Week 41—Changes—What My Grandmother Saw in a Hundred Years
In the nearly one hundred years that my grandmother, Pansy Louise (Lancaster) Johnston, lived, she experienced great technological change. Born in 1913 and died just two months short of her hundredth birthday in 2013, many technical advances happened in her lifetime. Growing up on a farm in Erath County, Texas, transportation was likely horse and wagon into town, and walking on her own two feet to school. Later, they lived in the town of Stephenville and her father was a self-taught auto mechanic. In her lifetime, planes progressed to jets, and her brother, R.D., was an Air Force pilot in World War II and Korea. Her husband, Tom, and her younger brother, Wayne, served in the Navy. Pansy was independent and drove a car up until the last decade of her life, when a minor heart attack put a stop to her driving. Their family did not have a radio in 1930, but it was likely they soon had one. Once television was widely available, the Johnston family had one, as I have heard stories ...