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Faye Bertholf McCoy: CHILDHOOD IN SOUTH-CENTRAL KANSAS IN THE 1920s. Communication & Transportation There is certainly a change in communication during my lifetime. I recall vividly my father’s story about his first introduction to the telephone, as a very young man. His reaction was, "that fool-thing will never work!" It is obvious that his assessment has been proved wrong! Of course, a few years later , he and his brother had a line via the barbed-wire fence that connected their homes. Often the early lines were owned by the farmers, connected to a ‘Central office’ in the near-by town, which operated for a 50 cent per month fee to get them connected to other places. The radio was just making its entry into the area in the 1920s. A news item in the Kingman, Kansas local newspaper in 1922 announced that the Meade Theatre had installed a big radio receiver so that patrons could enjoy concerts and speeches from all over the U.S. Cell phones, fax machines, the internet, television and computers were not in our experience in the 1920s!
A typical wall phone of the 1920s (above) Transportation, also, has made inconceivable strides since that time. The first car in my memory as a tiny child, was a 1913 Ford, much like the illustration. It did get one there easier and more quickly than the horse and buggy, but my mother always longed for the independence she had when her faithful horse and buggy took her anyplace she desired to go. She never learned to drive a car, and so was dependent on my father, and later on me, to meet her needs for transportation. I witnessed the end of an era for many women who had been more or less independent. I fondly recall the last time I remember her actually riding a horse. I was about 10, and we rode our horses to my aunt’s to see the new baby.
An early model Ford (left); a typical buggy (center); and a saddle-horse (right)
Copyright
© 1997 Faye Bertholf McCoy. "I,
Witness to History" and logo are trademarks of Wesley
Retirement Communities, Inc., d/b/a Larksfield Place. All rights reserved.
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