Shaking the Hand of History
Last
Thursday, after a celebration of his 102nd
birthday, I had the opportunity to shake the hand of longtime Rotarian and
attorney, Eldon Sloan. With that simple gesture, came an appreciation of both
the time and of the events which he has witnessed first hand.
I’ve
always had a tremendous appreciation for history and the events that define our
country. The last 102 years have encompassed much of what we know as the
American Century - The World Wars, Great Depression, Industrial Revolution and
the beginning of the Information Age. He was born three years before the
Titanic sank, before World War I, when William Howard Taft was President. He
went to college during the Roaring
Twenties
and begin his law career in the midst of the Great Depression. He has lived his
live through events I only know by a photograph or a headline.
As
time marches on, the stories and the history of what people can tell us of this
time will slip away. I’ve always taken the time to listen to the stories told
by those much older than myself. The richness of the words spoken and the
voices are far more important and memorable than words printed in a history book
years later. I often asked my grandparents about their childhood and their
lives. What they told me taught me much about who they became years
later.
Although
my thirty-nine years are short in comparison to a centenarian,
I believe that each day that I have lived my life, I have been rewarded with
tremendous blessings and I’ve tried to take what I’ve learned from one day and
apply to the next. I hope that one day, many years from now, I’ll have a young
person come up and ask about life in the late Twentieth Century and I’ll be able
to tell them of my experiences of a hundred years ago.
Photo by Ann Palmer