Correspondence

One of my cousins up north has recently been transcribing some letters written by my great-grandfather, and some other members of the family. These letters all fall in the period of the early 20th Century.

It's really been revealing.  Not only in lost family history, and not only in making these relatives, who I never met, and who had passed on long before my time, very real and human, but also in pointing out the extent to which corresopndence has become a lost art.  It's really been amazing.

 Public letter writer, Mexico.  The equivalent of the internet cafe in its day.

Generally, people in the past simply wrote a lot more than they do now.  And the time, effort, and thought that went into hand written letters is really amazing.  These letters, not more than four pages or so, are beautifully written.  But this certainly wasn't unique to them.  My mother was a great correspondent, and constantly was writing letters.  At some point in time, so long ago that I don't know when it was, she went from handwriting letters to typing them, and indeed I recently ran across a typed journal that she was doing while in college, so obviously she went to typing quite early.  She went from the typewriter to the computer, and then in her later years back to handwriting, but all along she wrote letters constantly.

My father wrote to fewer people, but he too wrote a fair amount. When I was a college student I always looked forward to the handwritten letters from my father.  I wrote letters in that time frame as well.  After my father died, I found a handwritten and very interesting letter his father had written him when he was first in college.  Again, my father's letters, and his father's letter, were very well written.

Well written letters even extended to commercial life, at one time.  For example, I've seen letters written by lawyers in cases, who were adversaries in their representation, that were not only well written, but they were even amusing and a bit chatty.  Clearly the correspondents, even though working at the time, took the time to make their letters interesting and amusing.  Something that still happens a bit, as  lot of commercial correspondence continues on (although email has made its intrusion here as well), but not to that same extent as it once did.

Now, it seems, letter writing is all but dead, replaced by the much more abbreviated form of modern correspondence, the email.  Emails just are the same.  I'm not sure why, but perhaps its because of their instantaneous nature.  You get them immediately upon their being sent, which means that you can reply instantly, or nearly so.  This was not true, of course, of mailed correspondence, which took days to arrive, and to which no immediate reply was expected.  So, emails are shorter, terser, etc.

Similar to this, I suppose, is the diary or journal.  I've known a few people who kept diaries, but I never have.  They were once quite common, and it's surprising to realize how many well known people kept diaries in the past.  Winston Churchill, for example, made diary entries darned near every day of his adult life, it seems.  Some books by people great and small have simply been published diaries, with I suppose the most famous being The Diary of Anne Frank.  I suspect that diaries have passed by the wayside, like mailed correspondence.  Indeed, if anyone who happens to read this entry keeps a diary, I'd be curious in their noting that in the comments.

I've seen it claimed that the diary, like the written letter, has been replaced by an electronic equivalent, that being the blog and/or the "tweet". Well, this is a blog, but it isn't a diary, and because these are open to the world, they aren't at all the same as a diary.  People simply don't write the same thing they might if writing only for themselves, or if figuring that anyone who might read the entries will not do so for years, or even decades, after they were written.  Tweets are even less analogous as they are, in my opinion, semi-bizarre streams of consciousness.  I can't even begin to fathom why people actually write them.

Anyhow, love or hate the electronic era, one thing that has been a casualty of it has been the written letter, and I suspect that the daily diary entry is mortally wounded if not already dead.  Its a shame too, as so many people, in all stations of life, wrote so well and insightfully, and now that is lost.

Going To The Dance

The other day, I was at an event which included a dance.  The dance was well attended, but a friend of mine mentioned that he'd heard that the dance was once the central event, and no longer was.  He further observed that it seemed to him that dances had once been a central event for people, but that era had passed.

I've never thought of that, but I think there's something to it.  Not that dances don't occur, I just don't think that dancing is as big of a deal to people now as it once was.

In making this observation, I have to note that I can't dance. But then maybe that forms part of my observation.  I never learned how.  When I was of that age, it seemed that traditional dancing was not in vogue.  There were high school dances, but swing dancing, etc., didn't occur at them. This was also true of the very few dances I attended while in college.  The Rock and; Roll era of the 1960s had impacted dancing to the point of almost destroying it, to some degree, so that by the late 1970s and 1980s, my high school and college years, dancing was sort of a free style type of deal.  You'd see it, to be sure, at school dances or college bars, but nothing like that depicted above.

