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God Bless America
By Jerry L. Ginther
Growing Up In Sullivan: Visiting the Past - Anticipating the Future
I'll concede that viewing the past from my vantage point necessarily presents a somewhat different concept than the ones of my children and grandchildren. Most of them see those times as an adventure not unlike the TV episodes of "Little House on the Prairie." What young boy would not appreciate going to town with his father in a horse-drawn wagon to load up supplies. When they were younger, they were thrilled by the adventure and dismissed the hardships and dangers that were common to that era.
With the knowledge I have acquired from my immediate ancestor's stories, I know that it was a time of perpetual, laborious activity with few tools to mitigate the difficulty of farming the prairie lands. Some of their recollections were of tough times. They were the pioneers of their era braving the elements. Illness and injury were frequent companions. The weather, often unpredictable, caused additional hardships. In those days they could hardly forecast the weather for the next day with any degree of accuracy. However realistic my perception may be, it was not just from the years of my life, but also from the chronicles of my parents and grandparents.
My grandparents were born before 1900. As a matter of fact, my father's parents were 19 and 20 years old at the turn of the 20th century. I suppose that what they did not have impressed me more than what they had. When I realized they had no automobiles or telephones and had never heard of an airplane, their history became all the more interesting to me.? Grandpa was born in Chillicothe, Ohio, the son of German immigrants and the first in my line to be born in the U.S.A. He and his family moved westward to Christian County, Ill. where he married my grandmother whose family had also moved to the same Illinois county several years earlier. They acquired farmland and remained there until they both passed away in 1953.
By that time I was seven years old and aware of what modern conveniences they had as well as what was available to most Americans. They had cars, telephones and indoor plumbing; however, they never owned an airplane. In addition to the farmland they had previously owned, Grandma had inherited a couple of farms from her side of the family. My understanding now is simply that they were much better off than when they started, but they still had no cell phones or computers and no color television. From some of our current generation's perspective, they wonder how much worse could life have been?
With the resources of reflection and comparison, I recognized that their story was just like reading a chapter from an American history book because that's exactly what it is. The account of their lives in the first 53 years of the 20th Century depicted the marked progress our country had made in that short span of time. Today, in nearly any endeavor of our undertaking, we have a machine or an electronic marvel to assist us from the creation to completion of the project.
Nineteen fifty-three was the end of their story but not the end of our family's story or our nation's narrative. In the last 60 plus years our country has made tremendous advances in medical research prolonging life and the quality of it. We also have many more innovations designed for our comfort in our daily lives and efficiency in the workplace. Many occupations require us to be merely overseers of machines run by computer programs. However, both the machines and the computers were designed and created by the human mind. Anticipating the future, I'm not too worried about artificial intelligence. The human mind is still the necessary marvel that makes it all work and is behind all of the progress we have made, or will make, in the future.
Bio: Jerry Ginther grew up in Sullivan, Ill with a few brief departures over the years. He served two years in the U.S. Army, 1966-68 and was employed by the Illinois Central Railroad as a telegraph operator and train dispatcher for nearly 25years. He and his wife reside in Texas.
Email: JG@JerryGinther.com
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