Born in the 1930s and early 40s, we exist as a very special age cohort. We are the Silent Generation.

We are the smallest number of children born since the early 1900s. We are the ‘last ones'.

We are the last generation, climbing out of the depression, who can remember the winds of war and the impact of a world at war which rattled the structure of our daily lives for years.

We are the last to remember ration books for everything from gas to sugar to shoes to stoves.

We saved tin foil and poured fat into tin cans. We saw cars up on blocks because tires weren’t available.

We can remember milk being delivered to our house early in the morning and placed in the milk box on the porch.

Many of us are the last to hear Roosevelt’s radio assurances and to see gold stars in the front windows of our grieving neighbors.

We saw the ‘boys’ come home from the war and build their little houses. They would pour the cellar, tar-paper it over and live there until they had the time and money to build it out.

We are the last generation who spent much of our childhood without television; instead we imagined what we heard on the radio.

As we all like to brag, with no TV we spent our childhood playing outside until the street lights came on.

The lack of television in our early years meant, for most of us, that we had little real understanding of what the world was like.

Our Saturday afternoons, if at the movies, gave us newsreels of the war sandwiched in between westerns and cartoons.

Telephones were one to a house, often shared and hung on the wall.

Computers were called calculators, they only added and were hand-cranked; typewriters were driven by pounding fingers, throwing the carriage, and changing the ribbon.

The ‘internet’ and ‘Google’ were words that didn’t exist. Except for Barney Google in the comics.

To be continued…