Remembering when phones were used just for calling and the numbers were single digits
We are already into November and the older the Old Men of the Mountain get, the faster the time goes. For time itself, yet for things not exactly related to time, they seem to take forever.
It takes forever just to get things done and there doesn’t seem to be enough time. However, on Nov. 2, Election Day, the Old Men of the Mountain met at the Middleburgh Diner in Middleburgh.
As always, the OMOTM discussed old cars, old trucks, and old tractors. That’s because of the ages of this group. It was obvious that one OF was tickled with what he had accomplished with his old Massey-Ferguson tractors.
To do this, he had to use 2021 technology. This OF proudly showed how he has gotten his old machine to run, along with sound effects. The OF passed around his phone, which had a photo of the machine running in his garage. The OFs were impressed as each in turn looked at the phone to see the display.
A simple phone does a lot more now than just making phone calls. Attaching the name “phone” to these devices does not sound right. Of course they can, and are, used to make calls but it seems most of the time the new phones get used for something else.
The OFs can remember when the phones had operators and you could ask the operator to get the person you were calling. In the town of Esperance, New York, the operator could see out to the street from a large window in the telephone office.
When calling the garage, you would say (this is an actual number) 19 the house, or say 19 the garage, and the operator would do it, or the operator might say (actual stated conversation), “Milton is not there; I just saw him go into the tea room. I’ll dial that for you.”
Also the OFs remember the phone number for the doctor was 1, the phone number for Mexico (a local tavern) was 2, and the phone number for the artificial inseminator was 3. It was much simpler then.
Lots of bear and deer
The OFs have mentioned recently that bears are on the prowl. Tuesday morning again, bear sightings were reported, but added to it was the amount of healthy looking deer roaming around, not only in the woods, but in some of the OFs’ yards and fields.
There does seem to be more than normal. The OF’s sightings are mostly rural and Encon will, of course, bring us up to date on this situation.
One OF mentioned bears may be only around here; the OFs have no idea about the other tiers of the state. Maybe in some other areas the bears don’t appear and our region has them all.
Hollow Halloween
Halloween has come and gone, and there was no mention of it at the breakfast. Apparently not many (if any) of the OFs decorated for Halloween, or had any great influx of kids.
No one even mentioned decorations of others like they do at Christmas time. This scribe has seen a few cute decorations when he was out and about, some really clever.
Of course this scribe didn’t wander very far, Altamont and Voorheesville, and a little bit in Guilderland Center was about it. Fall decorations — that is another story.
Prices jump
The cost of living has been touched on at a couple of meetings, but just around the edges. However, at this meeting, it was discussed quite a bit.
To the OFs, it is getting out of hand in a hurry. One OF mentioned that prices are not just inching up but are jumping by leaps and bounds. Another OF thought it was supply and demand and likened to all those unloaded boats, and scarcity of truck drivers.
One OF mentioned he had to sell his plane because it was just too expensive to park it and maintain it, let alone supply the fuel to fly it.
Some of the OFs wondered who was paying the demurrage (a charge for detaining a ship, freight car, or truck) on the ships just parked offshore. Some thought it might just be like the railroad, or trailers left off to be loaded or unloaded. In those cases, it is the company that pays that fee, not the railroad.
It was thought that many hobbies of this type, like flying, boating, golf, even maybe fishing, will go by the wayside because it will become too expensive to maintain participation in them when on a fixed income. That will be a shame.
One OF mentioned how much harder he had to work now compared to just a couple of years ago as a truck driver, and that the pressure applied made the job not only physically more exhausting but unsafe.
Another OF who was just discharged from the hospital said that previously the care he received in the same hospital was good but that this time he compared it to being in hell. The OF attributed this to lack of help and overworked staff.
The OF mentioned some of the particulars as he saw them, but this scribe is not going to mention them because it may just be an OF grumbling because things were not like they were before, and he was just repeating what he was told by overworked employees.
The OFs keep asking, “Where has everybody gone?”
It seems just like a little while ago so many were unemployed it was making news as one OF put it. One other OF answered that it was just the news people, making news where there wasn’t any.
This OF said, if you wanted to work, there was work, and people looking for workers. That again the scribe does not know.
The scribe only knows what he reads in the paper like this media clip from The Miami Herald: Man married, sentenced on same day.
Then one OF capped it all up by saying he is so old he has been through all this before and there is no sense “bitchin’” about it; it tain’t gonna change, and it will all work out in the end.
The OF may be right, but in this case: Will the end be worth it? The older the OFs get, this can be said about many things.
The Old Men of the Mountain who made it to the Middleburgh Diner and showed up in their fancy cars and trucks and not their old tractors, with mismatched tires, only one fender, and no cowling (a removable metal covering that houses the engine) were: Paul Nelson, Harold Guest, Wally Guest, Marty Herzog, Bill Lichliter, George Washburn, Jake Herzog, Gerry Chartier, Russ Pokorny, Lou Schenck, Herb Bahrmann, Jack Norray, Paul Whitbeck, North Carolina guest Jay Williams, and me.