Part Two
“How I Came to See Time Differently” is the second installment of a short series exploring how we look at the past, the passage of time, how some times can seem more recent than others, and why it might be useful to think carefully about how we consider what is and what isn’t ancient history. The first installment can be found here.
A whole lot can happen in a span of decades. Major events can take place, politics and technology can shift, and our lives and attitudes can change.
Eight decades separated my paternal grandfather’s birth and mine, and although he lived into the age of digital technology, he was a person of old habits. He ate with his knife in his right hand and his fork in his left, tines down old world style, and wore his pants at his stomach. He seemed like a person of another time, and yet, he and my grandmother were always quite aware of what was happening around them. That gave them the gift of historical perspective—a way of seeing the present as a product of its past—which they tried to share with me.
Born in Germany in 1898, my grandfather Oscar soon moved with his family to Budapest. By his 20s, the political situation in central Europe was ominous, making emigration a serious option. A study opportunity allowed him to leave. He first arrived in the United States in January of 1925, traveling 12 days by train and steamship. Most of his family stayed in Hungary. On a trip home in 1932, a customs official there told him never to come back. He eventually did, but not for many years—and by then, some of his relatives hadn’t made it to the end of World War II.
My grandfather originally intended to study engineering at the University of Michigan, but on arrival in the U.S., some circumstances had changed, so he enrolled at Pratt Institute instead, and found in New York City a familiar community of people from Hungary and other nearby countries. He met my grandmother, and aside from a brief stint in northern Virginia, became an engineer and a New York resident for life. He retired in 1968, more than 40 years after enrolling at Pratt.
That was just a decade before I was born. He passed away in 1986, a few months before my eighth birthday. By that time, he had lived through most of the 20th century’s significant events, and even experienced some of them personally—as had my grandmother, Claire, who lived until 1999.
Hearing about those events from my grandparents, I took them to heart. In adulthood, I came to appreciate something else hidden in their stories. I discovered that the overall change that occurred in their lifetimes was perhaps just as significant as each event by itself, because the process of change tied each event together. This change was nuanced and took years to play out, so it was harder to define, let alone narrate. But, once it became personal to me, it became clearer, and the significance of change and evolution in world events became more real. Looking at the past as a process made the timeline at once fuller, more complex, and faster, but also more interesting, and more valuable. I could see and examine the world differently than I ever had.
My growing career really put this into perspective. Working at history museums and historic sites, my job was to engage visitors with a past that, for many, seemed ancient. One was at a visitor center and battlefield that addressed West Virginia’s role in the Civil War. Another was at a copper mining site in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Two sites that really put time and change directly into perspective for me were places whose defining epochs began around 1900. Both were in the mountains that separate Virginia and West Virginia.
Not long out of college, I worked at an historic logging site with identical, whitewashed company houses and working, coal-fired steam locomotives in a town called Cass. A major paper company started cutting timber there around 1900. It supplied spruce lumber for the Wright Brothers’ experimental airplanes, and pulp for the paper upon which magazines like the Saturday Evening Post were printed. Timbering topped out after about 20 years, then declined steadily: economics and technology were changing, and old-growth timber was running out. Operation ceased in 1960, and the property became a state park. I served as an educator, tour guide, and supervisor there in the early 2000s.
Later, I worked for the National Park Service in Virginia. In the 1890s, just as the timber scouts were starting to acquire land in Cass, a family a few hours to the east put nearly all of their savings into a rocky, fog-covered farmstead atop the Blue Ridge. With little cash left for building materials, they spent their first season felling trees for a one-room log house and a subsistence farm in the granite-filled soil. As more financially flush families in the valley below enjoyed electric light, streetcars, automobiles, and increasingly mechanized farm equipment, the mountaintop family scratched out a living reminiscent of frontier pioneers. In fact, when the Blue Ridge Parkway preserved the relocated home in the 1950s, the first signage even called it a “pioneer cabin.” When I was a park guide there, most visitors’ first instinct was to see it as one.
That instinct set them up for conversations about how, owing to circumstances, we can sometimes find similar things occurring in different times and places. I took the opportunity to reflect on, and reconsider, the passage of time. Black and white photos, log houses, and steam engines, as it turned out, do not necessarily mean ancient history. In fact, many of us still know people who remember a time and place where those things were part of everyday life.
At the time of my grandfather’s 1898 birth, partway around the world, the sharp smell of hewn logs was still fresh in that house on the Blue Ridge. In the place that was shortly to become Cass, surveyors with brass transits, wide-brimmed hats, and pack mules may have looked quaint and rugged, but they indicated that an industrial-scale logging operation was coming.
Time moved quickly. My grandfather, the town of Cass, and the children born in that new ridgetop house all grew up at the same time, all reaching maturity by 1918 – the year that World War I ended, and the year that the Spanish Influenza epidemic hit. The tumult of the 1920s and 30s was significant for all of them: for my grandfather’s escape from growing danger in Europe, for the Depression’s effect on the timber industry, and for the coming of federal land conservation and tourism to the Blue Ridge.
