Niko,
Back when I was young, parents would make scrapbooks with highlights from the year their child was born. I always thought that was pretty cool. Since this is your virtual scrapbook, I figured I would try to do the same. This is probably information you could find on Google (or whatever search engine has supplanted Google), but it wouldn’t come with my witty commentary. Plus, when the world descends into anarchy and the network falls, you won’t have access to Google. When this happens, I’ll have cleverly downloaded this site to a small thumb drive and I’ll give it to you on a necklace in a touching Hollywood moment before the zombies descend on us. It will be great.
The night you were born: it was a clear night, about 60 degrees…
…the high was 72 degrees. It was a Tuesday.
Family
- Mary was 25 and took time off from her job at a camp outside San Diego to get ready for you. Jonathan was 28 and was mentoring at-risk high school kids in San Diego.
- Jul was 32, volunteering at the Stanford Cancer Center and working as a florist. I was also 32 and working for a start-up called JotSpot. We lived in Mountain View, CA.
- Grandma Pat was a principal at an elementary school and Grandpa Jere was a professor at University of Michigan. They lived in Ann Arbor, MI.
- Grandma Mart was spending time on her painting after retiring from the travel business and Grandpa Lew was building crazy radar technology for Norden. They lived in Trumbull, CT.
- Your Great Grandma Louise was retired from the film industry and was living with Pat and Jere in Michigan.
- Your cousin Molly was born shortly before you, and Aunt Meg was taking time off from teaching to take care of her. Uncle Luke was working for G&K Food Services. They lived in Oxford, CT near Mart and Lew.
- Uncle John was an investment adviser and Aunt Jan was consulting for Accenture. They lived in Washington, D.C.
State of the Union
You were born during a time of great prosperity…at least for some people. All and all the economy was reasonably strong in 2006. The country was in fairly good shape although the divide between the wealthy and poor here in the US continued to widen. That being said, the standard of living for even the most poor here was still several orders of magnitude better than most of the developing world.
Technology companies were seeing massive growth and huge profits. For example, six of the top ten fastest growing companies in 2006 were high tech companies (Akamai Technologies, Perficient, iMergent, Ceradyne, InterDigital Communications, F5 Networks, and CyberSource). The Internet was a new frontier and while we had seen amazing things happen, we had barely scratched the surface of what was possible. Wikipedia had become the largest, most accessible and dynamic collection of knowledge ever to exist. Information was more accessible than ever before, breaking down many barriers, and empowering everyday people. All of this made it much harder for organizations like large companies, lobbying groups, and government bureaucracies to hide behind a curtain of misinformation. Staying in touch, learning about other cultures, and publishing information to the world had never been easier. This was all good. Plus it was really easy to find recipes.
In tech, the news was dominated by companies like Microsoft, Google, and Apple. Several start-ups were making revolutionary products and large companies, unable to copy this innovation, were snapping them up. The print media was still trying to figure out how to make money online. The music industry had spent all of their time suing their customers and missed the online music revolution. Apple’s iTunes music store and iPod music player stepped in to fill this void. Laughably, the movie industry was going down the exact same path and I suspect Apple will happily take their profits as well while they are busy litigating.
Over the last ten years cell phones have become ubiquitous. I suspect you won’t differentiate between “cell phones” and “phones” so this will seem like an odd thing to say. As of 2006, phones were largely for voice and have only rudimentary access to the Internet. I believe this will drastically change over the next decade. Two of the most popular phones were the Blackberry and the Motorola Razr. These probably look like bricks to you.
The US auto industry bet on “big” during the early 2000s. There was a huge demand for large cars and the US auto industry did nothing but satisfy this demand with gigantic, gas guzzling SUVs. In a shocking lack of foresight and overabundance of hubris, they completely missed the potential of hybrid and electric cars. Over the last year, oil prices have soared and US automakers were killed by foreign car makers like Toyota, which focused on these technologies over the last decade. From my perspective, a plug-in hybrid is the perfect car. It allows you to use an electric car for the first 25 (ish) miles, but continue to drive for as long as you need on gas. This is a great fit for the US auto market where consumers think they drive 200 miles a day, but actually only drive, on average, 19. How people who think about cars all the time missed this, is a mystery to me. I’m so disgusted by US automakers that our financial planner is under strict guidelines to avoid all investments in these companies.
