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Last year I was doing some research that led me to discover this feat had been accomplished, so last night I logged on to do some more. This time for the Chronicles. I wanted to see what Labor Day Weekend was like in Red Dirt country fifty years ago.
What I found was a slice of life that made me laugh, frown, send a clipping to my colleague at OSU and think about my friends who are politically active. I experienced quite an array of emotions for the hour I perused the September 1st, 2nd and 3rd issues of the paper. Then I tried to decide how I would put all that information into a small Friday morning blog posting.
The decision I arrived at was to provide you bullet points of what stood out to me, provide you with a few visuals, then encourage you to try this type of exercise on your own if you enjoyed it. Here we go…
And, Governor Edmondson was trying his best to educate the state about several legislative measures going to a vote of the people very soon.
So I wonder…what has changed? The Oklahoma culture is still here: Football season, Labor Day cookouts (standard across our country), the local and county fairs, community, politics and the news.
It seems that most of what has changed, besides the fashion, are socio-political factors. There isn’t a “Red” scare any more…but there are others, right? Are people of various skin colors still being threatened with persecution and derogatory name calling?
Okay. Perhaps not all that much has changed.
However, the technology to retrieve this information is a huge difference. People will cook with technology that wasn’t invented in 1960. The football games will have real-time updates on the internet and entertain the crowd with multimillion dollar big screen “wow factors.” Brides-to-be will be utilizing event management software by an account set up online within their wedding planner’s website. People will take digital photographs of their fair entries and send them to their family around the country.
There are differences. Perhaps a bit of the socio-political paranoia is gone…maybe.
But there sure are similarities as well.