And it wasn't as if people said "let's go out dancing" either, or even "let's go to the dance".  While at the University of Wyoming I think I went to one actual "dance", a dance at a dormitory that the foreign students association hosted.  All the other dancing I saw during the 80s in Laramie was at parties, concerts or bars, and all of it was the descendant of the rock type that became predominant in the 1960s.

But this wasn't always so.  As noted above, a friend of mine noted how dancing was once a much more common event, and further commented how, in Western Nebraska, where he was from, people in small towns had frequently "gone to the dance" on weekend evenings, or at least young people do. And I've heard many recollections of that type as well.  Indeed, just last night, at a 50th wedding anniversary party I heard a recollection about the "dances in Powder River". Powder River is a small town in western Natrona County, and I bet that there hasn't been a dance held there in decades.  Apparently there used to be one darned near every weekend, and I don't doubt that something like that was close to correct.

I will note, on that, that once I started to date my wife, who in fact is from Powder River, that I encountered real dancing for the first time.  Rural people in Wyoming all know how to dance, so it's pretty evident that dancing as a social event has hung on in the rural west. And they dance well too.  Even today, at wedding receptions of rural couples, real swing dancing is very common, to all types of music.  Perhaps, of course, it's coming back in, in general, but I'd be surprised.

I'm not sure what sparked this change, but whatever it is, is part of a bigger trend.  A book sometime ago entitled "Bowling Alone" advanced the thesis that Americans more and more engage in solitary activities, rather than getting out with people.  While to anyone generation that's hard to perceive, I think it evident that this is true.  Probably our hectic lives, and television, and now the computer, all contribute to that.  At one time people had to get out, basically, or the only other option was staying at home reading or listening to the radio (after there were radios).  Therefore, group activities of any kind, were much more significant than they are now for many, indeed most, people.

Connectivity

In the past couple of days, I have had instances in which I have been sitting in my office, with my computer connected to the net, and I have found it necessary to text message somebody using my cell phone.

Indeed, over the past year, not only have I found that it continues to be necessary (no surprise) to own a cell phone, but I am now text messaging on my cell phone as a work necessity. Text messaging tends to be associated with teenagers at the mall, but at least in my recent experience it's gone on to be a feature of at least the legal work place. Not all that long ago I found myself walking through Denver getting and receiving text messages pertaining to a deposition that was going on in Texas.

Here at my office, where I am right now (taking a break for lunch) I have, right where I am, a laptop computer, a telephone, a second miniature laptop, a cell phone, and an Ipod that's jacked into the computer, which allows me not only to send and receive email (including work email, and I've done that) but to keep my calendar and contacts electronically.

When I started this profession a little over twenty years ago, my office was equipped, as all our offices were, with a phone and a computer. The computer did not have net access. I don't really recall what I used that computer for, but chances are that I didn't use it all that much on a daily basis. I did write legal memos on it, and it had some programs that were used to substitute for casebooks we had in our library. It was probably three or four years after that when we purchased a computer that had net access, and we obtained West Law in our office for the first time. Before that, most local lawyers had a West Law account at the County Law Library, which was in the old County Courthouse. Having a good fax machine in that era seemed pretty neat. Now all this seems quite quaint.

It does make me wonder about the earlier era, however. Twenty years ago we were already on the cusp of a technological revolution. Even ten years before that we sort of were. But what about before that?

From probably the mid 1920s through to about 1980 the telephone was the only piece of connected technology any law office had. Fax machines hadn't arrived. If you wanted to send something, you did it by mail. Or if you wanted quick contact, you called. What was office work like then? It no doubt involved a lot of dictation of correspondence, and indeed we dictated when I first started out. Some people still do that. But we all did. And dictation in that era did place a bit of a premium on avoiding revisions, although we all revised. Revisions in that era were truly manual, and the result was, the further you go back, that the product had to be regenerated.

What about before 1920? At some time prior to that, most offices didn't have phones. How different office work must have been then. Quick contact just wasn't going to happen. Contact would have mostly been through the mail. Dictation would have been all direct. Everything was much more hands on and manual.

