Completely agree. I often wonder what places like this were like 100 years ago. Not all good, I know that, but still.........
These kinds of things may or may not be interesting, but as a kid I loved hearing them:.
My grandfather used to tell stories about his days working in sales to support his sisters and help out his dad when he was still a teenager - he never went to high school, he worked. He was, however self-educated, and read all the classics, kept up with current events his whole life, etc. The stories came because we'd drive around the area in his car on Saturday afternoons while he looked for real estate to buy, after he'd taken my brothers and me to lunch. There wasn't much to do but listen.
However...listening is learning.
My grandfather left home around 1903 to work. He probably wasn't any older than a ninth grader when he left school.
Salesmen didn't drive to their destinations, they took trains. They rented buckboards and horses to get to areas that weren't reachable by the railroads once they got off the trains. All roads were dirt roads. Detroit had the first fully paved streets in the US, and even that was after he got started working.
He was based in Texas, in the small town that's made the news recently (in a sad way), Uvalde, but he'd spend several days in every city in the country, from small towns to big cities doing his sales work. He used to tell stories about small town life in the more rural areas...and he LOVED Texas.
I think most of his time was spent in the South, but he got North for sure, and ended up in real estate development in Detroit, a city with big opportunities due to the new car industry, lumber production, and copper trade from the mines in northern Michigan. So I have lots of stories he told about Detroit, but we're not on that topic.
During the Depression there wasn't much real estate activity, so he had a franchise for Miller Beer when prohibition was lifted. He'd go to the area around Lake Michigan (about 200 miles from Detroit) once a week to make sure the beer was loaded onto the trucks, and head them back to Detroit. He'd stay over in small towns. My mother was a little girl at the time.
He'd tell us about small town hotels in the South - there was one or two in most small towns - with one bathroom everyone on the floor would share; outhouses with no toilet paper - they would hang a corn cob on a nail with a string and that's what you used...ewwww....
Inns you'd go out and pump water into a washbasin to wash yourself. He'd tell us about his customers in towns and cities, and how different things were in rural areas at the time. Most of the Southern small towns didn't have electricity.
He was around for the 1900 Galveston hurricane. Sold mattresses across the border to Pancho Villa, which I thought was a pretty unique story.
He was also around when men landed on the moon in 1969; I saw the moon landing with him and my grandmother in his apartment building. To me, it was kind of a big deal; to them...well, it was amazing. They'd lived in an era that spanned buckboard travel to moon landings.
He told lots of stories. I still cherish their memory, and his.
Compared to my grandfather. I've done very little in my life, and certainly had it easier.
