Most of us now live such easy and comfortable lives that it is easy to lose sight of this history from the near past. That’s a little more than a decade longer than the country’s now median age of 38.4.

When grandpa Ralph was born in 1904, the average life expectancy in the U.S. Life expectancy at birth in this country was then 58.3 years, according to Our World in Data, a database maintained by the University of Oxford.īy the time I was born 24 years later, it had risen to 68.6 and by the start of the past decade was approaching 79, but with signs of finally plateauing after a steep and unbelievably steady rise for more than 100 years. Still, she lived to the age of 70, well above average for those born in 1928. The fever left her with a weakened heart, a common consequence, which would eventually kill her. They nearly lost their only child, Donna, my mother, to rheumatic fever in the 1930s when that illness was one of many untamed, infectious diseases regularly sweeping across the country. Grandpa and grandma were born into lives that were hard but which grew progressively easier over the years though the struggle to survive continued well into the middle of their lives. The suffering of the flu – it killed about one in every 150 Americans and for a short time knocked life expectancy down by 12 years – was lost in the turmoil of World War I, which came along at the same time the social-economic chaos of what was to follow in the forms of Prohibition and then the Great Depression and finally the global nightmare of World War II.

Along the way, they survived the Spanish flu, the last great global pandemic. My late grandmother, Alma, and grandfather, Ralph, grew up in the country below in the age of the horse and buggy and lived to the dawn of the Information Age. HIGH ABOVE FLYOVER COUNTRY – Encased in a tube full of masked humans carried on the wings of a Boeing 757 some 35,000 feet above the lights of civilization spread around Alexandria, Minn., it is hard to believe how much more the world has been transformed by humankind in the past 200 years than in the 200,000 before, and how some things haven’t changed at all. Farming Minnesota wheat in the labor-intensive world of old/Wikimedia Commons

If my grandmother had wheels