Current events have me looking back on a lot of my history, and it seems like some of that history is catching up with me, too. I popped on to the Binder Planet while we were on vacation and saw a post in one of the main forums about the passing of a familiar name: John Hofstetter, who used to frequent the IHC Digest (a precursor to webforums, back when email was the next evolutionary step beyond BBS). He was an old-timer then, someone who always had a minute to help a young shit like me figure something out in the days before YouTube and when the pictures in reprinted service manuals were too dark to be usable. That led me to another thread started back in 2017 asking where all the old timers were: as I read through the posts I realized that a lot of the guys I’d learned from back in the day are gone, and I’m now the age they were when I got into Scouts. That was sobering.
Passage
Posted on | | Posted in Friends
Neal in Boston says:
Yes, it can indeed be sobering.
Just had my 51st birthday yesterday. So happy to be in good health and have a healthy family. Still bummed to not have a Scout yet.
Also, we just got the teacher seniority list for my district, and I am on page 2 of 23! Somehow I became the old-timer!
It is also mind-bending for me to think about what i was doing when my parents were my age; they married young and started our family early, so when they were my age I was already 28 and on my own working construction, training for teaching, and living with my girlfriend who is now my wife of 20 years.
I should have bought a Scout back THEN!
bill says:
Ha ha wait a minute Neal, your birthday is March 18?