Changes in my Lifetime – Page 3 – My Name is Sydney Jo

1960: The Austin

This is not my car – ours was completely black… but my own photo is stuck in Calgary until COVID allows me to return home.

Young friends of mine (by young I mean 20-30 years younger) are always surprised by my comfort with manual transmissions. They (the transmissions, not my friends…) will soon become a thing of the past – they’re precipitously close now – a shame for me because, while automatics are more relaxing to drive, I’ve always loved the feel of a standard and the driving benefits it gives.

Our first family car was a British, circa 1960 Austin Cambridge. It took us on our move from Winnipeg to Calgary, it was the one I learned to drive in at 16, and it remained the second family vehicle for many years after that.

Air Travel

I flew for the first time at age 12 in 1967. Our family had driven back to Winnipeg for a visit and Mom and Dad let Mark and I fly home. Strangely, I remember almost nothing about that monumental event. In 1988 we took the kids (6 weeks, 3, 8, and 10 years) on a domestic flight where they were showered with colouring books, entertainment kits, and snacks… which doesn’t happen any more. Since then I’ve flown countless times – with Larry, family, friends, alone. The whole experience has changed… a lot.

The Kodak Brownie 300 Movie Camera

Kodak brought this camera to market, at a cost of about $25, right at the time I was born. Exposure was set with a dial around a fixed focus lens meaning that focus was not adjustable, and you had to choose the distance between the nearest and farthest objects as you filmed so that a “sharp enough” focus was produced. The learning curve must have been interesting!

Each 3-inch reel held about 3 minutes of entertainment. On occasion, we got the projector out and made a family evening out of it. It took time to thread the film through the guides, then rewind it at the end, and it was a real downer if the projector lamp blew without a replacement on hand, but we loved those evenings. With each new child (and ultimately there were five of us) it brought more amusement.

As a young adult I decided to collect all of those reels and splice them into larger ones. I spent hours viewing, editing, and splicing snippets of our lives. I then had it professionally formatted for a VHS video, the go-to technology of the time. It has since been reformatted for computer use but I imagine its days in that realm are numbered as well.