Very little success had been found trying to help developing countries (note the broad generalization — there are plenty of exceptions). Africa was in a ton of trouble and the Middle East was (and probably still is) a mess. Europe was slowly forming a single union (the EU) and had agreed on a common currency but not much else. This is not unlike the US. China and India were booming and will be a very dominate players on the world stage over the next twenty years. Both China and India also had a huge income gap like the US.
You were born in a time of great political ineptitude. Our president was an idiot. He was smug and self-righteous. He was a horrible leader. He was close-minded. The administration in the white house was incorrigible. They lied to the American people and dragged us into a war which has killed countless people for no apparent reason. The war drags on with no end in sight. The administration had very little regard for our civil liberties. They used fear as a tool to get what they want. They set up prisons where we held people without charging them. The administration was somehow convinced that taking away freedoms would ensure our freedom. (I can’t see anywhere in history this has gone wrong.) When the twin towers were destroyed we had an opportunity to change the world. The world was listening. We squandered this opportunity and instead created a whole new generation of people who want to destroy us. As a country we have spent irresponsibly and are deeply in debt. The administration blurred church and state in a way that leaves me speechless. Any form of radical fundamentalism, whether Muslim, Jewish, Christian or other is terrifying. It leaves no place for diversity, tolerance or growth. Sadly, enough damage has been done by this president that many of these problems will become your problems.
Prices, numbers
The day you were born, the Dow Jones industrials closed at 11,669, the S&P at 1,336, and NASDAQ at 2,261.
Regular unleaded gas was $2.10 a gallon. I hope you don’t know what I’m talking about when you read this because everything is electric.
A loaf of bread was between $3 and $4.
One dozen organic (cage free) eggs was about $4.
Entertainment
The best selling album of 2006 was the High School Musical Soundtrack. I have no idea what it is. I guess it is a movie soundtrack but I have never heard of the movie. I can relate to Eminem in 2002 and 50 cent in 2003, but this one slipped by me. I’m not a huge fan of musicals, so maybe I subconsciously ignored it.
The top grossing movie of the year was Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. This is a sequel to an earlier Pirates movie which was pretty good. This tricked many of us into seeing this sequel, which was pretty horrible. As you will learn, quality does not guarantee success the same way that mediocrity does not guarantee failure. Most sequels are pretty bad with The Lord of the Rings being the big exception to this rule. I have probably made you watch this trilogy about 1000 times by now, so you probably hate it. Fortunately for 2006, the Academy Awards were smarter than the general population and voted Crash the best movie of the year. They were right — it was.
The Colts beat the Bears 29-17 in the Super Bowl in 2006. The Colts QB Payton Manning finally won a Super Bowl ending speculation he might end up like Dan Marino. It was a stress free super bowl because none of your Mom’s teams were playing (Patriots, Giants, or Jets). Your Mom and I weren’t together for the game — she was in CT with her family and I was down in LA visiting our friend Melodie. Neither of us watch baseball or hockey so I’m not going to dig up those winners.
Your mother and I don’t watch a ton of TV, but we did like Sopranos and Big Love. Sopranos was a show about the mob in New Jersey, and Big Love was about a Polygamist family living in Utah. These were both pretty popular shows in 2006, although you needed a subscription to HBO to watch them. We rarely watched TV live and instead recorded it using Tivo, a digital video recorder. This was a fairly new development. I imagine by the time you are old enough to care, you will just download what you want.
