At the time I was born, my parents had not flown on an airplane.

So when my father flew for the first time, from LaGuardia in New York to Cleveland Hopkins in 1962, one of the first questions we asked him was “What were the stewardesses like?”

It seems like a weird question in 2024. If only because nobody is called a “stewardess” anymore.

When airlines tried to build their business in the years after World War II, they believed the fastest way into the wallets of their potential customers – most of whom were male – was to appeal to their libidos.

That meant hiring young women who fit a stereotype of beautiful and dressing them in outfits generally not suited for the kind of work they were doing, Often, the women had to wear heels on long flights while handing out trays of food.

The advertising of the era would make most of the younger women I know cringe in horror. One airline, National, had a campaign that depicted stewardesses as the vessels on which they were flying. “I’m Cindy,” said one young woman. “Fly me to Miami, Tampa, Orlando, all over Florida.” Another, Southwest, briefly put its attendants in the hot pants that were the craze of the early ‘70s.

The women couldn’t be married. They couldn’t gain weight. Movies suggested the women had promiscuous private lives. When they were in their early 30s, they were done.

The raising of awareness in the late 60s put an end to this. Lawsuits successfully killed marriage, age and racial discrimination. And men took on the job in increasing numbers.

Now the term is flight attendant, which seems more appropriate, because it’s a tough job. Helping elderly and disabled passengers. Coping with crying babies of all ages.

There are still some vestiges of the old-style glamorous stewardesses on international carriers. But, fortunately, the sexualization of flight attendants seems to have gone the way of actually serving food on a flight.

My mother loved trivia. That might be obvious to anyone who knows how obsessed I am with it.

But in 1954, when I was born, trivia wasn’t a particularly big deal.

Yes, there were quiz shows – some of which were rigged to give the answers to contestants. But there weren’t a lot of outlets for trivia.

For one thing, there wasn’t as much of it. The amount of trivial content exploded with the advent of television, the proliferation of entertainment options and the expansion of professional sports.

Also booming was the population. The biggest generation in history had a shared past in common and seemed very interested in what about it they remembered.

Trivia as a source of game-playing and entertainment didn’t really take hold until the 1960s, when college students realized there were interesting – to trivialists – questions to be asked about old TV shows and baseball players.

One of the first manifestations of the trivia boom was “Jeopardy!,” which debuted in 1964. It was a daytime TV show that allowed trivia experts to show off their knowledge by making them come up with the questions for the answers given.

About 20 years later, Trivial Pursuit made trivia an obsession. The board game was once so popular that copies sold for $40 apiece and were really hard to come by.

In the 21st century, trivia is a social phenomenon. A few years back, my kids and I invaded a Rockland brewpub and wiped out the reigning champs. My mother heartily approved.

By the way, it’s Ouagadougou.

I know that my mother didn’t see a taco until 1965, when she and I each had one at the New Mexico pavilion of the New York World’s Fair.

So to tell her in 1954 that tacos would be among the most popular foods in America in 2024 might have drawn a blank expression and the question “What’s a taco?”

Of course, tacos were hardly new to the Southwest. In Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California, Mexican immigrants had brought their food to the United States.

But in the 1950s, when New Yorkers thought about Hispanic immigrants, they thought about Puerto Rico. It’s a big point in “West Side Story.” And not a lot of Puerto Rican dishes spread beyond certain neighborhoods in the city.

So tacos and other Mexican-type food were slow to come east. Taco Bell, which is to Mexican food as Pizza Hut is to Italian food – that is, not really – didn’t open its first location east of the Mississippi until the late 1960s.

Tacos became popular for several reasons. One is that as more people come to the U.S. from Latin America, the food of the region – Mexican as well as from other nations – has become more popular. Tortillas and salsa take up considerable portions of a Safeway’s aisles.

Another is that they’re amazingly good. Even at Taco Bell.

Among the people who loved tacos was my mother. She made them for the first time in the late 1960s and loved them all the rest of her life.

“The Star-Spangled Banner” had been the national anthem of the United States for only 23 years on the day I was born.

Before 1931, there was no national anthem. “America the Beautiful” and “Hail, Columbia” were performed as anthems throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.

But Herbert Hoover, whose presidency was a general disaster, signed the legislation that made Francis Scott Key’s ode to the Battle of Fort McHenry the representative song of the nation.

The song is notoriously hard to sing (although, bragging here, my daughter knocked it out of the park in the fourth grade). And, around the time I was born, it was performed in a very straightforward way.

Usually, it was some sort of band or orchestra that performed it. Occasionally, there was a singer, a pop or opera star who sang the words as though they were afraid of messing it up.

Then came the fifth game of the 1968 World Series.

Recruited for performing the anthem that day was Jose Feliciano, a folk singer and guitarist. He sat on a stool and played the song in a different key, changing the inflections of the tune from the traditional melody.

.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQkY2UFBUb4

It was the Vietnam War era and baseball crowds – especially the ones who attended World Series games in Detroit – didn’t particularly care for Feliciano’s rendition. The blowback was tremendous – my father was among those annoyed about the performance. I, age 14, thought it was cool.

