My paternal grandfather, Magnus Anderson, was born in Sweden in 1891. His parents conformed to a long tradition of constructing their son's surname by adding the word 'son' to the father's first name (his father's name was Anders Munson). My grandfather apprenticed, became a carpenter and emigrated in 1911 to Canada when he was 20 years old. The next year, in 1912, his mother, father, brother, and two sisters followed him from Sweden. Originally, the plan was to leave Sweden for England, and then cross the Atlantic on the Titanic's maiden voyage. However, as fate would have it, a storm in Sweden delayed the crossing to England, and so they booked passage on a different ocean liner. Eventually the family settled in Winnipeg. When WWI broke out, my grandfather still did not know much English, and in 1917 was conscripted as an orderly in the Tuxedo Military Hospital in Winnipeg. He later married my paternal grandmother, another Swedish immigrant, and raised a family of four children. The children were raised as 'Canadians', which meant that only English was spoken at home, and only some 'trappings' of Swedish culture were preserved, such as the special food and decorations at Christmas. Keeping employed through the interwar years as a carpenter, in 1931 (the year my father was born), he was hired at Christie's Biscuits as an engineer to re-organize and maintain the machines on the factory floor. He was 48 when WWII began, and joined the Reserve Army in Winnipeg. He outlived my grandmother, and in the late 1960's had a stroke, thereafter living out his life in a Nursing Home. He died in bed in 1973, at the ripe old age of 82.
His generation saw continual and rapid change in every facet of life. Perhaps most obvious were the terrific advances in transportation technology. He would have read about the first flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903. He'll have seen the cars produced by Ford in Canada for the first time in 1904. Sometime later he bought a second-hand Durant (he never bought a new car in his life), and built rather than bought the box that people used as trunks on those early cars. WWI saw huge advances in transportation technology, including planes, trains, and automobiles of every sort. WWII saw further advances in such transportation, and added submarine technology. In the post WWII period, cars became affordable to most people, and successive politicians covered Canada with an ever more elaborate web of highways. Before he died in 1973, my grandfather watched on television as Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon. In his lifetime, he saw an advance from hot air balloons to landing on the moon, from dreadnoughts to nuclear submarines able to circle the globe without ever coming up for air, and from horse and buggies to a country full of cars.
At the same time, he was around for the first radio transmissions, and belonged to a world in which families eventually gathered around the 'wireless' to listen to the news and entertainment on a nightly basis. He also witnessed the change from families listening to radios to families watching televisions. He will have communicated by telegraph, a technology virtually replaced in his lifetime by telephones, and would live to see a telephone in every house. He was around for the first transistor which changed forever the world of electronics, and the first small computers required by the space race. He would have first played records made of glass, and later of vinyl, and would have seen the first 8-track tape recorders. His generation saw the invention of sulfa drugs and eventually broad spectrum antibiotics to kill all sorts of deadly bugs, and the first successful organ transplants. Such advances increased life expectancy in his society by a decade.
His generation witnessed dramatic changes in society. He saw universal suffrage in 1928 that allowed women the vote, and a steady advancement of womens' status in Canadian society throughout his life. Eventually, barriers began to fall that had preserved for men only certain types of work. By his death, his doctor may well have been female. He would have seen a dramatic change in how people of European descent in North America perceived people of different ethnicities. He witnessed US civil rights legislation that granted people of colour the same rights as white people.
His generation saw two world wars of staggering death tolls and horrific atrocities. WWI ended with a crappy international agreement that in many ways set the stage for WWII, which itself had the normal nation state rivalries at its heart, but the added dimension of racism and the atrocities committed in its name.
Things are changing so quickly today that I can barely keep up with some of them. I still don't really understand why people like Facebook so much, let alone Twitter, and I am typing away on a laptop with Windows XP as an operating system.
However, can there ever have been a time that saw so much change in so short a time as my grandfather's generation?
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