It'd be interesting, if we could, to go back to one of those offices, say an office of 1912, and see how they really worked, what somebody in our profession (assuming that there is a 1912 equivalent) actually did, on a daily basis, and how they did it, before communications became so instant over vast distances.

Life Span, old age, and statistics

The issue before last of the National Geographic featured an article on the Teenage Brain. This past issue, which arrived last week, included a letter to the editor from a reader who somewhat grumpily suggested that the teenage brain might be the evolutionary norm, because, he suggested, back in our early days as a species, we didn't live much longer than that.

Oh yes we did.

The suggestion of the letter writer was that human beings live longer than they used to. This is a common belief, people state that all the time, but it simply isn't true. People live the same number of years that they always have. That number of years varies by population and culture, but it's generally between 60 and 120 years. Extreme old age generally seems to cap out at an absolute maximum of 120 years, a span that's actually mentioned in the Old Testament, interestingly enough. The longest any human in modern times has been recorded to have live is 122 years. There are claimed examples of people living in excess of this number of years, but they lack verification and tend to be subject to serious questioning. This is not to say, of course, that anyone can live to 120 years. Far from it. Only a tiny minority of people shall ever approach that age. But instances of advance years in any one era are quite easy to find. Chief Washakie, for example, lived to be 99 or 100 years of age and was not the only Native American of that to have done so. Adams and Jefferson lived into their 80s. And so on.

Well, if people are not actually living longer, why do we tend to think that we are? That's because life expectation is increasing. That is, average life span, or life expectancy, is increasing.

Well, isn't that the same thing? Not at all.

Life expectancy or average life span is a statistical figure. It doesn't mean that all people live to that age. No, by its very nature it means that most people will have died before that age or after it. It's the statistical medium.

But if that's the case, wouldn't it still mean that people are living longer? No, what it means is that people aren't dieing as young.

That sounds like semantics, but it isn't. When you look at what killed people in prior eras, it makes sense.

For one thing, and a huge thing at that, an enormous number of people died at (and in) child birth prior to the mid 20th Century. And this was in European and North American societies. Infant death was very common. Childhood death was also distressingly common. A large number of people died prior to age five.

The reason for this is varied, but disease and the stress of birth explains a lot of it. But what it also means is that if a person passed their fifth year, their life expectancy jumped enormously. Indeed, if you take out the number of infants who died prior to age five, and the number of women who died giving birth, life expectancy for the most part would begin to look pretty recognizable for most European or North American cultures.

They would not, of course, be identical. But that's easily explainable as well. Diseases of all types were enormously dangerous prior to the late 19th Century. The germ theory of disease itself was only discovered in the mid 19th Century. There were an awful lot of diseases that, if you acquired them, your end was nearly guaranteed, where as this would not be the case now. Heart attacks, cancer and strokes basically killed. Diagnosing dangerous diseases prior to their last phase was often impossible. None of this is true now. And accidents tended to be much more lethal in any era prior to the one we're living in right now. Work, for males, was much more dangerous in prior eras.

And, of course, warfare was very prominent in earlier eras. Most European nations were constantly at war in the 18th Century. When the Indian Wars are included, the US was basically at war from 1776 through the 1880s. And wars have become less lethal in modern times in comparison to prior eras.

So what does all this mean? Perhaps not that much, but the common modern assumption that we're living longer is simply incorrect. Things aren't killing us before we reach our natural end of life. That's what is occurring.

Casper's "neighborhood schools"

