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Don't look it up, Google it
(by Ed Flynn - January 02, 2008)
I know I write a lot about “the good old days,” but the truth is, of course, that they weren’t necessarily always that good and, for that matter, many things today are both better and easier. Consider, the search for knowledge.
Time was when the hunt for an obscure fact – Who were the Hunzas? How high is Everest? When was the first night baseball game played? – required a collection of reference books at home including an almanac, atlas, thesaurus, and set of encyclopedias. If that failed to yield the allusive answer, you’d have to visit the library where an understanding of the Dewey decimal system came in handy.
Today, it’s simple; that is, if you’re computer literate. All you’ve got to do is “Google” it, a process that has become so common that the word itself is now included as a verb in most new dictionaries. It simply involves accessing a function known as “Google” and typing in the word or phrase you’re trying to research. In an instant, Google comes up with sources of information. For example, if you typed in “USARS Duluth,” the name of one of the ships I served on in World War II, you’d get a complete copy of the article I wrote for the Coast Guard’s Historians Office. In fact, if you’re patient enough because there are a lot of Ed Flynn’s in this world, you can even put my name in and access back copies of my columns. You might even try “googling” your own name. A lot of people are doing it these days and are surprised by the results.
How they got all that information in there is beyond me. I remember our first set of encyclopedias and it took up a whole shelf in our bookcase. I bought it back in the 1950s, not too long after the end of World War II. We had just moved into our first home. It was in River Edge, a
Cape Cod with a breezeway and an attached garage. It cost $13,600. After putting $500 down on a G.I. mortgage all we had left was the money in our pocket and expectations of my next paycheck. We didn’t even have a savings account. I was making about $75 a week and we needed just about everything a young family could need and couldn’t afford when this salesman knocked on our door. They don’t make salesman like this guy anymore except maybe for those pitchmen selling sponges and knives on TV.
As I recall, neither of our daughters had as yet started kindergarten but he seemed aghast when I confessed that we didn’t have a set of encyclopedias in the house in case they had some questions about the outside world. He asked me what I did for a living and when I told him I was a newspaperman he could hardly contain his joy.
“A reporter!,” he enthused. “That’s great.” Turned out that the publishers had authorized him to make a special offer to any distinguished person he came across in each neighborhood; you know, someone whose name he could use as a reference when he called on other people.
Made sense to me. After all, I could just hear him going to my neighbors and saying, “You know that distinguished reporter who lives on the block? Well, he bought a set for his daughters because people like him know how important it is to provide the proper educational tools for their children.”
I’ve always been a sucker for a con job so naturally I asked him to point to the dotted line. I can’t remember what the set cost – more, I’m sure, than we could really afford – but we paid for it on time and each year we received a new year book to stand after the W to Z volume on the shelf; 1955, 1956, 1957 and so on. Eventually, of course, the year books stopped coming.
Somewhere along the line we got rid of that by then outdated set but to be honest about it, I occasionally miss it. All those volumes standing shoulder to shoulder on our library shelf made an impressive prop, sort of like the books in a lawyer’s office. They give you the feeling that even if the guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about at least he can look it up.
That’s why, despite all that finger-tip knowledge available on my computer, I make sure that my bookshelves are always crammed with impressive titles; the complete works of Shakespeare, Will Durant’s “Story of Civilization,” Carl Sandberg’s “Lincoln.” Believe it or not, every once in awhile I even take one of those books down from the shelf and settle down with it in my reclining chair.
The computer will never replace a good book. And, besides, if anyone drops by and browses through my personal library I want to be sure they realize it belongs to a distinguished person.
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