When were the ‘olden days’? How far back do you look?

One day in 1980, when our family was living in Atkins, Ark., my daughter asked me, “Dad, tell me something about the Old Days — like back in the ’50s!” I almost fell out of my chair! I am a Pea Ridge child of the 1940s and 1950s, and her question shook me to realize that the younger generations would be thinking of the 1950s as “The Old Days!”

My first reaction was to say, “Why, Jennifer, the ’50s weren’t the old days! The “50s were like the mid-morning of the modern age!” To me, the “old days” would be earlier, say the years during and prior to World War II; or the 1930s — those years of the Great Depression and the rainless seasons and failed crops that caused so many poor Arkansas and Oklahoma farm families to pull up stakes and move out west in search of a better life. Those were the “hard times.” Or, the old days could be thought of as the days before automobiles, when steam trains and horses and buggies were the usual ways to travel. I had difficulty absorbing the idea that the 1950s could be the old days, even if 1950 was quite a few “years ago.”

I suppose everyone has their own memories and ideas about the old days, as to which years really were the old days, and whether the “old days” were good or bad. We each think of things from years past that we want to see continued in contemporary life, as well as certain things that we are glad to see gone.

But even today, I have difficulty in thinking of the 1950s as old days. Why? Well, first, I grew through the teen years in the ’50s. Do others, like me, find it hard to think of our teenage years as the old days? It was our time of arriving at a measure of maturity, beginning to look at the world through our own soon-tobeadult eyes. But, whatever age we were, back then, new things were stirring in the 1950s. The times were changing.

When 1950 dawned, I was 10 years old, and everything seemed fresh and new. The times felt promising and progressive. Pea Ridge Public School was expanding. We had barely escaped being consolidated with Rogers in 1949 because we were smaller than the state minimum. But the outlying schools, such as Central, Twelve Corners and Bayless were being added to our school district, and Pea Ridge was becoming a “big” school. New classrooms were in the works. The “little white building” had been set up behind the main building, so the main building no longer held the whole school. In the fall of 1950, our fifth grade held classes in the basement of the Presbyterian Church, and the sixth grade in the basement of the Baptist church, as new classroom wings were being built onto the front of the school building.

The 1950s brought wideranging changes to the Pea Ridge area. The highways to Rogers and Bentonville were being paved, city water came to our town, we gained a city Fire Department, most of our homes now had electricity, even the people living outside town were getting telephones, televisions began showing up in our living rooms, the Pea Ridge Battlefield was becoming the Pea Ridge National Military Park, plans were being laid for Beaver Lake, which would soon change the whole complexion of our corner of Arkansas.

The tourism which northwest Arkansas had lost during the Great Depression of the ’30s was being revived, industrial companies like Daisy Manufacturing, Bear Brand and Wendt-Sonis were bringing good jobs to Benton County, Mr. Sam Walton moved into Bentonville, where he would develop an idea called Wal-Mart and high school graduates in Pea Ridge could begin planning careers in northwest Arkansas rather than leaving for greener pastures elsewhere.

With today’s raging pace of technological change, with computers regarded as “dated” even as they are removed from the box, there comes a strong tendency to think of even last week or last year as “old days” no longer of importance to “today.” I want to resist that tendency. No, “today” is just built out of itself. If we can see “today” as composed of the materials of all our yesterdays, filtered through people’s experiences, choices, visions of the future and the workings of divine providence, then maybe we can gain both appreciation and perspective as we navigate our changing times.

Editor’s note: This column was originally pubished in Feb. 6, 2008. Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge and an award-winning columnist, was vice president of Pea Ridge Historical Society.