of it. Of course, we Christians are not bound by those laws since they are but a shadow of all the true rest and peace that is ours in the Lord Jesus (Col. 2:16-17).

A while back I read that People's United Bank in Bridgeport, Conn.—a bank—focused an entire promotional campaign on Super Bowl Sunday. Well Byron, you'll soon learn about the importance of Super Bowl Sunday. I'm hoping and praying that you and your family will be able to join us on the next Super Bowl Sunday at church. And then, after a relaxing Sunday dinner, we can all watch the big football game on the TV together. I pray that the importance of family worship and being together never goes away regardless of how Sundays and weekends change.

All our love,

GGPa

Ain't We Got Fun

Dear Byron,

It won't be long before you'll start talking. We are, after all, about to celebrate your first birthday. And we're all excited. In fact, we've been keeping a photo record of that first year. We in your family believe you'll appreciate it as you grow older. You will look back and laugh with us about all those things.

As you can tell by this time, I love to look back. I think it helps all of us to look ahead. Today again I'm looking back with you at how much things have changed since I was your age.

Here's some numbers from 1930-39, the decade in which I grew up, compared to the present.

Population in the United States

Then: 123,188,000 of us lived in 48 states.

Now: We are over 311,600,000 — nearly 3 times as many. About 6.5% of us are your age, with twice that number over 65. White folks, not Hispanic, are over 60%, but that's rapidly changing. People of Latino origin are over 16%. Black folks are nearly 13%. 

Life expectancy

Back in the 1930s men expected to live to about 58 on average and women to about 62.

Now they tell us you can expect to live over 78 years—if you live in Minnesota where I grew up. Here in Texas we only expect to live to about 76. Hah! I'm glad I was born in Minnesota, because I'm past that. Some say that your GGPa will make it to 82 since I've lived this long. We'll see. That's all in our Lord's hands. Of course, if you ever have a little sister she'll likely live on average to well over 80. Who knows? With all the advances in medical science, by the time you're all grown up you and others of your generation may live to be over 100. 

 Annual income

I think I told you that back in the 1930s people were having a hard time making money. Here's some samples. On average a worker made a little over $1,360 a year. Yup, a year! If you worked in a factory you made under $17 a week. A cook earned $15 and even a medical doctor only cleared about $61 a week. That was less than $3,200 a year for the doc and the cook was lucky to make $760 in the same year. 

Today the median annual household income is about $50,000. It'll be about 3, even 4 times that in your house, because both of your parents have advanced college degrees and work. That'll put your family in the upper 2-3%. The earnings gap between those with college degrees and those with only high school is getting wider and wider all the time. During the past generation (while your folks were growing up) the high school folks' income rose 10% at most, while the income of people with advanced degrees rose by over 30%.

Unemployment

Remember me saying that the 1930s decade was called the Great Depression? Everything was depressed. Unemployment was around 25% for much of those 10 years. No matter how little people made, a fourth of us made nothing at all! Despite all the things the Government did, it was still over 17% in 1939. 

Today we're going through what people call a recession, not a depression. So 4-5 years ago only about 5% of us were unemployed in the United States. Today we still have 28 million unemployed. That includes people who only can get part-time jobs, but have given up finding a permanent one. As I write we still have 9.5% unemployed. In some areas its over 10% yet. We're all praying that somehow that will change.

How much things cost
This part is fun—and strange. Here are the prices of some things when I was a kid

• Quart of milk - 14 cents
• Loaf of bread - 9 cents
• 5 pounds of flour - 25 cents
• Dozen of eggs - 38 cents
• Pound of round steak - 42 cents
• Sweater - $1.00 
• Table lamp - $1.00
• Gas stove - $20
• Portable electric sewing machine - $24
• Heavy winter coat - $28
• New car - $625
• Gasoline - 19 cents per gallon

Yes, Byron, things have changed a lot during the three generations since I was born. In spite of all the problems people had in those days they could still laugh and make fun of themselves. One of those satirical songs was called 

Ain't we got fun 

Bill collectors gather 'round and rather Haunt the cottage next door Men the grocer and butcher sent Men who call for the rent But within a happy chappy And his bride of only a year Seem to be so cheerful, here's an earful Of the chatter you hear Ev'ry morning, ev'ry evening Ain't we got fun? Not much money, Oh, but honey Ain't we got fun? The rent's unpaid dear We haven't a bus But smiles were made dear For people like us In the winter in the Summer Don't we have fun Times are bum and getting bummer Still we have fun There's nothing surer The rich get rich and the poor get children In the meantime, in between time Ain't we got fun? Just to make their trouble nearly double Something happened last night To their chimney a gray bird came Mister Stork is his name And I'll bet two pins, a pair of twins Just happened in with the bird Still they're very gay and merry Just at dawning I heard Ev'ry morning, ev'ry evening Don't we have fun Twins and cares, dear, come in pairs, dear Don't we have fun We've only started As mommer and pop Are we downhearted I'll say that we're not Landlords mad and getting madder Ain't we got fun? Times are so bad and getting badder Still we have fun There's nothing surer The rich get rich and the poor get laid off In the meantime, in between time Ain't we got fun? When the man who sold 'em carpets told 'em He would take them away They said, "Wonderful, here's our chance Take them up and we'll dance" And when burglars came and robbed them Taking all their silver, they say Hubby yelled, "We're famous, for they'll name us In the pepers today Night or daytime, it's all playtime Ain't we got fun? Hot or cold days, any old days Ain't we got fun If Wifey wishes To go to a play Don't wash the dishes Just throw them away Streetcar seats are awful narrow Ain't we got fun? They won't smash up our Pierce Arrow We ain't got none They've cut my wages But my income tax will be so much smaller When I'm laid off, I'll be paid off Ain't we got fun?

Yes indeed, Byron, through it all we can still look up, because we have a faithful and loving Lord who guides us.

Love ya,
GGPa