Opinion: Earth’s favored children, part II

The youngest pre-Boomers are now 77 and the youngest pre-World War II children are now 82. In retrospect, that five-year difference in age didn’t mean much. New technology was early-stage electronic. Change occurred slowly. But it did happen, and the pace of change increased as the years slipped by.

The telephone

The telephone was a marvel of modern technology. But don’t confuse it with that hand-held device that seems to be part of people’s anatomy in 2024.

Most people had party-line phones; some had private lines. A party-line was shared, which meant that people on the same line could listen to the conversations of others. A private line was something of a luxury. Yet the vast majority of Americans had no idea of what “real luxury” was.