Casper's "neighborhood schools" Here's another link in from the hub blog, a rare editorial on my part. Shifting away from that, here's a change that's occurred locally that's very much within my own lifetime and observation. This is, of course, a local story, but I'd guess that similar things have occurred in many locations. When I was a kid, I went to Garfield Elementary School. The school had been built in the 30s, I think. Originally it was called the "Harding School", named after President Warren G. Harding, and it was a school for developmentally challenged students. Some time in the 50s, or maybe earlier, it was added on to and became Garfield Elementary School, a regular grade school for students living in that portion of the Standard Addition to the City of Casper. Basically, the school took in those students who did not go to Park, which was downtown (named for the nearby park) or Grant, which wasn't really far away either. Garfield was pretty much the only grade school on that side of town until Crest Hill was built in the 1960s. Starting about 1990, and really getting ramped up in the late 1990s, the local school district went to a new system that abolished boundaries, and created a competitive system between the schools. Some old schools died, Garfield included. New schools were built, but without any consideration for local population considerations. They usually were built with land availability in mind. Now the school district wants to shift back. But I doubt it really can. Too many things have changed, most locally. But some things have changed everywhere in the US. Whereas we walked to school, hardly any kid does that anymore. Vehicle transportation is the norm for everyone now. I routinely find that various people I'm working with, no matter where they are located, will have to stop work early to pick up children from school. That just didn't happen with us, when we were young. We walked to school, and walked back. And competition between schools seems to be the norm all over now. Lots of kids go to "charter schools", etc. Our district may be unusual in that all the schools are competing with each other, but an element of competition seems to have come in everywhere. This makes public schools a bit more like private schools, in some locations. Generally, I think that's a good thing. On one more thing, it is simply the case that a lot more students, no matter how we might imagine things to be, complete school, or more grades of school, than they used to. Even as late as mid 20th Century a very high percentage of Americans did not complete high school. Probably around 40%, on average, of Americans left school in their mid to late teens at that time. It wasn't regarded as that big of deal. Arguably school was harder to get through then, but it was also the case that a high school degree was less valued then. It wasn't regarded as necessary for those going to work on farms or ranches (although many farmers and ranchers completed their schooling, and in some regions of the country, by that time, many were going on to college educations). And it wasn't necessary for those going on to many types of industrial, or even office, employments. Now it is not only necessary, but for many some degree of college is as well.

Holscher's Hub: Flying back from Tulsa

Holscher's Hub: Flying back from Tulsa: Sunrise over Colorado, Kansas, or Oklahoma. Wyoming.

This is another one of those topics which relate to the massive change in transportation we've witnessed over the past century. As followers of this blog know (okay, there are not followers, it's just me) this blog is attempting to focus on the first part of the 20th Century, and look at that era, but we do occasionally stray into more recent ones for comparison purposes as well.

This topic nicely illustrates these changes.

On Sunday I flew down to Tulsa, which is the second time in the past three months I've visited Tulsa (very nice town, by the way, in my view). This time, I left Casper around noon and flew via United Airlines to Denver Colorado. I had a three hour lay over in Denver, and then flew on to Tulsa, arriving about 8:00 p.m. their time. I worked in Tulsa the next day, and then I flew back yesterday morning, leaving Tulsa about 6:30 am. I was back in my office about 10:00 am, local time.

Okay no big deal, right?

Well, take this back a century and lets do the same trip, for the same purpose.

Now, granted, a person in Casper Wyoming would be pretty unlikely to make such a business trip to Tulsa in 1911. That's illustrative of the change right there. Hardly anyone would do that unless there was a very significant reason to do so. Given the region, I don't doubt that this did sometimes occur, but it would be infrequent. By the 1930s, however, such a trip would have been much more likely.

In either event, such a trip would have been by train, not plane (plane is a theoretical possibility for the 30s, but mostly theoretical). What would that have entailed. Well, it would have started with boarding the train downtown here in Casper, probably early Sunday morning, and then making a series of train transfers all day long. You'd probably sleep in the train at night. Maybe you'd have to leave on Saturday, particularly if you intended to start work on Monday.

You'd still stay over Monday night, as I did, but you'd re-board a train on Tuesday morning, and spend all day traveling back.

Perhaps all this doesn't seem as dramatic of change to you, as to me, but it is significant. What we now do in a matter of hours was then done in terms of days. I still had time to myself Sunday morning, and worked most of Monday here in my office. That, at least, would have been different.

What about plane travel, when that became possible? I'm not sure when Casper received regular air traffic, but I believe it would have been some point in the 1930s. I have no idea what the travel patterns were like, but it sure would have been a lot slower. Could you fly from Casper to Tulsa in a day? Perhaps, but I'd guess it would have been pretty much an all day type of deal.

Holscher's Hub: Dugout

Holscher's Hub: Dugout

This is a dugout. That is, this is a very early dwelling by some homesteader, most likely.