Feliciano single-handedly changed the way the anthem is performed. Famously soulful and emotional versions of the song came from Marvin Gaye, Whitney Houston and Aretha Franklin.

The anthem is played before every Met game I see at Citi Field. And in this day and age, singers seem to compete for the most stirring and hip way of performing it. If he, she or they strike a chord with the crowd, it’s a powerful minute-plus.

I think it would have surprised my parents to tell them that in 1954, as the anthem played on TV as a station’s broadcasting day ended.

When was the last time you made a pitcher of orange juice from a tube of frozen mush?

If that sounds strange to you, consider this: Around the time I was born, there were generally two ways people were able to drink orange juice in the morning. 

One was to use a manual squeezer and extract the juice from an actual orange. Some people loved it, but a lot of people were turned off by the pulp that inevitably got into the juice.

The other way was to go to the freezer aisle of a store – there was only one back then – and buy a tubular can of orange juice concentrate. You would dump the frozen juice into a pitcher, fill the can with water from the sink three or four times, then stir it. You’d put the pitcher in the refrigerator and it would last as long as you needed it.

Frozen orange juice was relatively new when I was born. It came into grocery stores just after the end of World War II (which only ended nine years before I was born) and soared in popularity after Bing Crosby promoted the most prominent brand, Minute Maid, on his nationwide radio program.

So if you told my parents that their grandkids would have no idea what frozen orange juice is, they’d be surprised. I wouldn’t say shocked – again, frozen OJ wasn’t that old.

What did in the idea of frozen orange juice concentrate is, well, actual orange juice.

At about the time I was born, the idea of keeping fresh orange juice cold was just taking hold. The biggest company involved was Tropicana, which produced juice in Florida and shipped it to lucrative markets in the Northeast. 

As easy as it was to make a pitcher from frozen mush, it was a lot easier to pour something from a carton.

And Tropicana had one other advantage: No pulp. They added it relatively recently for those people (Ed: nuts) who really want it.

It’s my understanding that there was great joy in my family when I was born.

But with that joy – as you know if you’ve experienced parenthood – comes anxiety. How will I keep my baby safe?

In 1954, one of the biggest fears was that your child might contract polio – the disease that killed more children than any other. Those people it didn’t kill suffered paralysis, among them President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who contracted it as an adult. 

Polio fostered one of the biggest medical charities, the March of Dimes, which was much more prominent in the 1950s than it is now.

But to tell my parents on the day I was born that they needn’t worry would have been a gross understatement. Not only was polio neutralized, it was practically obliterated from the planet.

The reason first became known to the world a year after my birth. In April 1955, Dr. Jonas Salk, a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, announced a vaccine to prevent polio. Six years later, Dr. Albert Sabin developed an oral vaccine that is still in use today.

Much to my discomfort, my parents weren’t waiting around for an oral vaccine. I got the needles. Three of them. And I was not a particularly good shot taker. 

In the second grade, my entire class got the oral vaccine. Except me. I already had the shots, so I didn’t need the sugar cube that carried the vaccine. I apparently complained about this and was given a subsequent dose that may or may not have been a placebo.

Today’s infants get their polio “shot” as part of a combination vaccination to combat diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough or pertussis, and hepatitis B. 

All diseases most parents don’t even think about in 2024.

Unless they’re idiots who’ve decided vaccines are a hoax.

In the first months after he was born in 1994, my son wouldn’t sleep at night. He would bawl until you held him and then cry again if you dared try to put him down.

When I was on sit-up-with-the-baby duty, I took for granted that I could occupy myself sitting there by watching TV – in particular, the rebroadcast of that night’s installment of Ken Burns’ “Baseball” series on the local PBS station.

Here’s the thing: My son inherited his inability to rest at night from his father. And unlike me, my Mom had nothing to keep her company.

That’s because TV stations – and there were only seven of them on the VHS band in New York in 1954 – signed off the air at or soon after midnight.

They played a filmed recording of the National Anthem, and then put on patterns of bars and circles called a test pattern with a ringing sound in the background. The patterns were crafted by individual stations – some of them used a template with a Native American in a headdress. 

At 5:30 or 6 a.m., the stations would take off the pattern, play the National Anthem again, mention that they carried the Seal of Good Practice from the National Association of Broadcasters, show some local minister delivering a sermon, and then do some kind of start-of-day programming.

Unfortunately, my Mom is no longer around to tell me what she actually did while trying to get me to sleep the first two years of my life. But as the broadcasting day lengthened over time, she spent quite a bit of time staying up and watching old movies.

The CBS station in New York pushed the limits, at one point only being off the air for about a half-hour a day. By the late 1970s, local TV stations were on all night. 

Now, of course, it’s not just the local stations that are on all night. So is every cable channel – although many of them run infomercials to fill those late hours. And you can stream stuff.

My mother could only dream of that as her son refused to go to Dreamland. 

I returned to the hospital nearly seven and a-half years after my birth to have surgery.

My parents wouldn’t have been surprised about that. They actually would have wondered why it happened so late in my life.

What would have surprised them is that their grandchildren have no idea what a tonsillectomy is.

