Author Archives: Mark M. Meinero

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20 – INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY

There’s something about the Internet that feels like it’s always been there. And if you’re 35 or younger, it has.

Maybe it’s because we’ve gotten so used to the idea of pulling information seemingly out of the air. Who won the Northwestern basketball game? Who won the Northwestern basketball game on this day in 1974? Who was Grover Cleveland’s first vice president?

There was no Internet in 1954. There were newspapers and magazines. There were encyclopedias to look up facts. You could send a letter to a government agency when you had a question and wait the necessary period of time by your mailbox for the response.

But beginning in the 1960s, engineers began creating networks of computer in order to share unused capacity. Companies began to see these networks as ways to share information.

There were efforts to commercialize the information. Cable TV networks ran scrolled news 24/7 that was formatted to fit a screen. In Britain, teletext used bandwidth to provide what was, at the time, a robust assortment of real-time information.

The information evolution continued. My role in the mid-1980s came at The New York Times which started – and then foolishly ended – a videotex service that came in through a modem in a dedicated device used for banking. Large all-purpose commercial services were launched such as Compuserve, Prodigy and America Online, which flooded the country with CD-ROMs to get you started on their service.

With the blossoming of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s, the information provider middleman was eliminated. You could call up the information yourself if you knew the uniform resource locator, or URL, a line of text that usually started with an “http:” inserted in the top of a browser.

There were those who thought the Internet was a fad. Hardly. It’s how you’re seeing this. It’s how you’ve seen the vast majority of what you see in the 21st century.

It also took a toll. Many cities no longer have daily newspapers. Online shopping has decimated retailing. When was the last time you saw a World Book Encyclopedia?

It also changed the way we communicate with people. We send e-mail and texts instead of writing letters. Through social media, we keep in touch with people with whom we went to high school in a way that was impossible when we went to high school in the first place.

Like so many other things about 2024, not everything about the Internet is a unmitigated benefit. Fake news and hoaxes and conspiracy theories and racist crap have been shared for centuries, but now it often looks and seems very real. People are more isolated, even with 1,000 “friends” on Facebook.

The Internet is arguably one of the biggest changes of the last 70 years. What becomes of it in 2094 is hard to imagine – and maybe at this point, it’s silly to try.

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21 – THE PLAGUE

My parents would have been stunned by the COVID-19 pandemic that began in this country in 2020.

My grandparents wouldn’t have been.

They saw it before. In 1918, the world suffered through an influenza pandemic that killed tens of millions of people – the exact number isn’t known. One third of the people in the world came down with it. The worst of it lasted until 1920.

Over the years, there have been other breakouts. But people thought the epidemiology had advanced and minimized the damage. Outbreaks of Avian flu and Ebola in this century were kept under control by international intervention and swift vaccination.

We weren’t as lucky in 2020. 

Maybe lucky is the wrong word. Because one problem we had in 2020 was that knuckleheads ran the world’s most powerful nations.

In China, where the pandemic began in the city of Wuhan, Xi Jinping’s totalitarian rule couldn’t stop the virus. And because of his suspicion of outsiders, the world knew little about what was going on in the country of origin.

But the real cetriolo who botched COVID was, no surprise here, Donald Trump.

Trump thought ignoring the spreading virus would make it go away. Otherwise, he feared that his efforts to turn the economy around – vital in an election year – would go for naught.

So there was no sense of urgency in his administration about the virus. And because he wanted to will it out of existence – and not signal weakness to his lunkhead supporters – the United States found itself overwhelmed by cases by the end of March 2020.

The nation was forced to shut down in a way none of us ever imagined. The streets of major cities were deserted. Schools closed. People worked from home – or lost their jobs entirely. Major events were canceled.

Trump held these inane briefings, at one of which he speculated about the possibility of injecting bleach into people to fight the virus. He refused to wear a mask – and his followers did the same, saying that it was an infringement on their freedom and not a proven method of helping to prevent the spread.