A lot of homesteads started in this fashion. For that matter, quite a few started and failed having never become any more built up than this. I've seen dugouts that I could date to as late as the 1930s.

This gives us an example of many interesting changes that are hard for modern Americans to really appreciate. The conditions of living expectations were simply different. Not far from this example, I know of another one in which a stone dugout was built, and about a mile away another wooden framed dugout, which were the homes of families. Not single men, but families. Man, wife, and children. And this was their bedroom and kitchen.

Early homesteading was hard, of course. But homesteading continued on up until about 1934. The peak year for homesteading was 1919. The dream of owning a place of ones own was strong (it still is) but making it in agriculture was hard in ways we can hardly imagine. Movies and television have liked to portray mansions on the prairie, but that was very rare. More typically, they have liked to portray white clapboard houses on the prairie, but frankly that was somewhat of a rarity too. For a lot of people, this was their starter home. A log structure likely came later. If it was a 20th Century homestead, and the homesteaders were Irish, a house in town was actually almost as likely.

To add a bit, another thing that is hard for some to appreciate is that in the mid 20th Century there were a lot of little homesteads. They were being filed, proven up, and failing, in rapid succession. Almost all of these little outfits have been incorporated by neighboring outfits now. A few hang on as rentals to neighbors. There is no earthly way these small outfits could survive economically today, on their own, and they barely could earlier. But, while there were many of them, they were also very isolated in an era when a lot of people still traveled by horse, and those who had cars, sure didn't have speedy cars.

The Old Homesteads

I went to a ash spreading (i.e., a type of funeral really) out at an old homestead the other day. By 4x4, it was a long way out. Long, long way, or so it felt. I learned while there that the original homestead had first been filed and occupied in 1917, a big year for homesteading.

It was a very interesting place, and felt very isolated. In visiting about that with my father in law, however, he noted that there had been another homestead just over the hill. And, as I've likely noted here before, there were tiny homesteads all over at that time. It was isolated, but sort of locally isolated. There were, as there were with most of these outfits, another homestead just a few hours ride away, at most, if that.

That is not to say that they weren't way out. I'd guess that this place was at least a full days ride from the nearest town at that time. Even when cars were commonly owned, and they were coming in just about that time, it would have taken the better part of a day to get to town, or a town (there were a couple of very small, but viable towns, about equal distance to this place at that time). It's interesting how agricultural units everywhere in North American have become bigger over time, even if they are all closer now, in terms of time, to a city or town.

Communications and Road Miles

I had a fairly typical experience, and a bit of an odd experience, yesterday which calls to mind the topic of this blog.

Yesterday I went to my office, then to Sheridan Wyoming, then to Ranchester Wyoming, and back.

On the way to Ranchester, we passed two Rolls Royce touring cars. The Silver Ghost type of car, really old ones. They were, of course, premium touring cars in their day, which would have been basically the years on both sides of World War One. Huge automobiles.

The trip basically entailed about 170 miles of travel one way, or a grand trip, in one day of about 300 or so miles. We were home by dinner.

On the way back, I pulled over by the Midwest exit where there was cell reception to make a work call to an attorney in Gillette, WY. My son took this photograph while I was doing that.

What does this have to do with anything?

Well, in a century's time, communications and travel have been so revolutionized that they've radically impacted the way those in my field, in this location, do business. A century ago I would not have taken a day trip to Sheridan and Ranchester. For that matter, while I could easily have gone from Sheridan to Ranchester, most summers, a century ago, that would likely have pretty much been a day trip in and of itself. No, an attorney, if he ever had any cause to go to Sheridan from Casper, would have taken a train. Most likely, you'd take the train up one day, and back the next.

A very adventurous person, if they owned a car, might have driven up to Sheridan, but it would have taken all day. And you would have stayed upon arriving.

This year, I suspect, the travel by car of that type, on roads of that era, would have been impossible. Everything is flooding. I doubt a person could have driven in these conditions from Sheridan to Ranchester. You might have had to take the train to do that. The rail line does run though both towns, then up to Garryowen, and on to Billings. It did then as well.

Even in the mid 20th Century this would have been a long road trip, but you could have done it in a day.