But a majority of children when I qualified as such underwent the procedure. It was usually performed when kids were around 4 or 5, although it wasn’t unheard of for toddlers to have it.

The rationale was that the tonsils becoming inflamed caused kids to get way too many sore throats. And even though most mothers didn’t go to jobs and were already home, taking care of a sick child isn’t usually fun.

So doctors were quick to order the tonsils removed.

I got upset because most of my classmates already had the operation, usually in kindergarten or first grade. I was already in second grade and the tonsils were still there. 

Why upset? There were two things about tonsillectomies that recommended them to 7-1/2-year-olds.

One was that I was going to miss at least a week of school. By the last week of September, any desire to get back to school fades into the drudgery of day-to-day classwork. 

The other was the understanding that having the operation would entitle the victim, er, patient to all the ice cream he or she wanted. 

What they didn’t tell kids was how godawful they felt after the operation. Who the hell wants ice cream when your throat hurts like it never has or will again?

Eventually, doctors realized that maybe removing the tonsils wasn’t a great idea. Surgery is always a risk. And, for little kids, the pain of the procedure coupled with not having your parents around is pretty traumatic; I think the horrible memory of that sleepless night in the hospital – and being a 7-1/2-year-old in a ward with 4 year olds and an infant – stayed with me a long time.

Today, tonsillectomies are performed rarely and only if there’s a really good medical reason. Given the hellish week my operation provided them, my parents would probably wish that doctors came to their senses about 20 years earlier.

I went home from the hospital six days after I was born.

No, parents of 2024, there was nothing wrong with me or my mother.

In 1954, mother and child spent something approaching a week in the hospital. The idea was to make sure the baby was fine and that the mother had recovered sufficiently to care for her newborn.

So I can only imagine the look on my parents’ face when I told them…

— Their grandson went home less than 48 hours after he was born. We didn’t think anything of it, mainly because the hospital considered it staying an extra day.

— When I taught journalism at a state university a few years ago, one of my students showed up at class two days after she delivered her son. Yes, she was a really good student. But, two days?

— A woman who worked in my office came in the day after delivery in order to finish up some stuff she was doing before starting maternity leave.

It’s pretty standard that mothers and children go home as soon as they can. Part of it is the exorbitant cost of hospitalization. Part of it might be that doctors believe women recover better in their own home.

I don’t know how those of you who have delivered children feel about the amount of time you and the kid(s) spent in the hospital. I only know my Mom would have shuttered if she knew she was going home on day two or three.

I’m 70 days from the 70th anniversary of my arrival.

As I reach the milestone, the thing that strikes me is how much different life is now. Of course, things are going to change over the course of any 70-year span. But it’s still wondrous – things and concepts we accepted as never-ending end, and things and concepts we never imagined show up.

So in the 70 days leading up to my birthday, I’m going to offer some thoughts on this idea: What things would have shocked my parents, sitting in a room at Flushing Hospital after my birth, about the world in which their soon-to-be septuagenerian son lives.

—

Let’s not leave the guiding image of this endeavor: a multibed hospital room on an upper floor of Flushing Hospital. It’s an April afternoon and my parents are sitting there with who would turn out to be the first of their four children.

My mother has seen me since Dr. Joseph Micelotta of Corona held me up to her moments after my birth.

My father, on the other hand, was not in the room. He didn’t see me until well after I had been examined, cleaned up and dressed (in a blanket) for the first time.

In 1954, that was the norm. Fathers didn’t attend the birth of their children. They were either in a waiting room, pacing as they awaited news about their growing family, or off the premises all together, awaiting a phone call to tell them to come on over and see their son or daughter.

Sometime between 1954 and 1991, when my daughter was born, the norm changed.

Women, pretty much alone in the final hours of the worst pain humans normally endure, began pushing to have their spouses or other partners in the delivery room. They wanted to either share the experience with someone they loved or, in some cases I’ve heard, curse out the guy responsible for the suffering.

Men wanted to support their partners. The way I looked at it, the one – soon to be two – I loved most in the world were in pain and peril. And even though I wasn’t sure what I could possibly do to help, I wanted to be there to try.

I took the Lamaze classes with the intensity of studying for a final exam in college. We practiced at home. And then, when I was in the room, I held my wife as she kicked against an elderly nurse in a final successful effort to push out the baby and avoid a C-section to get her.

I saw our daughter the second she arrived. I held her with my wife within a minute. I choked up as I realized how much someone must love me to endure what she did to produce our baby.

The next day, my father and mother came up to see the baby. At dinner, I told him how wonderful it was to be in the delivery room. He had a hard time grasping it, saying he could never do it and flinching as if I had wanted him to see something gross.

I said to him that it was surprising he felt that way. He was so protective of the people he loved, I would think he’d want to do what he could for them at such a critical moment.

For the most part, things have changed for the better since 1954. That’s definitely true in this case. Not only can fathers watch their children be born, but so can women who are married to the childbearer, or any partner mutually involved in the baby’s life. 

Not that it changes the feeling. In my office is a note my father wrote to my mother to go with the flowers he gave her when he came to the hospital: “I am a lucky man today. Because I have a wife like you and a baby boy.”