October 2023

I said after last week’s earthquake that I probably had relatives involved because they are strung from one end of California to the other, but I didn’t know half their last names anymore. I was informed Sunday that a great-nephew Ronnie DuFour and his family are okay after a close call. Ronnie was enroute to his home about six miles from Oakland when the quake occurred, and his two young children were in the yard at their home. When their house started shaking, and furniture started moving around his wife made an attempt to reach their children but was unable to stand up in the shaking building and when she did get to the door it was jammed. We all feel that they are very fortunate to escape without personal injuries. Ronnie used a mobile telephone to contact his mother in Michigan, in just a few minutes she quickly called my sister to relay the good news… problem was my sister was watching a movie on television and wasn’t even aware that an earthquake had taken place.

Being a child of ‘The Greatest Generation’, I, in retrospect, often think of why they were the people that they were. After dwelling on that subject, then watching the personal habits of the generations since, including the Baby Boomers, and now Millennia’s and Generation “X” and “Z” and whatever else they label people anymore, I may have arrived at a possible answer. It may not be one that everyone can agree on, (what is it we can agree on?) but it works for me. I think it is the fact that these later generations have never been faced with insurmountable tasks. If you had ever arisen at 4:30 a.m. on a Monday morning in September, if you had, after tending to chores and breakfast, arrived at a 80 acre or 100 acre field of cotton ready for harvest, the open boles from 6 inches of the ground to 4 foot tall stalks standing before you and the cotton so white it was blinding, seeing nothing but the white of the cotton and knowing that it must be picked, weighed and loaded onto a truck or trailer with high sides, all within a few short weeks, you have never been overwhelmed. In that, The Greatest Generation’s time, all this was all done by hand. Almost everything was done in a matter of 6 days a week, 12 to 15 hours per day, of constant labor. Life was like that, at least the rural life. Much of the urban life as well, especially those employed by industrial firms. My generation, and I fit somewhere between The Greatest Generation and the Baby Boomers, being born in 1939. We had it a bit easier, at least until we reached adulthood. But back to the ‘greats.’ They were, at least many of them, the children of Civil War soldiers, or WWI, soldiers. They didn’t live in a world that moved fast, and time moved the same. Their labors moved that way also. In short, they were born, bred with patience and endurance, both of body and mind. They thought in a more community minded and family minded manner. They did not put themselves first in anything. They were te