Meditations
from Florida
The 1900s
Going, going... almost gone! (I)
The Twentieth Century:
my father's stories about my opa and
oma in Soerabaja at the turn of the
century.
They used to take an early-evening
ride in a babalokah - a horse and car
riage that was given the name of the
Chinese entrepreneur who owned
them. It took them around Kajoon on
the outskirts of town, for a breath of
fresh air. Such a ride was called poeter
Kajoon, going around Kajoon.
Weddings and funerals, too, used a
horse and carriage, and as a boy my
father liked to hang around the stables
of a funeral business in the neighbor
hood. According to him the horses
were not fed before a funeral so that
they were somewhat weak and there
fore easier to handle. The horse and
carriage by then had been around for a
long, long time.
Then came the iron horse, the auto
mobile. One of them was the Ford.
Henry Ford might not have invented
the automobile, but he surely was the
driving force behind making it the
most popular mode of transportation.
It was thanks to him and his idea in
the early 1900s that a moving line was
introduced in his factory,
the assembly line.-
It brought the job to
the worker, a line
in constant mo
tion, timed just
right, so that people
only had to reach
and do one certain
Does the 21 st century start with the
year 2000 or the year 2001
An important ques
tion that made me
run to the books to
make sure, since I
was taught that a cen
tury starts with 01,
but lots of people say
it starts with 00! What
did I find in the Conci
se Oxford Dictionary of
Current English, ninth
editions, 1995, page 213?
I quote: 'Strictly speaking,
since the first century ran
from the year 1 -100, the first
year of a given century
should be that ending in 01
However, in popular use this
has been moved back a year,
and so the twenty-first cen
tury will commonly be regar
ded as running from 2000-2099.'
Straight from the horse's mouth,
and we'll take it from there.
The Twentieth Century, often cal
led 'the American century', was (is)
a fast-moving century, because of
the many inventions during this pe
riod that not only benefitted the U.S.,
but also the rest of the world. In cele
bration of this century the U.S. Postal
Service has launched a 150-stamp pro
gram, ten sheets of fifteen stamps each
for every decade of the century.
Starting with the 1900s they deal with
people, the arts, music, science, tech
nology, lifestyles, etcetera, in short,
they deal with just about every topic
that depicts a milestone in this century.
So the 1900s is where
we begin.
Many of us had not
been born then, but we
heard the stories from
our parents, and years
later we see the results
of inventions that
changed the way life
was lived. I remember
Tekst: Juul Lentze
|3V#H PPI
