The Birmingham age-herald., 1924-02-03
c Ks Filling Station.

c k'S FflIlng StatlOn.
 c Ks grandfather, an old gentle man of S5 years, never attempted to drive a,motor car until recently. Half in fun, he was invited to try it. The old man promptly accepted. And b'gosh he did pretty good job. Here are some of the thoughts that his ex- perience induced.
 To-day, for the first time in my life, I drove a motor car. In my boyhood there was no such thing, nor, in fact, was there any such thing only 35 years ago, when I was already getting on in years.
 Before my twentieth year. never saw a paved or macadamized road. There was nothing then but dirt roads, or those of corduroy construction. There were no bath tubs, no electric lights, no street railways, no fountain pens, nor even hand-me,down suits of clothes. We had heard of balloons, but never saw one. The repeating rifle was a dream and not even the cartridge had yet been heard of.
 There was no such thing as the telephone The cotton gin was 8 re- cent invention. Sewing machines were experiments and rarities. The sight of railway engine was worth going miles to view. Steamboats were so uncommon that trip on one made a man traveller of considerable. renown in his own locality.
 "A phonograph would have been hailed as a machination of the devil. But whisky was almost as common as water, and license and prohibition were fantasies of the imagination. A man shaved in the good old-fashioned way and only his own skill saved his skin safety razors came 50 or more years later. N E "The unfortunate who was compelled to undergo an operation, which was rare, might have survived the cutting, but If shock didn't get him, gangrene did. The anesthetics and disinfectants were God-sends of later years.
 Ut would have been thought as easy to manufacture a living being as to produce ice by machinery. Horse ! power was produced by horses--some- times by muies--and when neither was available the genus homo took the | traces. A tractor would have been a gift direct from Providence, had there been any gasoline with which to op- crate it-but there wasn't.
 "A mans most practical and useful and most common mechanical devices, particularly on the farm, consisted of | his two hands. The sickle and scythe were only being displaced by the first crude mowers and reapers. The binder came later. Flows were very crude and were practically all made by the village blacksmith, if not by the farmer | himself. The threshing machine came with other innovations.
 | Newspapers were as trare as mil lionaires in those days, and there were no dailies at all. No one had ever heard of the linotype and monotype. The Bible and Plutarch's Lives were I the whole library in many a household
 The airplane was as fantastical as perpetual motion. Until I was 15 years old, I had never seen a photo graph of a human being. Then it was an Old-fashioned daguerreotype. Mo tion pictures would have been fully as amazing to us as to the startled savages of the South Seas. The radio would have either been classified with mir. acles or hallucinations.
 I Correspondence at that time was limited. Mail service was insufferably slow, and not overly reliable. All let ters were painstakingly written in | lUuSuduu. Iuere were uUL typeWrlleFs thence no stenographers. And no die taphone.
 "I chewed the natural leaf that was stripped from tobacco grown in out own garden and smoked the same pow erful concoction in a homemade corn cob. We had none of the wonderfully blended mixtures of today, and meer achaum or a calabash would have been too impractical for consideration.
 "The saddle was the most common conveyance-when we had a saddle Otherwise we rode bareback, or hoofet it. There were a few horse-drawn pas senger vehicles and, of course, many wagons of varying descriptions, de pending on the humor and genius oi the builders. But no solid rubber tirei on any vehicle. They came with [ more 'dudish' age. Pneumatics were still further remote in the future.
 "As boy, I never played with a tricycle., never saw pair of roller skates, never shot an air gun, ana never enjoyed 9 mechanical toy of an5 kind. l never tasted ice cream ol chocolate candy, and never saw a soda