So we had refrigerator trucks brought in as makeshift morgues, the sadness of health care workers working long hours to save and then losing their lives from exposure to the disease.

It was a horrible time that none of us will soon forget. Nearly 1.2 million Americans – and nearly 8 million people around the world – died from COVID-19. The outbreak is ongoing, but people seem to have decided to live their lives – in large part thanks to the COVID vaccine that so many Americans and others around the world have taken.

My parents didn’t live to see COVID. My Mom died in November 2019, a few months before the world shut down. It would have been bewildering to her. 

Come to think of it, it’s still a little bewildering to us.

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22 – DO YOU KNOW THE WAY TO SAN JOSE?

The answer to Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s musical question, at least from New York, is to cross the George Washington Bridge, stay straight on Interstate 80 for about 2,900 miles, and then head south on I-680 to downtown San Jose.

That answer was not nearly as simple in 1954.

There was a federal highway system, created in the 1920s, that often followed the path of settler and Native American trails. But you slowed down in every town with a post office and general store until you got where you were going.

In 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower – who, as a young soldier went on the military’s landmark cross-country drive that lasted two months – was in the middle of developing a system of highways of at least two lanes in each direction. In most instances, the roads would have limited access – entrance and exit ramps; you couldn’t just get on from your driveway.

It took almost 40 years to complete the system. But when it was done, there was a grid of fast roads waffling the nation. Some of the roads – I-10, I-80 and I-90 – completely crossed the country east to west; others – I-5, I-35 and I-95 – cross it north to south.

One of the system’s original purposes was national defense. Highways would allow for faster troop movement in the event of an emergency.

But it made America more mobile. It contributed to a boom in driving because it was a lot easier to get in a car for an intercity trip than to put a family on a train or bus.

It was not an unmitigated positive. Many of the routes uprooted established communities, often those with large Black populations, turning healthy neighborhoods into areas of blight. It contributed to a car and truck culture that swallowed gasoline and churned out emissions.

And while some of us are good at finding our way somewhere (not that I’m bragging), many of us haven’t got a clue as to where we’re going.

When I was young, I loved road maps. They were given out for free at gas stations – I still have several of them from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. I would study them for hours and plot the day when I would go across the country by car – something my family did after I graduated from high school in summer 1972.

But road maps weren’t the most efficient way to figure out how to get somewhere. Especially during the period when the Interstate Highway System was being built. Often the maps would show broken red lines or even broken plain lines to indicate where highways were being built or planned. 

That’s nice, but you can’t take non-existent roads to San Jose or anywhere else.

In the 1970s, the Defense Department – those guys again – came up with an idea that helped solve the getting lost problem. Using satellites, the developers were able to track vehicles in motion – in space, in the air and on the ground.

The Global Positioning System was strictly a military property until 1983, when a Korean Air Lines passenger jet was shot down by the Soviet Union for straying into its territory. After that, President Ronald Reagan allowed limited use of GPS for civilian purposes, mostly airplane navigation. In 2000, President Bill Clinton directed the use of the system for whatever civilians wanted to do with it.

What civilians wanted to do with it was not get lost in a car. 

Instead of unfolding a map and trying to spot where you were going, you could now punch the address into your phone or, later, into the information screen on your dashboard and get turn-by-direction to Grandma’s house or a restaurant in Piscataway. The GPS also told you if there was traffic ahead and if you wanted to use an alternative to avoid it.

It doesn’t always work well – who among us hasn’t found ourselves on a dead end street that the GPS thought went through to the next road? 

But if you want to know the way to San Jose, you can find out fast, gas or charge your car, and get on whatever interstate you and Dionne Warwick need to use to get there.

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23 – “I JUST WANT TO SAY ONE WORD TO YOU… JUST ONE WORD… PLASTICS”

If Benjamin Braddock, the anti-hero of “The Graduate,” were to have a glimpse of 2024 from his parents’ 1968 pool party, he might have listened to his father’s friend after all.

