52 Ancestors 2023 Week 25: Fast

I am really skipping around the topics!  Some didn't feel too inspiring to me and others I just didn't have anything to say ("So Many Descendants" did not really apply to any recent generations:  we are not prolific people.  "Last One Standing" just seemed a little grim and besides there was no one who sprang to mind!).  But "Fast.  Hmmm.  We have a video of our older granddaughter at about 2-1/2 running around our house and announcing "I so fast Grandpa!  Fast!"   I ran in track in high school but I don't think anyone thought I was particularly fast, especially the timers.  Fast can also apply to the passage of time and events and I think that is what I will meditate on this time.  

My Grandma Grace Belknap was born in 1895 and died in 1969.  A lot changed, very quickly, during her lifetime, and a lot happened for good and ill.  A very brief list:

The Wright Brothers flew an airplane for the first time.  By the time Grandma passed away, passengers were using jet aircraft to fly around the world on a daily basis.

Women got the vote (they actually had it in Washington state in 1910, which my great-grandmother and her daughters, as soon as they reached the age of majority, took full advantage of) in 1920.

World War I and the Spanish Flu pandemic (from which we apparently learned no lessons).

The Depression:  Grandma was part of the leadership of a PTA that provided soup for lunch to an elementary school several times a week in the early 1930s.

My grandfather's death in 1936, an accident at work.  My grandmother received compensation from the Washington State Depart of Labor and Industries' newly created Workmen Compensation plan for the rest of her life.

World War II.

Somewhere in here, my grandmother acquired a television which she used to watch such exciting sports as golf, bowling, and baseball.  

The 60's, which might be enough said, but there was a lot of social change, and then in July of 1969, the United States landed men on the moon. 

In fact, the more I type, the more I realize how much happened.  There isn't room for it all!  But her lifetime saw us go from hot air balloons to lunar landers, radios to satellite television broadcasts, women getting the vote to the Civil Rights era, the development of antibiotics and computers.  Grandma kept up with it all, one way or the other, from her home, even though it all happened very fast!


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