But even the telephone aspect of this didn't exist when I first practiced law, some 20 years ago. That's entirely new. It effectively makes your car your office. As internet connections continue to improve, very often you have internet service darned near everywhere for that matter.

An improvement, or just the way things are?

Remembering what places were like

An interesting edition of the Casper Star Tribune's history column appeared this week, under the title "Routines Disrupted". The following caught my attention, showing what the town was like early in the 20th Century. It's easy to imagine everything being slower paced and more relaxed, and easy to forget the atmosphere that actually prevailed at the time:

Because the city authorities stopped them from selling liquor and insisted that there must be no more piano thumping in their houses, the landladies of the bawdy houses of Casper held an indignation meeting one day last week and decided to suspend business entirely, and accordingly all the inmates of the three places on David street were discharged on the first of the month and Saturday morning fifteen of them left town on the east-bound train, it is hoped to return no more.

“These people got the notion in their head that they could do just as they pleased so long as they remained in the restricted district, and high carnival was held nearly every night for awhile, and it was seldom that a big fight was not pulled off by some of them two or three times a week. They caused the authorities so much trouble that it kept one man on watch nearly every night to quell the disturbance. But after tolerating it until it could be tolerated no longer, the order was given out to cut out the booze and the music, and this made the madams mad and they have closed up their houses, and threaten to ‘kill the town.’ ...

“[I]f the places are ever opened up again, which they undoubtedly will be before the end of this week if they are permitted to do so, the people should, and no doubt will, insist that the places be conducted along lines that will not disturb the decent people of the town.”

The distance of things.

I was in Denver the past couple of days, and on my way out, I took some photographs for my blog on churches in the West.

I've been to Denver approximately a billion times. But trying to find photographs on a particular topic really focuses in your attention on some things. More on that later, but one thing I noted is that you can find multiple churches of a single denomination relatively close to each other, in modern terms.

For example,the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Denver, is really relatively close to Holy Ghost, a fine old church (which I did not get to photograph) in downtown Denver. If I lived in downtown Denver, I'd probably have to drive to the Cathedral for Mass, but it isn't far. Nor are either of these far, in driving terms, from Mother of God Catholic Church which is just on the edge of downtown Denver. It's a very small church.

In any event, these churches are all so close to each other, in modern terms, that I can't imagine all three being built now. All three are still in use. I was perplexed by it, until in considering it, I realized that they are really neighborhood churches, built for communities that were walking to Mass for the most part, save for the Cathedral, which no doubt served that function, but which also was the seat of the Archdiocese of Denver. Mother of God church no doubt served a Catholic community right in that neighborhood, and it likely still does. Holy Ghost served a downtown community, and probably also the Catholic business community that was downtown during the day.

This speaks volumes about how people got around prior to World War Two. It probably also says something about their concept of space.

Here's another example. Depicted here, one time close up, and a second time from down the street, is the Burlington Northern train depot. It's still a train depot, but it only serves to be the headquarters for the BNSF locally now. At one time, of course, passengers got on and off the train here. A friend recently sent me a very interesting article describing that process, and how passengers got off and went to a nearby, now gone, restaurant. For that matter, at least three major hotels were located within a couple of blocks of the depot, one of which is the Townsend, now converted into a courthouse.

Office machinery and the written word.

Just recently, I resumed using the Dragon voice recognition system for dictation. For those not familiar with it, it's a program that jacks into your computer, and you speak into a microphone
which then processes the spoken word immediately into print. This is the second time I've experimented with. The first time, I grew frustrated with it and, after the system collapsed, I abandoned using it and simply typed things out on my computer. I'm a pretty fast typist, so this was working well, but any way you look at it, it's slower than speaking. This time around, the Dragon system seems to be working very well, so I've very happy with my resumed use of it.

Anyhow, what a revolution in the process of generating pleadings and letters this is. When I first started practicing law, some 21 years ago, we were using Dictaphones. Now those are practically a thing of the past. For those not familiar with them, a Dictaphone is a specialized tape recorder that allows the speaker to dictate the document. This ended up, at that time, in an audiotape which was handed over to the secretary, who then listened to it and typed out the document. The secretary handed that back to you, and then you manually red lined it for changes. This process could take some time.

