Ancestry Magazine

Not long ago, I came into possession of some photos that were taken about fifty years ago by my grandparents—pictures of a vacation through the southwest. My grandmother, looking quite a bit younger than I remember her, was climbing on a large road sign. I think it said “Welcome to Arizona” or the like.

Looking at the photos, I thought that it would be interesting to stand today in the place where each of the photos was made and really try to understand the setting—both now and when my grandparents visited.

There’s probably still a “Welcome” sign when you get to Arizona, but it’s doubtful that the scenery around the sign is the same and even less likely that people are climbing the sign. In fact, it’s also almost a sure thing that the settings in my grandparents’ vacation photos (yours’, too) are different now than they were when the pictures were snapped. Why? Technology, innovation, and time—what we think of as relaxing today may not have been conceived of fifty or one hundred years ago. And, like in the following examples, what was once thought to be a photo-worthy vacation probably doesn’t seem quite so relaxing today.

You can’t get there from here
When I was in college in the 1970s, I had to drive about one hundred miles from my parents’ home to get to school. The trip involved stopping at lights and going through the downtowns of a number of small towns, like Hempstead, Navasota, and Marlin. By the end of the 1970s, there was a bypass for every one of these towns and things changed, like the commercial opportunities to sell to travelers like me, for the bypassed old-town businesses.

There were only three Sheraton hotels in 1940. In 1965, there were one hundred. In 1952, the first Holiday Inn opened in Memphis; today there are over 2,800 worldwide. Our grandparents didn’t have hotel chains to choose from when they drove through a town, and their effo rts to find a place they liked resulted in a lot of hit-and-miss stops.

Trips taken in the 1950s included slow drives through towns you never heard of. The slower pace and atmosphere wasn’t seen as a problem—it was an opportunity for new and unique experiences. That attitude has pretty much disappeared from modern travel. Now we drive to the airport, fly to another airport, and drive a rental car to what could be the same hotel in almost any city.

Don’t drink the water
For most of human history, the best way to get sick was to drink the water. Wine, beer, and ale were the only things you could drink that would not make you ill, although there were other (hic) side effects.

The quest for clean water led first to filtration, then to distribution. In mid-nineteenth-century London, town officials noticed a decrease in cholera deaths during the 1849 and 1853 epidemics in places where slow sand filters had been installed. In the United States, by the 1920s, we had just about eliminated waterborne disease epidemics, thanks to filtration. In the 1940s, we went a step further by adopting our first set of drinking water standards. By the early 1960s, we had nearly 20,000 municipal water systems operating in the United States.

All of this led to the placement of signs at the edge of town proudly announcing that the municipal water supply was approved, although I never saw a sign warning that a town had really bad water and not to drink it. Odds are good, however, that our traveling grandparents occasionally had to balance on a knife blade wondering whether it was really worth the risk of water-borne disease by entering some unlucky town and drinking from the tap.

Let’s stop and eat
In 1891, the YWCA of Kansas City, Missouri, established what was considered the first cafeteria. Forty-five years later, the drive-in restaurant concept—where patrons are served food in their vehicles—began in Glendale, California.

The McDonald brothers converted their San Bernadino, California, barbeque into a limited-menu drive-in in 1948. They sold so many burgers and shakes that, in 1954, they bought eight Multimixers from salesman Ray Kroc. Kroc’s curiosity led him to become the brothers’ first franchisee, and he opened the first McDonald’s franchise in 1955 in Des Plaines, Illinois. The restaurant took in $366 on the first day. Now there are over 30,000 McDonald’s in 119 countries, and travelers will find just about the same thing in each of them.

Today’s fast-food is nothing like the meals our grandparents ate while traveling. Usually they visited a restaurant or a café—the latter having faster, cheaper options but limited menu choices compared to the former. At any rate, eating on the road was part of the adventure.

Turn that down
Remember all of those radios on the 1930 census? In 1931, they started broadcasting Little Orphan Annie. In 1938, it was Invasion from Mars by Orson Welles. No sooner did radio create a regional culture of shared experiences than television did the same thing—but more intensely.

TV set production went from zero to sixty in no time: in 1947 it was 178,571; in 1948, 975,000; and in 1950, 7,463,800. The sets had to warm up, tubes went out, and everything was black and white. When you turned them off you saw a white dot in the center of the screen for a little while. Television stations signed off at night and on again in the morning, usually with the national anthem and a clip of air force jets flying past a flag.

Roughing it today is renting a cabin in the woods that doesn’t come equipped with satellite TV—even worse if you forget your portable DVD player. Your grandparents, however, probably thought of TV as something new, and it’s doubtful that they chose a hotel based on the availability of a television in the room.

Refrig erated air
I grew up in Houston, and we didn’t have central air conditioning until I was in the eighth grade. Before that time, I don’t remember being particularly hot. We just made it a point to sit by a window and run a fan. Plus I got to make a mess of any papers I was writing by dragging my sweaty hands over them.

The development of electrical power plants in the 1880s led to the opportunity to get a really big air conditioning bill. When they rebuilt the Empire Theater in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1917, it was the first theater to use refrigeration (or not, people are still arguing about it). What’s clear is that before that time, you couldn’t go into a movie house to cool off on a hot summer day.

In 1928, the chamber of the House of Representatives was air-conditioned. I don’t want to think about why we had to cool off movie-goers for eleven years before we cooled off congressmen, but it might be that there was no hope of them working in the summer anyway. In 1953, room air-conditioner sales exceeded 1 million. In 1998, shipments of whole-house air conditioners and heat pumps set a record of more than 6.2 million units.

You can safely assume that your grandparents didn’t always have air conditioning in their homes and that their grandparents didn’t even know what it was. And neither of them found many motels touting refrigerated air.

Step back
When you stumble upon old vacation photos in an attic, see if you can understand the changes that were taking place in the world when the pictures were snapped. Remember, in the 1950s, 1940s, 1930s, and long before, people had different ways of driving, cooling, lodging, eating, and entertaining themselves. Study the pictures, the places, the people, and the time, then take a little rest. When you do, you just may discover something new about your family and why you are who you are.

Beau Sharbrough is a noted speaker and wri ter on topics relating genealogy and technology. His genealogy website is www.rootsworks.com.