There were a number of notable best selling books in 2006. One of my favorites was Freakonomics, in which Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner tackle a number of real world issues, from gangs and crime, to backyard swimming pools and McDonalds. J.K. Rowling released the fifth book in her Harry Potter series and it was an instant best seller. I think the books are good but I find Harry to be an annoying boy. I hope he ages well. John Grisham released another best seller. I enjoy his writing but I can never keep track of what I have read. I may have read The Innocent Man and enjoyed it or maybe that was a different one. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code is a fun, easy to read mystery which touched on the possibility that Jesus had a family. The Catholic Church predictably got their panties all in a bunch over this one. The Kite Runner is an amazing, but heart breaking, fictional story about two childhood friends from Afghanistan. This book is a good example of how sadness can be beautiful. Marley & Me is a hilarious account of a family and their poorly behaved dog. Marley is constantly causing trouble, destroying the house, eating everything that isn’t nailed down, and running away. Despite all this, they still love him. The Devil Wears Prada is a funny account of an intern in the fashion business. I liked the movie better so I recommend skipping right to that. The Tipping Point is a must read. Malcom Gladwell attempts to explain how things become popular and social elements are in play throughout this process. I haven’t read Running with Scissors or seen the movie but I have heard good things.
Headlines
Here were the New York Times headlines on the front page the day you were born.
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TOBACCO MAKERS LOSE KEY RULING ON LATEST SUITS
By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON AND MELANIE WARNER (NYT);
In a legal blow to the tobacco industry, a federal judge in Brooklyn ruled yesterday that people who smoked light cigarettes that were often promoted as a safer alternative to regular cigarettes can press their fraud claim as a class-action suit. Judge Jack B. Weinstein of Federal District Court …
QAEDA OPERATIVE, AN ESCAPEE IN ’05, IS KILLED IN IRAQ
By SABRINA TAVERNISE; MARK MAZZETTI
A senior operative of Al Qaeda who brazenly escaped from a high-security American prison in Afghanistan last year was killed Monday in a predawn raid by British soldiers in a quiet, wealthy neighborhood in southern Iraq, an American official and an official in Basra said. About 250 soldiers wearing …
BASEBALL; Baseball’s Oldest Old-Timer Opens a Window on the Past
By ALAN SCHWARZ (NYT); Sports Desk
Silas Simmons was handed a photograph and asked if he recognized anyone in it. He fixed his eyes on the sepia stares and moved his curled fingers over the glass and frame, soaking in the faces for more than 20 silent seconds. It was a picture of the 1913 …
Delivering Small-Town Justice, With a Mix of Trial and Error
By WILLIAM GLABERSON (NYT); Metropolitan Desk
Gary Betters thought he understood the law as well as any average American. A school psychologist, he wanted $1,588.60 he said the nearby village of Malone owed him for helping run a summer recreation program. When he brought a small claim in Duane Town Court, he expected that the …
THREATS AND RESPONSES; Europe Panel Faults Sifting Of Bank Data
By ERIC LICHTBLAU (NYT); National Desk
A European Union panel has serious doubts about the legality of a Bush administration program that monitors international financial transactions, the group’s leader said Monday, and plans to recommend tighter controls to prevent privacy abuses. ”We don’t see the legal basis under the European law, and we see the …
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That was 2006
That is a tiny window into 2006. I hope others can add their own perspective and I hope this gives you a small feel for what it was like, way back then.
9 Responses to “Back then”
That was awesome of you to put so much work into this, Scott. Even more awesome that Roan was born only months before Niko! Cut & Paste, baby. (PS: Niko, you had to drive to Kansas to get gas for $2.10/gallon)
Well done, and well timed as I find myself obsessing over my ancestors and what their lives were like and how little I know. I am interested in how people got around and how they communicated. Looking back to my birth in 1949, our car dependency has not changed but cross-country and cross-continent travel by jet is much more common. Dan and I made trips to NYC, Berlin, and Saranac by air in 2006. At home in Minneapolis I drove everywhere in a car because our public transportation is lousy. In the 1950’s GM convinced us to rip out all the trolley tracks and use cars instead. Now we are one year into having one stretch of light rail. As for communication, I relied more and more on email to stay connected with my far-flung family. I was frustrated by some of my family being less into it than others but all of my siblings (the oldest born in 1931) use computers every day. People slowly convert from dial-up internet access to DSL or cable (faster) or wi-fi. Did my dad ever see a computer? Questions I always wanted to know about my parents: how did you get from where you were born to here i.e. why did you move and what were your hopes when you did, and, secondly, how did you feel when you found out you were pregnant with me? (My parents were 52 and 46 and I had notions that at that age you looked forward to being done with the hard part of raising kids.)
