If you’re old enough to remember when women wore Easter bonnets to
church and for community parades, you’re telling a “little secret” that
identifies you with my “now generation.”
Fifty years ago at
Patterson Fletcher in Fort Wayne, flower hats for Easter ranged between
$5 and $8.95. Those, with a bit more money to spend, could fork out
between $8.99 and $12.95 at the more elite Nobbson Store, located on
Calhoun Street at the time.
For those who didn’t have quite as
much money to spend, Frank’s Store was the place to go where hat prices
had been “slashed” to $5, and hand bags to go with them could be
purchased for prices ranging from $2.98 to $5.
The real bargain
occurred, however, if you wanted to go for an Easter afternoon drive.
You could purchase tires for your car at prices ranging between $9.88
and $13.88 per tire. If you wanted an open-air drive, mo-peds were
selling for $184.50 a piece, or $19 down and agreeable payments.
If
you wanted to conclude the day with a movie, tickets would be $1 a
piece for such flicks as, “The Pride and the Passion,” “The Trouble with
Harry,” “Bailout at 43,000 Feet,” or, “The Bridge on the River Kwai.”
Editorially,
Clifford B. Ward was writing, “Indiana can’t maintain an army, a navy
or an air force to defend this state, nor should it. It can’t deal with
national imports, immigration, emigration, etc. But it ought to pave,
clean and light its own streets. It ought to provide and pay for its own
city police. It ought to build, maintain and improve its own schools
and in any circumstances to do what is primarily its duty.”
All of
this is a mere taste of the information provided in a 50-year-old
newspaper discovered in the back of the local library recently. In many
ways it indicated that not much has changed in thinking in the past 50
years. In other ways, it was a nostalgic trip back to the world when I
was 10-years-old. For just a moment, it was like stepping back into
those moments.
But it had more of a mystique than simply the news
and information that it provided. I was typing at a computer when a
member of the library committee said, “you ought to see the old paper
that’s laying on top of a box in the back.”
Being intrigued by
such things, I indicated an interest that sent him on a return trip to
retrieve the dirty, tarnished old paper.
It was The News-Sentinel
dated, “April 1, 1958.” While the average person would look at it and
think, “what an old paper, let’s take a peak through it,” I recognized
it as a half-century prior to my 60th birthday, which I celebrated the
first of this week.
With 364 other days in the year (365 this
year), it was one of those serendipitous, goose-bump moments for someone
who was looking straight at his birthday date, 50 years earlier.
It
was one of those special moments when you know that, for whatever
reason, you’ve received a special gift of connection, just for a moment,
a special connection just between you and God and the things around
you. Undoubtedly, there are others who share my birthday, reading this
column, who may have a sense of what I sensed when I looked at that
paper.
Where do these moments come from? Why do they happen? What are the mathematical odds of them happening?
I
can’t answer any of those questions but I know that there is a sense of
peace that flows into the heart for just a few minutes when such
happenings occur. Just for a moment there’s a sense of feeling that,
‘Someone’ reached out to me. Someone noticed me.”
It would be
enough if that were the only special happening this week but another one
occurred earlier this week, with a birthday card from a cousin.
There,
on the front of the card, was a magnificent picture of “Nubble Light,” a
shrine to our family that stands along the beautiful beach of York
Beach, Maine. It has been a sort of special “hiding place” where we have
visited occasionally with other relatives since the kids were little.
It gives off a special “aura,” a special “sense of light” for life’s
pathway that only a real lighthouse can ignite in our hearts.
When
I showed it to Joyce her mouth dropped open and she simply said, “Jim.”
I replied, “I know,” and therein was a quick connecting point as
magical as the center of the universe itself.
Just when I was
thinking of sorting things out and throwing things away, I was given one
more thing to save. And as I glance through the paper, Joyce is in town
looking for a frame for the lighthouse. How quickly life has moved from
age 10 to age 60, but thank goodness, some things never change.