The world is far more plastic that might have been imagined in 1954 or 1968. Plastic existed back then – there have been various forms of it since the 19th century. But as it became cheaper to make, it began to replace glass and metal, more expensive materials.

Glass, in particular, got phased out of a lot of products. As I mentioned in No. 25, many bottles and jars were converted to plastic, particularly soft drinks. But mayonnaise, salad dressing and a whole range of other products were made lighter by the use of plastic containers. Plastic replaced glass in some windows and picture frames.

One form of plastic, polystyrene foam, is better known by its trademark name, Styrofoam. It’s used for cheap coolers and was the insulation of choice for online shippers before the sealed plastic air bubbles came into use.

Another big chance came in the ubiquity of plastic shopping bags. A Swedish engineer developed the first ones in the 1960s – within 30 years, they were replacing paper bags for groceries, trash and anything else that needed carrying.

By the 21st century, a trip to the supermarket included as many as a dozen plastic bags, all containing plastic bottles and jars, paid for by ‘plastic,’ which became a slang term for credit cards.

Unfortunately, the plastic bags and bottles went from convenience to nuisance to crisis.

The problem is that plastic doesn’t biodegrade. It photodegrades, meaning it can take 1,000 years for the light and heat to wear down the bag into nothingness. And that disintegration can be toxic, meaning it’s not particularly suitable for landfills.

There is also the mess they make. On a winter train ride into New York, you can’t go very far without seeing unmitigated plastic bags flapping among the bare branches. And there are folks who make a living recovering bottles and other detritus from the sea, in part because fish and aquatic mammals die when they ingesting the plastics.

So plastic, while still used in so many more permanent items, is in its outcast days as a packaging material. Plastic bottles, like glass bottles of old, come with a deposit charge of 5-10 cents that you get back when you return them to the store or a collection site.

In many places, you either can’t get a plastic bag in a supermarket or you pay an extra 5 or 10 cents for it (for some reason, that doesn’t count the bags that hold produce or meat). Instead, the store wants you to bring your own bag and reuse it.

That bag is usually made out of plastic.

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24 – ALL SMILES

When I was born, my parents shopped for groceries at the A&P around the corner from their apartment in Flushing.

Down Northern Boulevard was a Sears catalog store, at which they could order what they couldn’t get otherwise, particularly tools.

On Main Street was F.W. Woolworth’s, where they went for things they wanted to get cheaply.

All three of those retailers were dominant institutions, with origins in the 19th century. None of them exist in anywhere near that form in 2024.

Instead, the world’s largest retailer now was doing business in 1954 as a single Woolworth’s-type five-and-dime in Bentonville, Arkansas.

It wasn’t until 1962 that Sam and Bud Walton opened the first Wal-Mart in Rogers, Arkansas. Not only did Wal-Mart overtake every other retailer – food or otherwise – in the world, it is now the largest company of any kind by revenue, taking in $611.3 billion in its most recent fiscal year. That’s $8 billion more than the Saudi oil company, Aramco.

Wal-Mart, with its smiley face logo, achieved success in part by staying away from places like New York. They built massive stores that carried everything anyone would need on cheap real estate away from center cities. The volume of these stores and paying low wages to work in them helped drive down prices.

The biggest retail challenger to Wal-Mart is online – and I’ve taken the liberty of asking “someone” else to write the next part.

Alexa, tell me the history of Amazon.

“Amazon was founded in Jeff Bezos’ garage in 1995. While the company originally only sold books, it’s become one of the world’s largest online retailers.” 

That’s an understatement.

Amazon is so ubiquitous that I’d wager you saw one of its gray trucks with the blue smile swirl at some point today. And its power is not limited to retailing.

Go on, Alexa.

“A couple of Amazon’s best (ED: Alexa’s word, not mine) innovations include the 2002 launch of Amazon Web Services and the 2007 launch of the Kindle. More recently, the 2010 creation of Amazon Studios offers Prime members award-winning original series and films.”