From the perspective of a family history researcher, this will be an incredibly documented time. Digital photos flow like water across the web hopefully to be there in some retrievable format a hundred years from now.
Another issue that started to grow in this time was the “green” movement. People began to think more about the impact of using resources on the planet. They looked at pesticides in the food chain, how much packaging they sent to the garbage dump, how their cars contributed to global warming, how we might use other forms of energy like wind and sun. Ironically, without a green consciousness, when my greatgrandfather cleared a patch of land in Indiana and hunted for wild game, he probably squandered fewer resources than we do now using every part of the deer he shot. But we didn’t want to control population growth so now we have to deal with problems like air pollution and urban sprawl. I pick up a catalogue today and I can buy a backpack made from recycled Keen shoes. Hopefully we will get creative before we kill ourselves off.
Lastly what did we do for fun? We went to plays and movies, I went camping with a tent and a backpack (or a toboggan in winter), we traveled, we ate out a lot at good restaurants, we “surfed the net”, Dan wrote plays and I looked for stories about my ancestors.
The day before you were born I had my 65th birthday. I rather hoped we would share a birthday, but it didn’t happen. When you are the age of boy I enjoy most(fifteen years old), I’ll be 80 and you will probably think I’m too old to bother with. But, in case respect for old age is the wave of the future, you have a standing invitation to tell me what is going on in your life when you are fifteen and no one else has patience for you.
Your birth was very exciting for us because you were the first one in the next generation of Mary’s immediate family. Mary’s sister Anne took many days off from work and flew to California twice so that she would be there when you were born. Meanwhile, back in New Hampshire, I was carefully washing a stuffed elephant named Hoover so Anne could bring him out to you.
My idea of the most useful modern invention is good roads. I was very motion sick when I was a child and the five hour drive in the 1950’s from Concord, New Hampshire, to Hartford, Connecticut, to visit my grandparents was torture. By the 1970’s the ride was only three hours and the roads were smooth as silk. My other grandparents had a summer place in Petosky, Michigan, and, before they built the New York Thruway when I was a teenager, it took us three days (two overnight stops)to get there. The Thruway took a full day off the trip and my parents no longer had to stop the car so my sister or I could throw up! It also by-passed the hills in Albany, Schenectedy, and Troy where the car radiator would boil over at least once every trip. Of course, you go to see Connecticut and Michigan in an airplane and that is faster and better still.
Dear Niko,
I’m going to start this trip down memory lane even earlier than the day you were born. I’ve been following your first year + nine months beforehand very closely, because the first time I heard about you (being the size of a kidney bean and still in Mary’s tummy… in fact, I refered to you as “kidney bean” for the next 9 months…) was the first time I really started wanting a baby of my own. I have been so priviledged that your mom and dad put this website up about you so I could watch you grow from the cutest baby of 2006 into the adorable toddler you are as I’m writing this. (And hopefully I’ll get to continue watching you grow into a boy, a teenager, and a man.) It’s now been 4 days since my own little boy was born, a little boy that became a twinkle in my eye when I first heard about you. I’ve gone back over the pictures of you first year several times in the past 9 months to get an idea about how babies grow up. I hope you’ll be able to do the same some day when you are starting your own family. My only regret is that I am just some obscure college friend of your birth mother, and you and my son, Hayden, will probably never get to meet. But I will always be wishing you the best and watching you grow (and leaving little comments!).
Love,
Angie
Dear Nicholas,
Here’s what I remember about 2006.
On the evening of January 16, 2006, your mother called me and grandpa to tell us that she had breast cancer and she would have to have a mastectomy. The news and her voice left us numb and transported us into a surreal world that would last for the next several months. I told her we would leave first thing in the morning for California and we did. She and your dad met us at the airport the next morning. Once I saw Julie, I knew she would be alright. She had no fear in her face, she smiled and hugged us and told us how glad she was we had come. Grandpa stayed for several days and we both embarked on a path to fill Julie with as much beauty and peace and healing that we could. I had a one way ticket and told your mom that I would stay until she was all better.
