Things we didn’t know we needed

I just received an email from a friend who was sending me several attached photos showing living conditions from the days of the Great Depression in the U.S. in the 1930s. Sometimes when we get to thinking that the times are tough for us now, it helps us gain perspective by seeing those reminders of the really tough times which were endured by our people some 80 years ago.

Some of the belongings that we are coming to regard as “must haves” were not even invented when our people were living through the Depression and drought years of the 1930s and the war years of the early 1940s. For example, there were no cell phones, not for anybody, not even for the richest person in the country. Even the transistors that would eventually make cell phones and computers possible in later years were not yet even considered as possibilities. The only people who had two-way wrist radios in the 1940s were Dick Tracy and Sam Ketchem, and they were comic strip characters, so cell phones were hardly even figments of the imagination back then. And even if we were reading of how Dick Tracy and Sam Ketchem were using their two-way wrist radios with the antennas pinned up their shirt sleeves to help them catch crooks, we never imagined that we would ever actually have something like that ourselves. Not only that, we never imagined why we would need it, even if we could have one. Cell phones seem to be becoming a need, rather than a luxury. Everyone seems to feel they need a cell phone. And, of course, the makers and sellers of cell phones are sure that everyone needs one, and a new one each time a new model comes off the production line.

I remember several years ago when I first heard that the Japanese were experimenting with cell phones having built-in cameras. My thought at the time was, who and why would anyone want to put those two things together? Who would ever need a phone with a camera in it? Well, I guess I learned a thing or two. There apparently were several people who could use a phone with a camera in it, like, maybe almost everybody?

When I was a small boy, people were just beginning to imagine what it might be like to have radios that could show you pictures as well as giving you the sound. We were pretty happy with our radios as they were, since in those days the radio personalities were good at speaking in ways that caused you to get the picture in your mind, even if you couldn’t see it with your eyes. For example, anyone who ever listened to Harry Caray broadcast a St. Louis Cardinal baseball game over the radio knows that it could be fully as exciting and fully as vivid a scene over the radio as over TV. We didn’t realize for quite some time that we needed a TV. We finally got our own TV in 1953. We could get three channels by having a tower antenna on top of the hill west of our house. We got our first telephone on the farm in 1954. We hadn’t realized that we needed one of those either!

I spent many years as pastor of churches, and was often working with people who needed help with meeting basic needs, like groceries for the table and clothes for the children. One thing that I observed, though, was that in whatever poverty-stricken home I visited, I hardly ever found a home without a TV, and usually a video player to go with it. It was like, even if you can’t afford food to eat, you have to have the TV and movies. The TV and other electronics to play videos have almost become “must-haves” in today’s world.

I remember well when movie theaters and motels and hotels began advertising that they were “air conditioned.” What a luxury that sounded like in 1947! We had become somewhat accustomed to the big ceiling fans in some of the nice stores in Rogers. For example, one of the stores