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Over the Back Fence By HANK HENRY Changes have come fast since the 1880s We were watching the History Channel on cable the other night. It was a show about the 1939 German invasion of Poland that started the World War II. One segment showed Nazi artillery pieces being pulled across the border by horses. Horses! Within a year or so, Germany�s war machine was completely mechanized, and the horses went off to pasture. America, on the other hand, was completely unprepared for war in the 1930s. A newsreel from that era showed recruits carrying sticks for rifles and trucks bearing large signs saying, "TANK." I was born in the 1920s and raised in the �30s. A historian recently wrote that more discoveries and inventions were made in the period from the 1880s to the present than all of the discoveries from the 1880s back to the beginning of time. Whether that estimate is true or not, change now happens almost every day. In just my lifetime, our world has been transformed dramatically. Take farming, for instance. Back in the 1920s, more than 30 percent of all Americans lived on farms. Today, only 3 percent of our countrymen live on working farms. A much larger percentage of our food comes from large corporate farms. For farm families, daily life in the early 1920s was not much different than that of centuries before. My father was a circuit-riding preacher who served four country churches in rotation, and some of my earliest memories are of visiting farmers who were, almost literally, dirt poor. The average small farm was labor-intensive, which was why farm families had so many children. The family was up at dawn. One of the members would milk the cow, another would feed the rest of the animals. The farm wife kept the family fed, and, in her spare time, she darned socks, made quilts, canned vegetables and fruit and made bread. She would also heat her irons on the stove to press garments for occasional trips to town or to attend church. Girls in the family would press hair ribbons by holding them around the kitchen stove�s warm flue. Her husband would slaughter a steer and dry the meat in the smokehouse, a small building without a floor. Cuts of beef hung from the ceiling on wires and a small fire was kept going on the dirt floor day and night. Hogs also would be slaughtered, and, as they say, everything would be used except the squeal. The telephone of that day was a wooden box mounted on a wall with a round microphone-like device protruding from near the top and an ear piece hanging on the side. To use it, one had to vigorously turn a small crank that would ring a bell in every home up and down the party line. A farm�s ring might be two-longs-and-one-short, but any ring would attract many along the line who were tempted to listen in. The system was made to handle one call at a time, and the addition of one new person on the party line would lead to a loss of volume for the rest of the phones on the line. By the time a dozen or so subscribers listened in, the volume was so low that no one could hear well. Then there was a lot of shouting until a few people got off the line. Back during the Depression, every woman owned a thimble. Now, says my wife, Nora, thimbles are scarce. No one calls a refrigerator an icebox any more, except for some of us old people. One of the biggest events on a farm wife�s calendar was spring cleaning, when she ripped all the rugs off the floor and hung them over a clothesline out back. Kids weren�t wild about this, because it was hard work. Mothers would hand them a baseball bat or a paddle and tell them to whale away at the rugs. Everyone soon would be working in a cloud of dust, but the rugs were cleaned and ready for another year of use. All of this didn�t happen in the Middle Ages. It happened during one lifetime. Mine. (Hank Henry is a retired Jackson County commissioner and a former radio and television announcer. Call him at 772-9055.) Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2000 Mail Tribune, Inc.