About ten days after we arrived, Julie had an appointment with her surgeon. I waited in the waiting room. Your dad came out after a while and told me that he had both good and bad news. The bad news was that the doctor was sure the cancer had spread to her lymph nodes and that her situation was very serious. The good news was that they were going to do the biopsies then and there. I thought Scott had lost his mind when he interpreted anything that was said as good. While the biopsies were being done (one of the lymph node and one of the breast) I went to the Stanford Cancer Center library and learned what it meant when breast cancer spread to the lymph nodes. I felt sick and helpless. Then I took several deep breaths and said “NO!!!!!†I had been telling Julie that she had a precancerous condition called ductile carcinoma in situ. She didn’t have cancer.
She came into the waiting area after the biopsies. Your dad left to go to work; your mother and I headed home. We were both quiet and both very worried. Your mom’s cell phone rang. It was the hospital calling. Her lymph node biopsy was clear. Of course, the doctor said it was a preliminary finding and he wasn’t sure they biopsied the sentinel node. Dr Doom and Gloom had begun his campaign of negative outlooks that didn’t end until the last and final pathology reports.
Your aunt Meg was due to have her baby on February 4, 2006. Your mom and I took a quick trip east on February 2 to be with her. (Your mom was between doctor visits and it was about two weeks before her surgery). Aunt Meg , who had be crying daily since the news of your mother’s cancer surfaced, got right to work. She told her unborn baby, her husband and her doctor that the baby was going to be born on February 4, while her sister and mother were in town. Megan usually gets what she wants and your beautiful cousin, Molly Jules was born around 6:00 p.m. on the fourth. I stayed with Megan and Molly for a week while grandpa took your mother back to California for a pre-op visit with Dr. Doom and Gloom.
I pleaded with grandpa to tell me the doctor wavered from his initial diagnosis since all of your mom’s tests came back negative for cancer. Grandpa said he didn’t change his assessment of the situation. I hated that doctor. I arrived back in California in time for the surgery. Grandpa and I were both there and we were a total mess. Your mom and dad were calm and so courageous. When it was over and your dad called us to come to the hospital to see Julie, it took both of us to find the place we had been to so many times before. On very shaky knees, we found your mom’s room and were aghast at how beautiful she looked laying in that hospital bed.
Grandpa went home. After intense pathology, my friend, Dr. Doom and Gloom had to admit he was wrong or as he put it, “We dodged the bullet.†Your mother had ductile carcinoma in situ – it didn’t spread. No chemo, no radiation. Julie was all better and I went home.
Julie called a couple of months later – there was a baby who was going to be born in September. She and your dad had been chosen to be your parents. We followed your prenatal visits and your parents meeting with Mary and Jon. Grandpa and I went numb again. Please let there be a healthy baby for Julie and Scott. You came, you were healthy and you had the bluest eyes we had ever seen. We fell in love with you on sight.
So Nicholas, whatever else happened in 2006 didn’t matter much to me. My daughter survived cancer. You arrived to become her son, our grandson. Your mother is one of the bravest people I know and so is Mary. It was quite a year for courage.
Love,
Grandmart and Grandpa Lew
Grandmart rocks! Thank you for sharing your “side” of the story. I got the chills reading it, and remembering the events unfolding.
Julie -you are one of the most brave and beautiful and wonderful people I know, too.
And Mary, yours was a tremendous gift that has brought such joy to so many people… and he can’t even talk yet!
Hi There!
I am Gretchen’s friend Julie, and she wanted me to check out your adorable website and your beautiful son! Congratulations to you all and it is so wonderful Niko has such a caring and loving family. This is the sweetest website I have seen from friends with blogs of their families.
All the best for a happy and bright future to you all!
Julie
Gran-mart made me cry!! What a sweet story (beautifully written) and wonderful mother/grandmother.
xoxo