December 12, 2009

I grew up in Hungary. My childhood spanned before and after World War II. I am not dating myself but let's say I was born in the previous century. That's good enough.

I saw many changes in life as well as politically as economically and also technologically. I want to say a few things about the last one. The first two are not very interesting with the Berlin Wall and other stuff.

In my early days automobiles were not very popular in Hungary. We had some trucks and some private cars but it was poor fraction of what's there today.

I remember when the garbage collector came down our street in Budapest he came with a huge steel container mounted on four wheels and drawn by two strong horses.

Both the garbage collector and the horses were City employees. The man was standing on a plank on the side of the container and the building supers were supposed to hand up their garbage containers and the man emptied them.

This process repeated at every apartment house. The horses were so well trained that at a whistle command they moved up to the the next building and stopped. This was the early form of cruise control.

Once the appointed route was finished they headed out to the garbage dump. These horses knew the way better than anybody. That was the early version of GPS.

Now I know why they had two horses. One was the cruise control, the other the GPS.

I also remember when people were trying to start trucks or cars one person went to the front of the vehicle with a long crank rod and cranked the motor until it started. It was usually the junior employee or the passenger in the vehicle.

Automatic starters were unknown back then or were a rarity.

Policemen patrolled the streets on foot. The elite ones in the cities or the ones in the countryside got bicycles. But then when a policeman said stop to someone nobody had the galls to run away. Back then they were respected.

When I was 14 years old my Father bought me a bicycle. I was elated. I thought I had the world by the b...s. The City was mine. There was no faraway corner of the City I couldn't get to. My cousin and I were discovering parts of the City we never knew existed. We were cool!

Public transportation were electric streetcars, buses and electric trolley buses. Oh, and we also had a subway that was about two miles long.

But streetcars were the most popular forms of transportation. Mainly because the buses cost more at that time. Now they all have the same fare.

Anyway, the longer streetcars had three cars. Each car had a conductor/ticket collector. He had a large leather bag on his shoulders and he walked up and down the car checking and selling the tickets and punching them with his ticket puncher.

Years later they converted to the pre-purchased tickets and now they only have inspectors checking on freeloaders.

When my Mother was born airplanes did not exist. She had never flown in her life until she came out to the US to visit me. But then, She ventured on a real long trans Atlantic flight. She came to New York twice and she loved flying. I think the first time She came it was propeller plane but later She flew on jet also.

The apartment I grew up in had no central heat and no hot water. We had a large fireplace in each of our rooms and in the bathroom we had a huge water tank were my parents heated water once a week. During the week I washed myself in cold water and that was no fun. But I got used to it.

In the rooms the fireplaces were always the social centers. In wintertime we always sat around them. It was always cosy and comfortable.

Now, if we have no hot water and central heat we scream. We are so used to our comforts that anything missing we are upset.

We get used to the good things, we take everything for granted and at the same time totally forget where we came from.

I remember years ago I was in Hungary to visit my Mother. I happened to be in a hotel's coffee shop. This older American tourist woman comes in and asks for hot chocolate. The guy behind the counter spoke fairly good English but couldn't understand what the woman wanted. He knew I spoke English so he asked me to explain the hot chocolate to him.

He told the woman they had hot cocoa but no chocolate. She became very indignant and insisted that she wanted hot chocolate and no hot cocoa.

Well, she didn't get any of it at the end but she did become the real Ugly American at that time.

This was a trip down memory lane. The older a person gets the more nostalgic he gets. It's typical of old age that people remember more of things from the past than current events.

That means I will always remember the old garbage collection Hungarian style.