conversation today

At the vegetable stand getting some corn and a watermelon. Bob always hangs out with the lady running the stand. I asked Bob, "ARE YOU 100 yet"? Four more years he said. So you were born in 1918? The end of ww1. Yes he said, my grandma was 99 when she died, by accident. She was born in 1865, the end of the civil war.

My mom will be 88 next week

Just looking at my grandparents photos on my desk and when they were born and when they died. My Dad's mom was gone in 1951 at 55 years old with a heart attack. His father was gone in 1940 with a heart attack at 57 years old. He was lucky to have made it that far as he had been mauled by a bear, gored by a bull and had his head crushed in a mine collapse. My Dad lived to be 88. My Mom's mother died in 1947 with TB at 45 years old. Her father died in 1963 at the age of 73. He probably would have lived longer but was a heavy drinker and was at the bar one night after cashing his pension check. I guess some one offered him a ride home and then robbed him. They dumped him on the edge of the highway and when he came to stood up and walked into the path of an oncoming car and was killed instantly. A young couple on the first night of their honeymoon. Mom lived to be 90. Lost a sister and a brother so far and they only made it to 61 years old. Time and chance happens to us all.

I have a brother that became a paraplegic back in 1980 when a drunk buddy of his ran off the road. He was in a class of about 10 in his therapy to learn how to live in a wheelchair. They were told then that there life expectancy was shortened. Other than my brother, the last of the members of his class passed away over 10 years ago, but my brother still seems strong.

I have another brother, older than me. He's retired post office, but for virtually all his adult life has been also in either a blues or outlaw country band and believing to be authentic, you have to live the songs.

If I don't outlive my brothers, I'll know clean living is for naught. At least I won't know that for long.

Chuck, that you and George Carlin and I can entertain such notions is incontrovertible evidence of just how good we have it now. We can propose that we have learned how to make a living but not a life whereas for most of those in the timeframe in question, making a living took up the vast majority of their hours and energy. By comparison, hunter-gatherer societies had much much more time to spend on non-subsistence activity. They didn't have much, but the major expenditures of energy needed to take care of the basics were confined to shorter blocks of time.

Natty, I could let it slide but something makes me carry the life-span question a step further. Risk-taking was not monopolized by Alexander taking an army all the way to India or Shakespeare's fictional MacBeth making a power grab for the Scottish throne or people trying to invent a flying machine. Anyone moving west in this country was a risk-taker, big-time, as was anyone involved in any military action, any sailing action, anyone working in those early factories, anyone in the mining industry, anyone who was a slave, anyone who went to the hospital, or any woman who ever became pregnant. That covers a lot of people, pretty much everybody back then. The data is there. Just take a long, focused walk through any cemetery you choose. Take a notepad with you and tabulate the lifespans leaving out anyone born later than, let's say, 1900.

My family was not famous in the slightest, and except for one guy who went to Alaska for gold and wound up insane and one who went for gold in California and disappeared, they were all just average hard-working God-fearing folk, tradesmen and farmers, men and women alike. One branch frequently lived into their eighties with many dying much earlier and another branch virtually never ever made it past seventy. 30's, 40's, 50's for the host, even the ones who acquired a measure of comfort in their lifetimes. My mother was born in 1921 and died at 88. Without modern medicine she would have died shortly after childbirth at 33. Dad, born in '21 died at 69. Without modern medicine he would have been gone at 49. I'm 66; would have been gone at 13. One brother, now 60, would have been dead in his forties. That's just the beginning of a very very long list of a very very average extended genealogy.

A reality check " We have learned how to make a living but not a life. We have added years to life, not life to years." George Carlin 1937- 2008 B) :) :) B) Deep Down In Florida Where The Sun Shines Damn Near Every Day

The point I was making was not to confuse average lifespan/life expectancy with how long people actually lived in past times. History records famous people and famous people are famous because they were risk takers. Risk takers usually die young. There is scant real evidence of how long people actually lived. If you believe the Bible, antediluvian man lived several hundred years. After the flood, Abraham lived way past 140. The prophet Daniel lived past 90 and that was 500-600 BC. Common history records Alexander the Great living to only 33 but he was a risk taker.

Woody, my wife grew up in one of those houses. The stairs creaked and the house had no proper foundation, but it always looked great and it is still standing up straight. There was a ghost in it but he, it was a he, never caused anyone any trouble.

On one of the other subjects, 300 years puts us back to 1714. Walker didn't even discover the Cumberland Gap until 1750 and Boone didn't go through it until 1775. 300 years doesn't mean much to the Europeans (among which most of us can trace our ancestries) but it's almost the whole shooting match to the U.S. The Mayflower didn't even land until 1620. We were all bottled up on the eastern seaboard until nearly 1800. (not counting a little something in New Orleans and Canada)

But what...the industrial revolution is about as far back as most of our thinking can go realistically. That made a lot of things possible, but it killed a lot of people too. Natty says, "Lots of people lived into their 80s and 90s. The difference being the infant mortality rate so the average lifespan was short. If you made it out of childhood, you could expect a long life."

