My Great Grandma is 100

I'm 33 and I still have one living great grandmother.  Yesterday she turned 100.  Do the math.  My family liked to start having kids by age 20 at the latest.  My older sister broke the mold on that one and I think all of our elders were just fine with it.  These days 20 still seems very young to be having babies, but way back when, 16 seemed like a great age for marriage and 20 was plenty old enough for motherhood.   Although times have changed, I'm so glad that I come from a family where not only do I have a great grandmother, but my kids have a great-great grandmother!  At age twenty I still had 3 living great grandparents and my 100 year old grandmothers long term boyfriend, Lag,  was still alive.  That seems unheard of these days.

So yesterday, on Carmela's birthday, I really got thinking about how crazy it would be to have lived through so many MAJOR changes in American History.  She was born in 1912.  William Taft was president.  The fifth Olympic Games where being held in Sweden.   The Oreo cookie was invented that year.  The automobile assembly line wasn't even invented at that point.  I think the Model-T was only just starting to be built around that time.  So you could imagine that only the richest Americans would have had access to cars.

The first rotary dial phone was developed in the mid 1920's.  I'll bet it took anther 10 years for a telephone to become something you'd see in a home.  Can you even imagine how crazy it would be to live through that time where no one had access to a telephone and then watch people today using cell phones constantly?  I wonder what Carm thought of the pager era? 

Commercial air travel got started in the late 1950's.  How scary would it have been to take your first commercial flight when there was no such thing only a few years before?  I imagine it feeling a lot like the today's concept of taking civilian into space.  I would be scared to death to ever try it.  My grandma went from the horse and buggy to a Boeing 747 in her lifetime.  That's a pretty huge change.

I'm left wondering if I could end up living that long and how many more monumental inventions could take place in my lifetime?  I can't imagine what changes could possibly happen by 2078.......the year of my possible 100th birthday.  I wonder if my great grandma could have ever imagined how different the world would be from the time of her birth until now?