A Visit with Grandma Pearl: Looking Back at the Twentieth Century

Chapter 8: Looking Back at the Twentieth Century (on January 1, 2000)

Well, to tell the truth, this year [2000] doesn’t seem like a major event. No. It's just another year. Of course, it has a lot of significance, I suppose. I'm very happy that nothing happened.  It was a nice, quiet, huge celebration; everybody behaved and there weren't any glitches.  When I look back, I realize that I was there at the beginning – that I've lived through almost a century.

I do that every day. I look back and 100 years hasn't been such a long time.  But it's another world altogether. It's nothing like the one I grew up in.  I can't begin to count the changes. Because you see, honey, when I came into this last century, the twentieth, I saw the birth of aviation, the birth of radio, the birth of everything -- and the walking around on the moon.

My memory really does serve me quite well, so I remember things exactly the way they were.

The Flight at the Park

I remember this one time when my mother took me to Grant Park here in Chicago. She said she wanted to see something that was going on that she had read about in the paper. She wanted to see what they were talking about. I went with her and I remember it so vividly. I must have been six or seven years old.

Several men were around some kind of contraption. I called it a "crate" and it had wings. They were trying to get it off the ground and keep it in the air a little ways. But it kept falling down. That might have been the Wright brothers or somebody in the beginning. But what would I know? I was interested in jumping around there and I had no idea what I was witnessing. But in retrospect, you see, when I recall it, it's so clear, and I've wondered. . .

Radio

The twentieth century was the one when everything happened.  I remember, in 1921, when I got married, I had never heard of radio. Nobody had a radio yet, but my husband was already interested and involved with it. When we got married, he was in the process of building a radio set.

One day, I remember him coming out of the garage -- we had a great big four car garage in this old mansion -- and he brought in this little crystal set with earphones.  We sat around the table and he was passing the earphones around for all of us to hear the music that was coming from a park that was about two blocks away. It was coming from Forest Park! I couldn't figure out how it worked, and then I had to pass the earphones for someone else to listen to.

We were so impressed with that. And my husband was always first with everything. He was first when they had movie cameras for residents, for private use. I have movies of my early children jumping around, performing for the camera.

The Holocaust

No matter what happened from the time of recorded history, there was never anything that happened to equal what happened in Germany with Hitler. There was nothing ever as bad. Six million Jews were slaughtered! Six million! You know, sometimes I can’t even think about it. I can’t get it through my head. It is so incredible. And the incredible thing was that when Hitler was carrying on over there, and the handwriting was on the wall, nobody who saw what was going on raised a voice. The Pope sat on the can in Rome and never said a word. Nobody! The whole world said, “Well, you know.”

It’s like the old story about the ship sinking. You know, the guy says, “Well, why should I worry? It doesn’t belong to me. It’s not my ship.” You see, that's the way it was.

If Hitler could get all these people who knew about the concentration camps to go along with him. . .  They claim, of course, that they knew nothing about it. Well then, what was he yelling about from up there? He was hollering his head off for hours on end to millions. They didn’t see in the streets what they were doing to the Jews in the streets of Germany? They saw it all. That’s a cop out.

This treachery was so incredible -- to do this to human beings. Would you do this to dogs? I mean, if you are a human being, and have any kind of human instincts. . . and yet, this treachery. Oh, this was a fantastic thing that happened. Nothing in history will ever equal this. Never.

Hitler was a special kind of mad man. He was a raving mad man. You know, he used to chew on carpets. He was really insane. And the incredible thing is that millions of people rallied around this mad man, and were very willing to go along with his plan to eliminate the Jews.

It’s scary because historically, whenever something didn’t go right in a country, people always took it out on the Jews; they were the scapegoats. You know, during the whole oil crisis, there were bumper stickers that said: “We need oil, not Jews.” There is a latent hatred– something deep down.  And that is why we have so many organizations which are watchdogs for this, because it could happen anywhere, any time. You have got to be on guard. You have got to be vigilant. I’ll tell you, if I see a swastika, I’m willing to pick up a brick.

On Present Dangers

I am on the side of no extremes, you know. I found that in my experience, when anything gets beyond reason and is excessive, something has to give. When things get extremely a certain way, they have a tendency to blow up in your face.

Oh, the financial world, the economic world. When I came into the world, if you earned ten dollars a week you could afford to get married and have a family. That's a far cry from today with all the billionaires. There aren't any millionaires anymore; it doesn't mean anything. And billionaires, trillionaires, it's just like so much garbage -- so many people with so much money. What does it mean? It doesn't have any meaning. You have to leave it anyway. It means nothing.

I find that there is too much excess, too much money. With these mergers, how high is up? Now, you don't say millions. Forget it, there's no such thing as millions anymore. It has got to be billions or trillions. What's the next mountain?

I remember how little it took to survive and everybody was happy -- and happier than they are now, because it wasn't so dangerous. Now, they can let loose some sort of a chemical somewhere and they can wipe out the world. You don't know where your enemies are. They plant one guy in the middle of a big city some place with a vile of poison or a plague of some kind, and you don't have to have wars anymore. It's frightening; it really is. There's really no peace on earth -- you never know when somebody is going to release some of that.

Nobody feels secure anymore. You can't feel secure if you know that you have more enemies around the world than you have friends. And they all have these chemicals now. They don't have to come and shoot you. They can kill out half of the world with a plague, never mind the bomb. Forget the bomb. This has gone beyond that already with the chemicals. So, it's a very unsafe situation. It doesn't do you any good to dwell on it but at the same time you have to know that that kind of situation exists.

Education is very important because what you have are millions and millions of people that are completely uneducated, completely unreachable. I have no idea how they are going to untangle that. A few are educated, but the multitudes are not.

Listen, if you don't try to get a reasonable slant on it, you can get very discouraged.  We’ve got to change the outlook of humanity -- get the world to be more friendly, erase some of the enmity.  You have to hope that there is a Supreme Being, somebody in charge. I hope. We live with hope -- that's how we live.

Keep reading: Chapter 9: Personal Reflections