I have grown up in a marvelous age. I have called it the Ed Sullivan generation but it’s much more than that.  I have seen the computer age unfold before my eyes and many marvelous things that the common man would have never had access to become readily available.  Air travel in this day and age is affordable if one wishes to travel by air.  I have enjoyed the computer age myself by using it as a flight instructor with many flight simulation programs at my command.  I am even flown are real airplane thanks to my lovely wife.  I have had so many dreams that I once thought unattainable come true.  All I have to do is type into

my computer and the vast world of information and entertainment is there for me to partake in.  I remember the days when encyclopedia salespeople came knocking on our door and, to be honest, the information that was in those books was something I desired but they were much too expensive for common folk like us, but now with the Internet I can learn just about anything my heart desires and I can find the answers to the most burning questions I have.  I’m old enough to remember searching on a transistor radio or a shortwave radio trying to find out what the rest of the world was up to.

  Tuning a shortwave radio in to some exotic land across the Atlantic fed my desire for adventure and mystery.  I can remember listening to Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce in Sherlock Holmes on the Armed Forces Radio Network on the shortwave radio and now I watch Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman in the BBC’s production of “Sherlock”.  To find out anything about someone famous or events of the day you had to read a newspaper or magazine, but today all of that information is instantly at your fingertips. 

Now that I’m almost a senior citizen, I realize that change is inevitable but it doesn’t mean that I have to like it or at least like all of it.  So much is happening so fast that we’re not able to keep up with all the changes.  As I get older it seems like the changes are going faster and faster and there starting to slightly leave me behind.  I know you’ve experienced it when one of your grandchildren mentions something that you have no clue what they’re talking about and their astonished that haven’t heard of it.  It’s not that I’m upset or even concerned, it’s just that I remember being on top of everything that went on around me.  I don’t know if it’s the stress of daily work getting harder or I’m just getting a little slower.  This is the part of change that I’d don’t like.  I have always been a fan of TV and movies because that’s the generation that grew up in.

I’m not the generation that grew up with video games, so I’m not quite as interested as the following generation naturally is, but I must say the amount of violence disturbs me now and I don’t think that it would have disturbed me as much when I was younger.  I used to love watching the old Universal horror pictures and at this time I dislike calling them horror pictures as we did back then because they have no relationship to the kind of horror that one can see today on the movies.  When someone was shot on television in our day, they just fell over and on today’s television when someone is shot it’s just gross and horrifying.  That’s the kind of changes I don’t like.  I still think that this is a marvelous time to live in and it kind of reminds me of the Carousel of Progress show that Walt Disney put on in the 1964 World’s Fair in New York and is still showing at Walt Disney World today.  It’s a show that tells the story of one man’s life traveling through time and all the marvelous inventions that each era brings to his life.

That’s the way I feel, like there has been a multitude of marvelous things come my way and I won’t bore you any longer with describing each and every one of the things in detail but let me just tell you about this one dream of my wife’s and mine when we were children watching television.  My wife dreamed of somehow capturing the invasion of the Beatles to North America so that she could see and relive those moments forever.  I dreamed of a way of having a library full of such wonderful movies as Sherlock Holmes and having a complete library of all of those wonderful mysteries that kept me entertained. Both of us had recorded television audio on reel to reel tape in hopes of capturing memories in some way. It wasn’t until the 1970s that commercial video recorders appeared in retail stores, but they were still expensive for my meager means.  I remember the first one my wife and I purchased. It was extremely large and noisy.  Just like everyone else, I copied everything I thought I would ever want on videotape.  Videotape being quite large, I had walls of bookcases full of videotape and now they’re so obsolete and most of them have deteriorated to the point you can’t play them.

  It’s even becoming impossible to find a VHS machine because they came out with something better that everyone had to purchase.  When all this happened I thought this was the end all and be all, but it wasn’t and it never will be, just remember that next best thing is just around the corner waiting for all of us to marvel over, so just keep enjoying this marvelous age we are living in.