I watched a flick on TCM that was 58 years old. Now, if I had watched

[Hardrada]

a flick of similar age when I was 14 in 1958 it would have been a movie made in 1900!! When there actually weren't movies. Does anyone else do this? Similarly a rock song from 1958 when I was 14 is now 53 years old. So something of that comparable vintage when I was in 8th grade would have been some vaudeville song from 1905!! And I thought then that 1905 was VERY far in the past. Even my grandparents couldn't remember much that far back. This is scary if you think about it.

[rurallib]

1. indeed I do - especially with R&R songs

As I listen back to the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel etc in say 1967 - that was @45 years back. 45 years prior to 1967 was 1922 - quite an different era.
There seems to have been a bigger leap in lifestyles etc from 1922 to 1967 than from 1967 to 2011.

boop-boop-e-doop

[Hardrada]

5. I do this with songs too but interestingly songs were

quickly popular in the 1920's since records and records and concerts could be broadcast. They just didn't have the musical flicks until about 1929 or so. And the 1967 lifestyle is much more remote than one might think. I watch movies from that time and the ones I used to think bright and funny now seem to drag on and belabor the obvious. Smoking was everywhere then. I saw one flick where this guy drove up in an MG (!) and went into a bar/restaurant and got cigarettes out of a cigarette machine (!! I have too) and then lit up right then and there and then went into a telephone booth (!!!) and called long distance etc etc. That whole underpinning of daily life is gone for good as much as the Charleston had been. And we are several technological steps beyond LP records.

[Kat45]

11. I think part of the reason is that there was rock music in 1967, and there's stil rock music now

But the music in 1967 was totally different than the music in 1922.

[rug]

2. I do that all the time.

When I was younger in the late 50s, there was an very old men in the next building who was born a slave at the end of the Civil War. When my children were studying the Civil War I told them this. I also told them that when he was born there were people alive who were alive at the time of the American Revolution. These living links of history give quite a perspective.

[Hardrada]

6. I just missed by a few years meeting our town's last Civil War vet.

[Lars39]

3. My wow moment came when my father told of the stories he'd heard

from his grandparents....of how fierce the weather was during the Little Ice Age,which ended in 1850. :wow: 'course the grandparents didn't label it as such; my father was the one to piece it all together.

[Hardrada]

8. I heard stories of the Norwegian immigration and the Civil War era

in Minnesota. My grandparents relayed these from their parents and grandparents. These stories are from circa 1845-1865.

[Lars39]

9. We have a few Civil War era stories passed on from my long-lived

great great grandfather. My brother was at the right age to absorb them. Oral histories are so important, but often get overlooked in the rush of living.

[Hardrada]

10. I think people are more aware of them now and also we have

recording equipment now that is easy to use and carry around. I've taped some older relatives to hear about the horse and buggy days. I have a digital recorder but don't know how to use it yet.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

4. It's a good way of getting a perspective on history

Back when I was a graduate student, I read in an article in the university's alumni magazine about the 1979 Homecoming (it was early 1980, I think.) An alum from 1929 was attending his fiftieth reunion, and he recalled Homecoming 1928, when he served as a waiter/bartender and met alumni from 1878.

When I was growing up, I knew my maternal great-grandfather, who was born in 1870. He died when I was 13. Now there's hardly anyone left who was born before 1910, and there are no veterans of World War I at all in either the U.S. or Britain.

World War I was closer to the Civil War (49 years) than it is to the present day (it ended in 1918, so 92 years ago.)

Here's a mind-boggling fact: African-Americans were here as mostly slaves (1619-1865, 246 years) longer than slavery has been illegal (148 years).

[Hardrada]

7. I remember college alumni from 1902. Earliest I can recall.

I did know people who were born 1871-72 when I was a child. One woman lived in town and her house looked much as it must have in 1900. It's gone now of course. More recent eras seem close but are not. You think you can reach out and touch the 1960's but when doing a book on that era I found out how far back it really is (incomplete records, vanished photos, memory gaps, faulty recollections of the decade's lifestyles etc.).

[alphafemale]

12. A person born in the early twentieth century as a child

witnessed amazing changes in their lifetime.

From barely a car anywhere, to traffic clogged interstates. From a glide on a beach at Kitty Hawk to footprints on the Moon,

I think there have been momentous changes in my lifetime as well.

I can access info on just about anything in seconds. If I so choose, I can pretty much watch just about any movie ever made, hear any song ever written, read every story told.