We observed two weeks ago that three ordinary lifetimes of 75 years each would take us back to the last year of Franklin Roosevelt’s second term as President; the last weeks of Lincoln’s first term; and then the first full year of George Washington’s Presidency. So essentially the whole life of our country under its Constitution has taken place in those three lifetimes, and that almost exactly includes the history of Europeans living here in our immediate area.
In our last two blogs, we looked at what had happened in those first two lifetimes. Imagine now a baby born on this day 75 years ago, in 1940. What has happened in that third lifetime?
In the first few months of that baby’s life Hitler crushed the forces of Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, Luxemburg, and France, and took over their countries in a brutal rule. They savaged the British forces, which managed to get away and defend their island from Hitler’s onslaughts. Winston Churchill came to power, and Roosevelt decided to go to the voters for an unprecedented third term – this was, as Eleanor told the Democratic convention, “no ordinary time.” Relieved voters kept him on, and local young men began to be swept up in America’s first peacetime draft.
Local men and women were in Pearl Harbor when the bombs came down, and on Corregidor when it fell. Mercury Aircraft, which had had but a single employee, soon had 850 manufacturing on contracts from the army, which also built it new facilities. Schweizer Aircraft had a similar experience, and Elmira became an early center of glider pilot training. George Haley of Bath became a combat pilot with the Tuskegee Airmen, fighting his first of three wars and starting a climb up the ladder to lieutenant colonel.
Hitler and his cronies, impatient with the inefficiencies of butchering whole populations by gunfire, created gigantic killing camps, designed in particular to exterminate all the Jewish-extraction people they could lay their hands on.
Especially in the last year of the war, local soldiers started dieing in dozens. Voters gave Roosevelt a staggering fourth term, but he died just a few months into it.
Atomic bombs brought the war to an end. New President Truman pushed on with Roosevelt’s G.I. Bill, designed to make America a nation of college-educated middle-class homeowners. He also made sweeping moves to racially integrate the military, and federal employment.
In 1946, another major flood struck the Conhocton-Canisteo-Chemung River system.
In 1952, Thomas J. Watson and Governor Thomas Dewey were key members of a group successfully boosting Dwight D. Eisenhower for the White House.
Driven by the G.I. Bill, the infrastructure development of the New Deal, and overseas prostration, America’s economy boomed… along with its population of babies.
Local people formed the Corning-Painted Post Historical Society, and the Steuben County Historical Society. Drivers ran the first Watkins Glen race. The Corning Museum of Glass opened its doors. Railroad tracks in Corning were re-routed north of the city, and Erie Avenue became Denison Parkway. Corning-Painted Post School District came into existence, and Corning Community College. Old friends and colleagues of Glenn Curtiss opened Curtiss Museum in Hammondsport. One-room schools closed their doors for the last time. A group of visionaries began the long long work of carving the Finger Lakes Trail through western New York.
Birth-control pills became available, thanks in part to research funds raised by Corning-born Margaret Sanger. Despite fierce and even armed resistance, a peaceful Civil Rights movement changed America. The country convulsed over Vietnam, and over dramatic social changes. The murder of President Kennedy ushered in a decade of assassinations.
Drivers started cruising the Southern Tier Expressway. As rail traffic declined, two major carriers serving our region merged into the Erie-Lackawanna Railroad.
Legally-encrusted bigotry was swept away from our immigration system, forever changing the composition of our nation and taking a long step toward making America true to its ideals. We started to face the fact that we couldn’t just dump our waste and pollution into the environment.
Sixty-four years (almost to the day) after Glenn Curtiss coaxed a mile-long flight out of his ungainly airplane in Pleasant Valley, men walked on the moon. We watched them on television.
In 1972 Hurricane Agnes poured on yet another cataclysmic flood, which would have been far worse without the New Deal flood control measures put into place after 1935’s inundation. Elmira began a slow population decline (matched by much of the rest of the region). Corning re-envisioned its downtown area, and began creation of today’s Market Street and Civic Plaza.
Corning Glass Works re-invented itself as Corning, Incorporated. As industry in general declined, boutique wineries stimulated the agricultural and tourism fields. As small family farms went on the market, a population of conservative Amish and Mennonites began to grow… even creating a new system of one-room schools. As America became not much more than 50% white, 95% white areas like ours became bizarre curios.
Curtiss Museum got a new home. Rockwell and Corning Museums had major overhauls. As the 21st century dawned we began a boom in library construction and renovation.
Our ridiculous electoral college brought us our fifth major crisis and once again seated the man whom the voters had rejected as President, placing George W. Bush in the immortal company of Benjamin Harrison, John Q. Adams, and Rutherford B. Hays.
We came through the Cold War victorious, but somehow couldn’t think of a way to reduce military spending, and soon found ourselves locked into asymmetrical warfare, including highly-controversial invasions overseas. Terrorist destruction of the World Trade Center hammered the nation’s economy, and especially New York’s, producing severe downturns even way out here.
Voters elected an African American, young enough that the cruel laws of segregation had applied to him, as their President.
And on the day you read this, thousands of American boys and girls are being born. They will have their 75th birthdays in the year 2090. All of us will be gone. We wonder what they will see and remember, looking back, on our country’s (and our region’s) fourth ordinary lifetime.
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Hey — Carl Koehler will be doing a presentation on “Talking Trees: Guides in the Wilderness,” about how trees were trained and used as trail markers in days long ago. The free Steuben County Historical Society presentation is 4 PM Friday, Feb. 6 at Centenary Methodist Church in Bath.