Longing for the ?Good Old Days? when you didn't have to spend half your life parked on the freeway, and the other half deleting mountains of spam to get to your email? Does your blood pressure rise at the end of the day when you try to have a quiet dinner in a restaurant and the inconsiderate jerk at the next table is hollering into his cellphone?



Take a break from this frenetic madness and enjoy REMEMBRANCES OF TIMES PAST, by Marta Hiatt, (Northern Star Press, $15.95), a nostalgic collection of stories and photographs recalling the way life was in the early part of the 20th Century, when life was much less complicated.

This book is a sentimental journey back to a time of Model-T Fords, stay-at-home-moms, vinyl long-playing records, telegrams, radio days, strict rules of etiquette, and manual typewriters. Hiatt has compiled hundreds of personal stories of ?the good old days,? in her charming book, illustrated with 250 black and white photographs that vividly bring the stories to life.

?My sister and I were reminiscing one day about how we used to spend almost all day Saturday helping mom pull the wash through a wringer several times to get the water out,? Hiatt says. ?What a chore that was! We also discussed how we had to make soap suds to do the dishes in the days before detergent was invented. We put the hard bar of soap in a small wire grate and swished it around for about 10 minutes to get enough suds. After our talk I thought it would be interesting to put together an entire book about the so-called ?good old days? by asking friends and family to contribute their stories.?

Dr. Hiatt compared her childhood in the ?40s to life today:

?You have a cell-phone, we had a party-line, and everyone on our line could listen in, usually surreptitiously.

?You send email, we sent telegrams.

?You play your music on a pocket-size iPod, ours came on 12-inch vinyl records.

?If you want information, you just Google it, but we had to search through index cards at the local library.

Hiatt's book is full of interesting, personal stories such as this:

?In our family we always ate meals together; mother and my sisters and I prepared them, and we cleaned up afterward too, while the boys played games and dad read the paper. Sometimes my mom played the piano after supper and we all stood around it and sang. We were creative; we played board games together as a family, and we invented games. On Sunday evenings we all sat around the kitchen table and listened to the radio; programs like ?The Lone Ranger,? ?Jack Benny,? ?Fred Allen,? and ?The Shadow Knows.? Of course there wasn't any TV, so we talked to each other.

Hiatt thinks the biggest cultural changes were the hippie revolution of the ?60s and the feminist revolution of the ?70s, sparked by Betty Freidan's book ?The Feminine Mystique.? ?After this,? says Hiatt, ?women gained a lot of freedom. Before this time, job listings in the paper were divided by gender, and women could only apply for ?female only? jobs. Although there's still a long way to go, today we're even talking about the possibility of a woman president, so there have been enormous changes.

?The ?60s generation transformed our entire culture. We went from being a very uptight society governed by religion and strict rules of etiquette, to anything goes, and ?do your own thing.? --From bathing suits that covered a woman's entire torso, to bikinis and thongs, and from ties and button-down white shirts at work to ?casual Fridays.? People were no longer fearful of ?what would the neighbors think?? or mortified if they made a social faux pas.?

In the chapter on ?Sex and Social Mores,? Hiatt explores the changes from Victorian prudishness to personal vibrators, and from corsets to Wonder Bras. She recalls: ?It's astonishing to realize that, until the feminist movement, it was legal for a man to rape his wife. It was considered her wifely duty to submit to his sexual demands whenever and however he wanted, whether she wanted to or not. And a spouse couldn't get a divorce unless he or she could prove either adultery or mental cruelty. Wife beating or chronic alcoholism weren't sufficient grounds for divorce. If a woman wasn't married by 25, she was dubbed an ?old maid,? and was often refused admission into college or promotion to management, which was reserved for males.

Hiatt states: ?Life was harsher in the 20th Century, but it was also much simpler.?

On the book's cover Art Linkletter says: "Remembrances of Times Past" will appeal to both a younger audience who will sometimes be amazed at the way things were, and older people whose own memories will be stimulated by reading these interesting stories, and viewing the photographs about the past. It's a great book!?

For info: http://www.northernstarpress.com