Not only has Amazon bigfooted other retailers, it has created products that it can sell and then pay itself for. That includes…

“In 2014, the company launched its first smart speaker, the Amazon Echo, featuring its Alexa assistant.”

The dominance of Wal-Mart and Amazon (you can throw in Target for the discerning) has given consumers experiences they couldn’t imagine in the checkout line at A&P. A new novel can be at your door a day after your order it. Groceries show up whenever you need them.

This is not, however, an unmitigated blessing. In fact, there are those of you who bemoan all of this.

And there’s an argument to be made. Amazon and Wal-Mart bear some responsibility for the glut of empty store space in this country. They have limited the idea of shopping in a town or village to boutique stores in touristy places. Their demands on their workforce has made being in their employ seem to be only for the desperate.

They seem like monoliths – the futuristic Buy n Large of the Pixar film “Wall-E” or Engulf & Devour of Mel Brooks’ 1976 comedy “Silent Movie.”

But 70 years ago, Sears and A&P and Woolworth seemed unbreakable, too. Now Sears has a few stores in California, Woolworth’s has morphed into Foot Locker and the only thing left of A&P is the Eight O’Clock Coffee brand that some company bought.

Hard to imagine for Wal-Mart and Amazon. But obviously not impossible.

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25 – SORTING THROUGH THE GARBAGE

In 1954, people just took out the trash.

They didn’t think about what was in it. They didn’t have multiple containers, each having a different purpose.

So my parents would need some explanation for the recycling containers that would show up on their front lawn in the 21st century.

Recycling in some form has been around for a very long time. Up until the 1960s, glass bottles for milk and soda/pop went back to the store for a penny or two. And people who endured World War II were well aware of scrap metal and rubber drives to provide materiel for the Allied forces.

But companies moved away from glass – it does have a nasty ability to shatter – and toward plastic, aluminum and cardboard. Deposits virtually disappeared and other forms of packaging showed up in landfills.

The environmental movement and the gas crises of the 1970s helped popularize recycling. The idea was not only to stop the clutter and pollution caused by all that packaging and, at the same time, save money because using recycled material for packaging was cheaper than using virgin material.

So people each week go through the process of sorting. Where I live, bottles and cans go in the green pail, paper stuff in the blue box.

And then the town recycling truck comes every Monday and dumps all of it into the same place.

If they’re going to sort it themselves at the collection facility, why the hell do they make us use separate containers?

Sorry for the tangent. 

Supposedly, recycling saves us money and is helping battle climate change and overcrowded landfills. Those are noble goals – I guess I just wonder why people didn’t think of this back when my parents took the glass bottles back to the store and thought what a pain in the neck that was.

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26 – THE MOST TRUSTED NAME IN NEWS

(NOTE: Admittedly, I’m biased about this. But at least I didn’t make it No. 1)

The evolution of television news as a window to the world was still in its early stages in 1954.

Both CBS and NBC carried network newscasts that were 15 minutes long, having done so since the late 1940s. The anchor for CBS was Douglas Edwards; for NBC’s “Camel News Caravan,” it was John Cameron Swayze, who puffed away on Camels.

But 1954 was a very important year in TV news.

Just four days after I was born, Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy finally responded to Edward R. Murrow’s “See It Now” March 9 broadcast highly critical of his brutal tactics. 

McCarthy, predictably, tried to turn fire on Murrow, alleging he was tied to communists. He also gave a long-winded statement about the evil of communism without once specifically rebutting any of the points Murrow made.

Murrow’s efforts were a factor in the taking down of McCarthy. They showed the power TV news had on determining the national agenda.

Network newscasts expanded to 30 minutes in the early 1960s and created the image of the powerful anchorman: Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on NBC, Howard K. Smith and Frank Reynolds on ABC, and, of course, Walter Cronkite on CBS.

TV began to show events live or within minutes of their occurrence. More remarkable than Cronkite’s emotional delivery of the news that President Kennedy was assassinated was actually watching his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, get shot live at a Dallas police station.