By the 1950s, the log house was already an historic site. Cass’s logging operation shut down in 1960, and was a historic attraction soon after. Simultaneously, TV shows like Petticoat Junction, Little House on the Prairie, the Waltons, and a library of Westerns began defining the age of log houses and steam trains as a distinct, separate time. A sizable part of an enormous, new “Baby Boom” generation grew up with little exposure to these times firsthand, even though, since change didn’t happen everywhere all at once, they coexisted for a handful of years.
Through this perspective, I started to explore how other generations and eras overlap. I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s. Our family had video games, a microwave oven, and color television, and most people we knew had cable. We were in the lower half of the middle class, so not everything was new. We still had rotary dial phones, and even the broader trends weren’t all high-tech. We navigated highways with paper maps, and downtown, full-service gas stations were still normal. Almost no one had vinyl windows or siding until I was in high school. 33 rpm LPs were sold out of necessity rather than nostalgia. But, those LPs were in rapid decline with the quick, successive rise of cassette tapes, CDs, and digital media.
It’s a little arbitrary, but 1988 is a good year for looking at how we perceive the rapidity of change. That’s 32 years ago, and it’s probably about when our family got its first microwave. It’s also the mean average year of birth for a member of the millennial generation. Significantly, on either side of 1988, you can reach through time across 32 years and reach either the steam age or the present.
Going backward brings us to my father’s 1956 high school graduation. That year, the last confirmed Civil War veteran passed away. Steam locomotives still hauled logs into Cass, which no one thought of as unusual because it still happened in many places. More than a few families lived in houses like the one on Blue Ridge, too. But, jet air travel had arrived, the first computers were already a decade old, and the U.S. was well into an era when the majority of families owned at least one car—not to mention a TV. In cultural terms, Chuck Berry recorded Roll Over Beethoven, Hank Williams had passed away three years before, and Prince was born just two years later.
Thirty-two years is also the amount of time that has passed since 1988. Usually, I don’t think of 1988 as having been all that long ago. Some things from the late 80s seem like yesterday. Of course, when I look at pictures and watch movies from that time, the clothing and the cars all seem like they are from a long time ago. In comparison, some of the simple things that I lived through directly – swimming in Corey Lake in the summer, riding to school in the winter, recording songs on tape from the radio, the friends I knew – still often seem like fresh memories. Even still, I talk about some comparatively recent events as having happened “years ago.” Those are often the more complicated things, things that are associated with drama, complexity, and massive change—like the job I was working when the news of 9/11 first hit.
Difficult events can make time seem longer, because they often precipitate faster and more dramatic change. At almost any scale in U.S. or world history, there has been plenty of drama. There have been slightly less than four 32-year time spans since the construction of the house on Blue Ridge, the establishment of Cass, and my Grandfather’s birth. In that time, the Titanic sank, the U.S.S.R. rose and fell, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated, and the majority of American employment shifted from agriculture and manufacturing to service and technology. In that same span, the U.S. has been in six declared wars and another eight or so conflicts, depending on how you define them. My grandfather lived through three-quarters of that.
Recent history has had its share of rapid change. Millennials are no longer the youngest members of the workforce, and the average millennial has lived through the rise of smartphones, 9/11, the longest war in the nation’s history, two economic downturns, and amidst acute division over a far-ranging combination of topics from climate change to the Second Amendment.
2020 is full of events that will likely bring major and permanent change. What those changes will be remains to be seen. If I live as long as my grandfather did, I will see the year 2066, and I truly don’t know what to expect, except that some things will be the same and some will be different. It will depend in part on how we manage change, and that will be a product of how we study how change has already happened.
Cass came to be at the time of my grandfather’s birth, and became a public attraction before he retired. Retirees from the Cass sawmill have lived into the age of smartphones. Although it was short-lived, and its transition from industry to attraction swift, there were reasons that Cass mattered enough to save. Today, because it is fascinating, it sits on a line between historic relevance and technological curiosity. That is also true of the one-room log house on Blue Ridge. However, visitors can leave both places today with a sense for their intrinsic value because they are recent enough that their most universal relevance—that of historic homes and workplaces—speaks, to a degree, for itself. In other words, they’re ancient—the world has changed a lot since 1900 or 1950—but not so much that it isn’t possible to learn how they are still relevant.
I will be curious to see what events we will be treating as ancient history in 2066, because that will show how we decide what is relevant, what is mere curiosity, what we forget entirely, and in turn, how we manage change based on what’s happened. I will be spending a lot of time thinking about the changes that preceded and that will follow current events, as well as what perspectives these changes might offer. If history and my grandparents’ experiences are any indicator, the changes will be as telling as the events themselves have been.
Dave Vago is a writer and columnist for Watershed Voice. A Philadelphia native with roots in Three Rivers, Vago is a planning consultant to history and community development organizations and is the former Executive Director of the Three Rivers DDA/Main Street program.
