Does it matter if today’s kids can’t dial a rotary phone or read a mechanical clock?

By John Toth

The Bulletin

I saw a video on YouTube recently in which a Baby Boomer about my age showed teenagers a rotary dial phone, and asked them to figure out how to use it.

The kids, put on the spot, had no idea what to do with it. They turned it all around and upside down, trying to figure out how it works - better yet, how it used to work.

The comments along with the video were telling. “In my days, we wrote in cursive and solved math problems the long way, on paper. They don’t teach kids these skills anymore.”

And, “Life was much slower and better back in those days.” “They can’t even read a mechanical clock.”

I think most kids today can tell time on a mechanical clock. It’s not that hard. And they actually still teach math in schools. Cursive writing still has its place in today’s world. I do it myself daily. It’s faster than printing out each letter.

I have made a living as a journalist and writer, which required when I was reporting for daily newspapers that I take notes - fast notes. That meant that I either had to learn longhand or write very fast in cursive. I never learned longhand.

When I was in pre-engineering in high school, we used a slide rule. That’s an analog mechanical calculator, primarily used by engineers, scientists and students from the late 19th century until the 1970s.

Two years after I started high school, Texas Instruments came out with a commercial slide-rule calculator, the SR-10. We forked over whatever it cost to buy it, and we put the slide rule in the closet.

Why would kids today have to know how to use a rotary dial phone? They belong in museums and antique stores. Those of us who grew up with them still know how to do it, but we don’t anymore because we now carry cell phones that don’t even require us to remember phone numbers.

I know that a lot of us Baby Boomers feel the past was so much better than the present, but it really wasn’t. It was a lot more cumbersome, and a lot less got done with a lot more effort. We’re living in wonderful times, and I, for one, am very glad that in my lifetime we progressed from black-and-white tube televisions to artificial intelligence. Instead of resisting progress because it’s new, this Boomer has always embraced it.

Remember phone pagers? When they went off, you ran to a payphone to call the number back. We had calculators and the Sony Walkman, and I always carried a camera with me wherever I went. Everything I just mentioned is now available in a little box in our hands. It’s called a cellphone. Plus, you can watch YouTube on it.

My favorite outdated gadget is the answering machine with cassette tapes to record outgoing and incoming  messages. They were awesome. When I wasn’t home, people could leave messages, and I could call from anywhere, beep the machine and listen to them.

They were expensive at first. When mine broke, it took weeks to get it fixed. I had to take it to an answering-machine store in Houston. All they did was repair and sell answering machines.

My children are now adults, but they grew up on the tail end of my mechanical-gadget generation. When they were little, they listened to records and cassettes. Then they played CDs and graduated from old-fashioned 25-inch cathode-ray tube TVs to gigantic 4K flat screens.

I cringe every time I read a comment about how great things used to be with the old gadgets and how well they worked compared to today’s. The truth is, if that were the case, we’d still be using them.

So, dear Generation Z, don’t worry about grandpa having fun at your expense because you can’t figure out right away how to use a rotary dial phone. He’ll call you for help when his cellphone goes on the blink.

Just keep on progressing and inventing new stuff. And remember, when you get to be grandpa’s age, all the magical technology that now surrounds us will be your version of our rotary dial phone. Just soak in all the new stuff and let people know what you think, perhaps by then, just by thinking it.