Old folks born in the 19th century say hello from 1934

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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/08/28/old-folks-born-in-the-19th-cen.html

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That said, man, Washington County, Iowa was whiter than a pale of milk in a snowstorm.

Probably hasn’t changed that much, if my rural MN county is anything to go by. Heh, current census estimates in 2018 for Washington County, IA at 96% white. Mine is 97%. Though we have become more diverse since I moved to this area.

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Well for an old-timey tune it sounded like some hot stuff to me! Play that there fiddle, grampy!

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I’m impressed by their 75 year old posture

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They seem a lot more spry than most 75+ year olds that I see today. I realize that most of that is selection/attrition bias due to the lack of modern healthcare taking out the less healthy individuals who would be alive today, but still.

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“That said, man, Washington County, Iowa was whiter than a pale of milk in a snowstorm.”

?

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So call me in 15 years, and I will regale you with tales of the 20th century, the days before cellphones and email. And using trig tables in math class.

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I was watching these exact same videos just this last weekend. It’s interesting listening to the Civil War veterans speak, their accents and so on. It’s kind of an audio/visual record of the past before those things were even recorded.

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The parts of the county where they pointed the camera, at least.

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Also I would guess that average life expectancies for non-whites back then were significantly lower than for whites - and therefore there wouldn’t have been many in this crowd of 75+ people.

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@SeamusBellamy “pail of milk” not “pale of milk”?

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Worth a few stops at the various Amish shops should you ever find yourself in that neck of the world -
http://www.kalonageneralstore.com/


and at the Stringtown Grocery (still website free!)

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Yeah I’m from Iowa. It’s pretty white. There’s beginning to be a lot of immigrants from Mexico but that’s pretty recent. I had a high school in a small rural town with about 500 kids total and there was one black kid who was there for a semester before his family moved away again.

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I have a great great grandfather who was in the civil war and would have been close to the age of some of these people and lived in Iowa. That’s the dream in genealogical research right? To find a film like this? I only have a couple old black and white photos of him from late in life.

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I’m curious about the dark-colored bead necklaces so many of the women were wearing – they did a double wrap, once like a choker, the second loop loose and long. It seems like it much have been a style. Or was someone giving dark bead necklaces away at the meeting? (Noticeable in the slow pan across the group at the end)

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I know, right? Mixing up homophones is simply beyond the pale :wink:

Though it does fit well there in a poetic sense, doesn’t it? :smiley: (could it have been purposeful?)

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Some real pearls of wisdom in there.

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Sonny, come here and let me tell you about how we used to rewind tapes!

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These kinds of records are good reminders of how things like the Civil War aren’t as far behind us as we sometimes like to imagine.

There are almost certainly at least a few people living today whose parents were born into slavery.

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