But the idea of 24-hour news seemed unworkable. News wasn’t a moneymaker for the networks and it was expensive to produce.

Two things happened to change that.

First, technology made instant news possible. Cameras that were more mobile and communications satellites that allowed almost instantaneous broadcast from anywhere in the world. 

And second was Ted Turner.

The billboard magnate took advantage of the breakthroughs in technology and the fact that Georgia was a non-union state to first create the WTBS SuperStation, a local operation that was broadcast by cable across the nation.

In 1980, he started Cable News Network, the first all-news TV network, in Atlanta. After some initial struggles – he once sold bumper stickers for $5 to help support the network – CNN became a go-to for breaking news. The Challenger explosion in 1986, the upheaval in China Tiananmen Square in 1989 and the start of the Persian Gulf War in 1990 all embellished the network’s reputation.

The first effort to challenge CNN, Satellite News Network, failed in the early 1980s. However,  MSNBC and Fox News, both launched in 1996, cut into CNN’s dominance. Both reflected the nation’s growing political polarization, MSNBC on the left, Fox on the right.

But CNN remains the place people turn when some sudden event breaks anywhere in the world. Wars, natural disasters, political upheaval. The network’s reputation – enhanced by some of the bravest and hardest-working people in the history of journalism – brings people back in moments of crisis.

I worked at CNN for 16 years and, even though I’ve been away for almost a decade, I still call it the home team. It’s an idea that was hard to imagine in 1954, but very much on point with the mission that Murrow exemplified 70 years ago.

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27 – WHO NEEDS THE 3Rs?

“School Days” is one of those old songs that everybody seems to know – or at least they know the first few lines. Particularly this part:

“Reading and ‘riting and ‘rithmetic. Taught to the tune of a hick’ry stick.”

Also known as the 3Rs, even though only one of the words actually starts with an R. (NOTE: We addressed the second part of the line in No. 40) Those three subjects have been considered elemental to education for as long as people remember. 

They’re also three subjects that the last 70 years have tried to render obsolete.

Perhaps math is the one that has suffered the most.

As someone who enjoys math more than most people, I loved playing with adding machines at my father’s tire store in the early 1960s. I thought the adding machine was an impressive piece of technology.

But, in 1974, my parents bought me one of the first Texas Instruments calculators. It ran on batteries and was a wonder. And, since I’ve used it on the job, it has corrected vote totals in two elections – a school board race in Evanston and a congressional contest in Michigan.

Calculators are everywhere. I really don’t know how many I have, not to mention the apps on my phone. And when it comes to doing your taxes, do you trust your math skills or the solar-powered calculator you got as a tchotchke at a home fair? Kids even use calculators on tests, including standardized ones.

Sure, you have to know whether you need to use the add or subtract or multiply or divide functions. But that’s it.

Writing was a lot of people’s least favorite subject in school. I never seemed to be able to satisfy either a teacher or my Mom with my penmanship.

Now, I don’t care. My writing is illegible. If I want to jot something down, I can type on any number of devices. 

And there is no way the signature you create on one of those supermarket checkout screens resembles what you would sign with a pen. I’ve stopped trying – a couple of swirly lines seem to do the job.

Reading is the most persistent R. After all, that’s what you’re doing right now.

Except if you’ve got a program that converts text to sound. Then some robotic voice is reading this to you. I’m guessing it doesn’t sound like me, but that’s not the point.

You also don’t have to know how to read to read a book. (that’s not a typo!)

The first audiobooks were developed to help the visually impaired soon after record players became widespread. But the selections were limited – usually somebody, often a service group, read a book after it was published.

When cassettes became popular in the 1970s, publishers got the idea of recording a book at the same time the hardcover was released. Then books would show up on CDs and now they’re available as digital files for play in your car, on an airplane or anywhere else you can think of.

I doubt schools will ever stop teaching the 3Rs. But do you need to know them? Hmm.

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28 – BABY, IT’S COLD INSIDE

Most Americans did not have air conditioning in their home in 1954. Most Americans do now.

