[GreenKeys] Fwd: Re: Colossus is 73

[Bruce Gentry]

That's wonderful, and frighteningly rare today. I visited several
technical museums and a very small hamfest during my visit, and everyone
I talked with said attacting younger people to learn the crafts and
preserve them is a losing battle for now. An entire generation or so has
turned away or been turned away from from fascinating but older and more
visceral technologies. Here in central New York, two things had powerful
impact. First, organized labor was very disrespectful of young people in
the 1970s wishing to enter the trades. Instead of telling them there
were no jobs available at the moment, and how to prepare for the time
there would be, the young were rejected, humiliated, and treated like
less than dirt. Big mistake. Another serious issue at that time and
rearing it's head again today, many skilled craftspeople were very
liberal in their personal views with regard to wages and benefits, but
fiercely conservative in all other regards. This  angered younger
people, especially veterans who may have practised these crafts in a
senseless war, and made a foul connection in their minds between a
fascinating craft and middle age and older gatekeeper people they would
be at social odds with. With those revulsions implanted, they moved on
to other interests and an entire generation of students and preservers
of these crafts was lost.


        Bruce Gentry,  KA2IVY







On 2/5/17 9:25 PM, Jim Haynes wrote:
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> On Sun, 5 Feb 2017, Bruce Gentry wrote:
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>> The scary thing is I didn't see younger people working on anything,
>> in another ten to fifteen years it may all be sitting in still silence.
>>
> In contrast to that, I visited the telecom museum in Seattle a year ago
> last November, and was pleased to see that most of the workers there are
> young to middle-aged.  This is the museum that has working examples of
> the great electromechanical telephone switches: step-by-step, panel,
> #1 crossbar and #5 crossbar.
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