Looking at history in 90-year lives

In early spring, 1929, there was a new governor in New York, a young man who had seemed to be going places on his family name and his money and his smile until polio took him down. Now he was back, but what future lay ahead for Franklin D. Roosevelt?

Out in Hollywood, Warner Bros. released its first feature with both sound and color. The National Football League had survived its ninth season: The Providence, Rhode Island, Steam Roller took the title ahead of the Frankford, Pennsylvania, Yellow Jackets and the Detroit Wolverines.

Overseas, with the German economy apparently on the mend, the career of right-wing firebrand Adolf Hitler might be in twilight. So, too, the career of Britain's soon-to-be-former finance minister, a broke aristocrat named Winston Churchill. He was hatching plans for a trip to the United States to make a quick fortune in the booming stock market.

And in Muskogee, Oklahoma, Mom was born.

We wished her happy birthday recently. Ninety years old used to sound ancient, but judging from YouTube, 90 is the new 70. Or the new 25. There are 90-year-old gymnasts, 90-year-old marathoners, 90-year-old mountain climbers and 90-year-old bodybuilders. A guy in Philadelphia chinned 24 pullups in a row at age 90, which is roughly 23 more than I've done in my entire life.

Mom's thing is dancing at her grandchildren's weddings and gallivanting around the neighborhood in flip-flops. She also follows the news very closely, which means the professional polarizers of cable TV have lots of time to scare the bejabbers out of her. The world is going to pot, Mom occasionally warns me. So, let me remind her of some of the things she - and the world - have survived and accomplished since her 1929 debut.

Start with the Great Depression, which arrived about seven months into Mom's life and upended everything. At its worst, the global economic collapse put 1 in 3 U.S. workers out of a job and revived Hitler's career. So many lives were ruined in Mom's part of the world that migrants fleeing from all over the Midwest were lumped into a single bucket: "Okies."

Yet the Depression was only the second-worst thing to happen during her childhood. When Mom was 12, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Her father and older brothers enlisted; her sister's young husband was killed in action. After the war, Mom graduated from high school alongside former boys who came home as hardened men with 1,000-yard stares.

Mom was a "tomboy," which is to say she ran as fast, climbed as high and jumped as far as the neighborhood fellas. We'd call her an athlete today, but women weren't athletes then. In fact, women had been voting for less than a decade when mom came along.

It puzzled and troubled her that kids with dark skin weren't permitted to attend her school or swim in the public pool on scorching summer days. Even the telephone booths in Oklahoma were segregated. A black man was lynched in Chickasha, near Oklahoma City, in 1930 - even after the National Guard arrived to protect him. The mob trapped the guardsmen inside the jail and set fire to it.

The world today is not perfect. But it's better than the world Mom inherited. The wars are smaller, the industries cleaner, the laws more just. Looking at history in big bites instead of sound bites - in 90-year slices of sweet and bitter cake - we can see a pattern of improvement.

When Mom was born in early spring 1929, an old man was serving on the U.S. Supreme Court. Oliver Wendell Holmes was nearing 90; in his memory was stored some 25 years of living in a nation where slavery was legal. He fought in some of the most savage battles of U.S. history to end that abomination and was wounded at Antietam and Chancellorsville.

Holmes was born in early spring 1841, just five years after the death of James Madison. Madison was born in early spring 1751, a subject of a far-off hereditary monarch in a household running on slave labor. He gave us most of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to prick our consciences through centuries.

Just three big strides take us from that early springtime to this one. Three lifetimes contain all the good and the bad, all the triumph and tragedy, all the heroism and hypocrisy of our shared national life.

Mom's favorite birthday gift was the arrival of her first great-grandchild. I hope he'll live nine decades and beyond, and that he and his contemporaries will carry the torch a good way farther along the road. It's a path with turns and potholes. It meanders, even doubles back.

But seen from a distance - a distance, say, of 90 years - the road tends in a good direction.

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