This, of course, was an improved process of dictation as compared to the original one, which entailed calling a secretary in to your office and dictating the document to her. She took it down in shorthand. My mother, who had worked as a secretary in the 40s, 50s and 60s, could take excellent shorthand as a result of this process. Now, shorthand is nearly as dead of written language as Sanskrit.

Even earlier than that, legal documents were processed through a scrivener, a person whose job was simply to write legibly. That person wasn't normally the lawyer.

I'm not sure if this entire process is really quicker than the older methods, but it is certainly different. My secretary only rarely sees a rough draft of anything. That rough draft goes on my computer, and I edit it from there. About 80% of the time, by the time I have a secretary proof read a document, it is actually ready to go. Those entering the secretarial field, for that matter, generally no longer know how to take shorthand or even how to work the Dictaphone machine. They're excellent, however, on working the word process features of a computer.


All this also means, fwiw, that the practice of law, at least, is a much more solitary profession than it once was, at least while in the office. Generating a pleading, in a prior era, was more of a community effort in a way. The lawyer heard the pleading for the first time, in many instances, as the same time his secretary did. Over time, most secretaries were trusted to make comments on the pleadings. In the case of letters, they were often simply expected to be able to write one upon being asked to do so, something that still occurs to some degree today. But for pleadings, today, a lawyer tends to wall himself off by himself while drafting them, and any outside input tends to start after a relatively complete document has been drafted. Of course, with computers, it's much easier to circulate drafts and to change documents as needed.

The Telephone

Concerning changes between then and now, something that occurs to me is that those practicing a century ago were much less impacted, if impacted at all, by the telephone.

That may sound obvious, but the impact would be huge.

There are days that I hardly get off the phone. And as I try to take my phone calls, even if really busy, it means that the phone impacts the flow of my work a great deal. This would not have been the case at one time.

It's really difficult to imagine, actually. A day without phone calls and without email. Communications would come solely by mail or by direct contact. I suppose if people had a question, they dropped by to ask it or to make an appointment, and most contacts would have been very much local.

Slow medicine

Perhaps another example of how things once were in the early automobile, late horse, era:

Slow ambulance -- "Broke Her Arm.

"Mrs. Frank Jameson of Ervay was kicked on the left arm by a horse Sunday and sustained a fractured bone, and she passed through this city Monday on her way to the Douglas hospital, where she will have the fracture reduced. She was accompanied by her son Lawrence.

From the Casper Star Tribunes history column. The date was September 1909.

The Speed of Cooking

I received an unexpected and surprising of how much things have changed even in my own lifetime this week, and in the kitchen at that.

Last week I happened to have to go to Safeway to buy some odds and ends, one of which was breakfast cereal. I'm bad about buying the same kinds again and again, so I decided to add some variety. It's been fall like here, so I decided to go with hot cereals for a change.

But not only did I decide to go with hot cereals, but I bought Cream of the West and Irish Oatmeal. That is, I did not buy instant Cream of Wheat, instant Oatmeal or quick oats.

Cream of the West is like old fashioned Cream of Wheat, except its whole wheat. Frankly, the taste is identical to "regular" Cream of Wheat. Irish Oatmeal, however, is really porridge, and it has to be cooked. It actually has to be cooked and allowed to stand, so it isn't speedy.

Anyhow, my kids have never had "regular" Cream of Wheat. They like "instant" Cream of Wheat, which has an odd texture and taste in my view. Sort of wall paper paste like. Anyhow, my son cooked some Cream of the West the first day I did, with us both using the microwave instructions.

He hated it. He's so acclimated to the pasty instant kind, he finds the cooked kind really bad.

Both kids found the porridge appalling. They're only familiar with instant oatmeal, and they porridge was not met with favor at all. I really liked it. It's a lot more favorable than even cooked oatmeal.

Anyhow, the point of all of this is that all this quick instant stuff is really recent, but we're really used to it. During the school year my wife makes sure the kids have a good breakfast every day, which she gets up and cooks for them. But it never really sank in for me how much our everyday cooking has benefited from "instant" and pre made. Even a thing like pancakes provides an example. My whole life if a person wanted pancakes, they had the benefit of mixes out of a box. More recently, for camping, there's a pre measured deal in a plastic bottle that I use, as you need only add water. A century ago, I suppose, you made the pancakes truly from scratch, which I'll bet hardly anyone does now.

