Week 50: Witness to History: Even from an armchair, it had to have been exciting!

This is a broad, broad topic.  In one sense, we are all witnessing history right now.  This week has seen the beginning of the use of the Pfizer vaccine against COVID 19, soon to be followed by the Moderna vaccine and eventually others, hopefully putting an end to this pandemic.  2020 has been a long year--it feels like a decade has passed since March 1st--but I hope we'll be able to take some lessons from what has happened. This much suffering should result in a proportional increase in wisdom!

Witnessing history.  My Grandmother Grace Belknap, 1895-1969, probably saw some of the biggest changes, though she never talked much about the early years.  The Wright brothers flew their first plane when she was 8 years old, automobiles began to appear on the roads, World War I and the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic occurred. In Washington state, women got the vote in 1910, but the rest of the country got it in 1920. The Great Depression.  In 1936, Grace's husband was killed in a saw mill accident and my grandmother thus became one of the earliest beneficiaries of the Workmen's Compensation program in Washington state.  [I worked for the state department of Labor and Industry which administered this program, during the summers in 1973, 74, and 75, and we even went into the Archives, but did I think to look up my grandfather's case?  No!  I don't think it would have been unethical and it would certainly have been interesting!].  World War II happened which certainly affected her life.  My mother and sister lived with my grandmother for a fair portion of the war.  My uncle Dwight spent the war in England where he married my Aunt Celia, and brought her home to his mother, where I think they must have lived for a while too, guessing by some of the documentation I saw.  Grandma made it through the 1950s and the early 60s, President Kennedy's assassination, the upheavals of the mid-60s, and ultimately putting Apollo 11 on the moon.  A few months later she passed away from heart disease.

So Grace saw the changes from the Wright brothers first flight (or at least word of it, since she lived on the west coast and they did this on the east coast!) to landing the Apollo 11 astronauts on the moon and bringing them back.  She lived through the Spanish Flu epidemic, two world wars, the Depression, a presidential assassination, and social upheaval.  I think the cultural changes from 1895 to 1969 could have been dizzying but she always faced them, with Grace.

Edited on December 17, 2020.  These pictures are out of order but they span the time frame I was talking about.  Today is the anniversary of the Wright Brother's first flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903 as it turned out, so this was a fitting entry!

Grace as a young woman

Grace is the shortest adult in this photo!  My mother Ruth is in the green coat and I am in the 9th grade wearing the cape. My two cousins and are on the left, and my beloved Aunt Dodo is on the right.  Aunt Dodo's granddaughter is the little one in front of us all. I believe this is Mother's Day, 1969, in Olympia, Washington.

Grace as a toddler