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SOLERA DIAMOND VALLEY | JULY 2017 19 18 SOLERA DIAMOND VALLEY | JULY 2017 By Dick Roppé, Resident As a youngster growing up my family of five lived in a three- bedroom house, with small bedrooms, a small bath and a small half-bath, a small kitchen (with a small nook,) a small living room and a small dining room with an expandable table. Notice the emphasis on small. In addition to formal meals this versatile table also functioned as a desk for homework, as well as a game and hobby table. Explanation being, once you put a bed and dresser in the bedrooms, there was no room for a desk. In the living room stood a large and elegant Zenith console radio that, on clear nights, could pick up short wave stations from a "galaxy far, far, away." Lying on the floor you could conjure up vivid images of the Lone Ranger and Tonto purging the West of evildoers. In the narrow hall we had a rotary-dial Bakelite telephone that early on was a party line. How do you explain a party line? Is there a child today who would understand that you had to share your phone with another house, let alone a family member? Later on, if you were lucky enough to have a television set it was black and white with a humongous 16" screen and a 12' pole antenna secured to the roof. The detached one-car garage housed a single not-too- roomy sedan. Space had been allotted for a steel drum, belt driven, top wringer Speed Queen washing machine. The dryer was in the backyard. It consisted of a pair of "T" poles, about 20 feet apart, spanned by four heavy wires. Clothes were taken from the washer, wrung out and hung on the lines with spring loaded clothes pins- weather permitting. Later, this clothesline was upgraded to an inverted pyramid contraption on a single vertical pole that could be manually rotated. The lines formed squares that decreased in size, the largest being at the top. This made it possible to leave the wicker laundry basket in one spot and rotate the lines. Ah ha- an epiphany! Yes indeed, necessity is the mother of invention. Oh, how the times have changed. We've upsized and now have a washer and dryer inside the house. The spot where the radio once sat is now occupied by a very wide, high definition, surround sound TV fueled by a fiber-optic cable or a satellite dish scanning the skies for one program out of hundreds or more. Add to this at least one DVR and you now have the perfect home entertainment center. At least for the next six months. And how about a walk-in closet and two sinks in the bathroom? That plain old telephone is now an iPhone with so many apps you can annoy anyone, anywhere, anytime. How do we manage without an eight terabyte hard drive, a laptop computer, an internet linked to the world, an all in one printer-scanner-copier-fax? How about an iPad? A microwave, the Keurig coffee maker? All this brings me back to my original epiphany, "Necessity is the mother of invention." Today, as the once simple life fades further into the oxymoron of forgotten memories, I have been hit by a second epiphany- Invention is now the mother of necessity. Build it, show them they need it, and they will buy it. "Alexa, play The Kingston Trio!" My brother's birthday party circa 1947 in the small dining room on the all-purpose table. He's at the head of the table (left). My sister is to his left and I'm the tall kid fourth from the left. The small breakfast nook is slightly visible through the door on the right how about some UPSIZING?

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