A revolution in the kitchen.

More tiny, but viable, towns

The Casper Star Tribune ran an intersting article over the weekend about a town that's disappeared.

Commenting on this on SMH, I noted:

A Casper Star Tribune article that sort of sheds light on some of the topics discussed here:

http://www.trib.com/articles/2009/07/19 ... 0157b9.txt

This article discusses an entire town disappearing. But it misses part of the reason for that. The town was only a few miles from another, that being the town of Midwest. Midwest is just about four or five miles from another, Edgerton. And Midwest is only about 50 miles from Casper. So the town in the article was probably only about 30 or 40 miles from Casper.

When it was founded, travel conditions would have made the town probably both necessary and viable. But by the 30s, when it disappeared, it was really redundant and inefficient, it's role having been taken over by older and slightly larger Midwest.

Today, Midwest and Edgerton are sort of shadows of their former selves as well.

Modern Transportation

Changes in transportation methods were brought home to me again this week.

On Tuesday of this past week I drove 140 miles to Rawlins Wyoming, worked all day, and returned home that evening. 140 miles isn't a long distance in modern terms. My route took me past Independence Rock, where I stopped at the rest station as I always do. Then, resuming travel, down the Oregon Trail a ways further, and then across some desert country to Ten Mile Hill, a huge topographic rise just outside of Rawlins. Then into Rawlins, whose Union Pacific station is depicted above.

I have no idea if this station is still there. A lot of Rawlin's older buildings are. Rawlins itself, still on the main line of the UP, has seen some very hard times in recent years, but it seems to be rebounding, it's recovery fueled, as it were by natural gas exploration, as well as some wind energy development.

When I wrapped up my work, I turned around and was home in the early evening. A typical day's work for a litigator in Wyoming. It was an enjoyable trip really. Armed with my company supplied Ipod, I finished the book on tape version of Alexander Hamilton for the third time, and listened to a selection of episodes of "The News From Lake Woebegone".

I was to return to Rawlins on Thursday. I didn't, as I came down with the flu. Before somebody asks, no I don't know if it was the "Swine Flu". Whatever it was, it was fast moving, and I am over it now. I crawled into work on Thursday, but a partner of mine very graciously volunteered to take my place, so he repeated by Tuesday travel on Thursday.

I was very grateful for this, as I had a motion hearing in Douglas Wyoming, fifty miles a way, on Friday. I went home on Thursday and slept most of the day. The next day, however, I was back on the road to Douglas.


The courthouse depicted above is no longer in use, and I don't even know where it was. Douglas has a nice new courthouse, built, I think, in the 1970s, or maybe 80s.

This trip too was pleasant and uneventful, except for loosing my motion (rats). On the way to Douglas, I listed to an Ipod interview of H. W. Brands, speaking about Franklin Roosevelt. On the way back, I finished up the last downloaded News From Lake Woebegone I had.

What's the point of this? Modern easy of travel.

Could I have done this a century ago? I doubt it. Even had I owned a car in 1909, there's no way that I could have traveled to Rawlins and back in a day. I wouldn't have tried. It would have been much more likely that, if I had to do that, I would have taken the train from Casper to North Platte NE, and then switched on to the UP line and rode to Rawlins on Monday. I'd have stayed over in Rawlins Tuesday evening. I wouldn't have been able to have a back to back event in Rawlins and Douglas, in all likelihood.

But what does that mean? In part, it probably means that a lawyer, in this context, a century ago, would have gone to Rawlins on a Monday, and came back on a Friday. On Wednesday, he probably wouldn't have had much to do. Perhaps, were it me, I would have gone down to Parco for amusement. If I had to go to Douglas for Friday, I would have had to catch a night train.

What about, say 1939. I could have driven then, road travel was much improved. Even so, it would have been a bit of a brutal trip.

I suspect this also shows that, while travel is easier, life is faster paced. Probably nobody would have tried to schedule back to back travel plans like this "back in the day". Now, I'll often travel up to 600 miles in a day. If something is no further than 300 miles away, I don't stay, usually. That certainly wasn't the case at one time.