Not a lot of people lived into their eighties, let alone their nineties so I beg to differ. Infant mortality did drag down the average and it dragged it down hugely, but the vast majority who lived into adulthood died in their forties and fifties and if you made it to your sixties or seventies you were doing well for yourself.

If you doubt me, start digging through the history books. Look at royalty, look at military leaders, scientists, artists, composers, explorers, whoever you can find any records for. 80-90? Literally the exceptional. Ramses lived to ninety. Truly amazing. King George (the one with dementia) made it into his eighties. Jefferson and John Adams broke eighty. Some did, not saying they didn't. But most did not come close.

Good food supply, vastly improved medical knowledge, refrigeration, and more sustainable working conditions, along with a relatively pristine environment gave the Great Generation a leg up their ancestors never even dreamed of. We've got a hole we're digging for ourselves at the moment, but we have it great ourselves.

We don't lose 50 to 100 million people from flu epidemics these days. An Ebola outbreak that kills a few hundred causes an international panic. We lose a few dozen in an entire industry for a country of over three hundred million people and those with nothing better to do start vibrating uncontrollably at their desks and decide they need to chain and cross-chain all of us to the roof. "Peepo eat!! Peepo eat!!" (to quote Woody)

250 years ago the average person had to be damned tough to survive and damned tough to keep surviving. I wonder how many of us would have a prayer if someone turned back the clock. We'd definitely need the prayer.

Clover, your grandpa's family musta had some real money, eh?

My grandpa quit school in the 9th grade, built a flat (no sidewalls) "wheelbarrow" out of 2x4's and a rusty iron wheel he found in the old county dump, and started digging in the side of the hill behind the house to try and find coal. He dug for one year with a pic and shovel and hit coal when he was 16. Saved the farm, fed his 8 younger siblings, and made a name for himself in later years.

His dad had a blind mule. He would dig a furrow, lay the plow on it's side, get the mule in the furrow and head back to the other side of the hill, then repeat the process. They thought they struck it rich when they could finally afford a two way hill-side plow.

I'll bet back in the day, a kid with his own TEAM of mules was pretty big sh**. Yeppers, times they have uh changed.

That's pretty cool woody. Thanks for sharing it! Today a single cow is worth what some of those houses were worth back then. :dry:

This Sears archive partly explains how you could have a house and not need a mortgage. Cheap to buy, no stinkin permits, just pick it up at the train station.

http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/1908-1914.htm

Lefty: "When we stop to gas up, do you ever see me go inside to buy anything?"

That's too funny, same thing here too! A good portion of my guys stop by the station every day before work. My Dad also paid his guys more than himself quite often. My Mom was sayin "get a real job" for those first few years :laugh:

MikeH: I've had credit pushed down my throat since I was a kid. I remember seeing commercials on the local TV stations saying how anybody could buy a house, or borrow money. This is the 80's. I grew up thinking that it was necessary to have a good credit score.

Also, Mike, your right about old times. My Grandpa got a team of mules for his 6th birthday, 1929. I cannot imagine.

What you do with $1 you will do with a $1000. My guys will say "I would do anything to have what you have". I tell them "no you would not. When we stop to gas up, do you ever see me go inside to buy anything?" They say "no" with a confused look on their faces. Then I explain that it is not how much money you have. It is what you do with the money you have. There is not one of my workers that has every stop going inside the convience store.

A lot of the time my workers were taking home more money then I was. I invested in my future. They were mortgaging theirs.

Why do people have all that debt? Because they want all that stuff that "makes life easier".

300 years ago, if you got drunk in a seaside bar, you'd wake up in the middle of a year long whale hunt, slave labor on a transport ship, had to cut trees to clear you land and pull out the roots with a horse, if you had the money to own a horse, and unless you fled to America you were a subject of a King, somewhere, who took most of what your raised for his own. 50 years later, the SOB caught on and tried to take what the people in the New World were growing too.

Centenarians are the fastest growing demographic of the 1st world nations. People, not just kids, are living a lot longer.

Yeah, lots of people lived longer than average. Lots of people win the lottery too. That doesn't improve your odds any.

This talk of times long ago gives me an opportunity to ask a question about a couple of useless factoids I picked up on recently.

What came first, fortune cookies or fiber optics? Hint: one beat the other by more than 70 years.

Let's see, today the average American has thousands of dollars in credit card debt, a high mortgage payment or rent, an average utility bill of $300-$500, cell phone bills, home phone bill, internet bill, $4 a gallon for gas, cable tv or satellite bill, car payments, everything at the grocery stores is $5 and up, etc. and is taxed to the hilt.

300 years ago most people owned their own home ( and farm ) outright, had zero debt, no utility bill, no phone bills, no internet bill, no tv bill, no car payments, had a 5 year supply of food on hand, etc. and little to no tax obligations.

I guess if you have the money today's way is much better but if you don't maybe not. I can't say for sure because if I was alive 300 years ago, I have no memory of it.

The difference between the lifespan today and back in the hunter gather day.is because of clean water sterile living conditons and good quality food not genectics Most of the brunt of decreased mortality came in the youth by age 15, hunters gatherers had more than 100 times the chance of dying as modern-day people. 70 is the new 30 in a lot of countries today. B) :) :) B) Deep Down In Florida Where The Sun Shines Damn Near Every Day