The adoption of home air conditioning was beginning in the 1950s. The first domestic units, the kind that we think of as fitting in a window, were developed in the 1930s. Their cost was prohibitive – only a few really wealthy folks even considered getting one. 

If you wanted to cool off, you could go to the movies – theaters prominently advertised the fact that they had cooling systems inside.

But the industry worked hard to drive those costs down. By the late 1940s, air conditioning was becoming more affordable.

My parents did not have any kind of air conditioner until the 1980s. Their home, built in the 1920s, was not well-equipped for the electricity drain of the big AC units – and that was the case with a lot of older homes.

But newer homes and apartments began to be “fitted” for AC. I remember seeing an apartment building going up across the street from the house apartment we rented in Queens and wondering what those gray rectangles below some windows were for. 

Soon we knew. Names like Carrier, Friedrich and Emerson would show up on those boxes indicating that AC units of those brands were either in there or about to be. For older buildings and those that weren’t being outfitted for AC, window air conditioners became smaller and more portable. 

And homes began including something even better: central air conditioning. It requires a couple of big power-eating units and a lot of ducts, but it is a lifesaver – especially in warmer parts of the country such as in the South.

In 2022, the latest data available from the Department of Energy, 87% of American homes now have some form of air conditioning. And just about every car sold in the nation has AC as standard equipment – a big change from when everyone rolled the windows down and hoped for a breeze.

The concern isn’t so much cooling people off as in not warming the planet any further. 

There have been several regulations regarding chemicals used in air conditioning. Most prominently, every nation in the world banned chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, because of how incredibly proficient at destroying ozone in the atmosphere.

These arguments would have seemed strange to a generation that found keeping cool a struggle. The problem of keeping the planet cool got punted to those of us in the 21st century.

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29 – $6 FOR A CUP OF COFFEE!

It wasn’t that Starbucks invented expensive cups of coffee – there have been coffee shops and cafes around the world for well over a century.

But, in 1954, you couldn’t get an expensive cup of coffee on every street in midtown Manhattan, every strip mall in Southern California or every other town everywhere else.

When you think about it, what Starbucks did is pretty remarkable.

Before it showed up, you picked up a cup of coffee at the place where you got breakfast – unless you made breakfast at home. If you brought coffee into work, it was from a cart on the street or a Thermos from home. You paid $1 tops.

And it was always coffee. Not dark roast or light roast or Sumatra or cappuccino with foam.

It also came in small, medium and large.

Starbucks made people drink lattes that cost $6 each. It mixed in expresso shots or vanilla syrup. It decorated the foam at the top of the cup. It fresh ground the beans in the store. It started the autumn pumpkin spice craze. And it made you use some contrived Italian name to order it. If you can get out of there without spending $10, consider yourself lucky.

When I worked at CNN’s New York headquarters in Columbus Circle, there was a Starbucks across from the employee entrance on W. 58th Street. There was one on the other side of the Time Warner Center complex on the corner of W. 60th and Broadway. There was other on the next block over at Ninth Avenue and W. 59th Street.

And, in case you missed any of them, there was a Starbucks-franchised coffee stand outside the building’s 10th floor cafeteria.

People would come into the office after stopping for a frappuccino grande or a venti Americano. The cup was ubiquitous, a sign that the drinker was above that sludge in the break room.

Soon, little coffee stands tried to up their game, creating many of the same drinks that drew people to Starbucks. And coffee-and-pastry places sprang up to challenge: Paris Baguette, The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, Blue Bottle, Peet’s. 

And, of course, the other caffeine-and-sugar fixture of our times: Dunkin’. They’ve been around forever, but mainly for the doughnuts – oops, donuts. The quality of the pastry has declined over the years as the emphasis fell on drinks.

I do not know if my father ever went to a Starbucks. My mother didn’t drink coffee, but I got her hooked on the chai tea latte. Something she loved, but never had, until there were Starbucks even in her hometown.

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