100 Minus 2.(Mildred MacFadyen)(Brief Article)

In March, my grandmother Mildred MacFadyen celebrated her 98th birthday. More than 40 people descended on the old Colonial home she shares with an immense collection of teddy bears and treasured family photos. She received 85 congratulatory cards and letters--and even more telephone calls.

I dialed in vain from my home in Barcelona, nearly hypnotized by the busy tone. Call waiting? "It's rude to the person you are talking with," Grandma Mac had replied when I suggested this telephonic innovation. If it is important "they" will call back. She was right, of course. "Getting close," she peppily announced when I finally got through. "Today I am 100 minus two."

She was born during Theodore Roosevelt's first term on a farm near Angola, in rural Indiana, where she lives today. She predates Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, the discovery of the magnetic North Pole and the invention of tea bags, not to mention plastics and airplanes. She experienced almost entirely a century that arguably brought more change than any in human history. Once, after listening to her tell a story about life as a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse, I asked which advances in society or technology most impressed her. As a child of parents whom she described as "very progressive and fond of the new things that came along," she gave an unusual list.

Her family, she remembered excitedly, was first in the area to install a Delco system--a battery-powered home electric plant that had to be recharged "every little while" with a small gasoline motor. She and her sister were studying at the kitchen table one night when the salesman knocked on the porch door. "Girls," he declared, "with the Delco system you can see as well in each corner of the house as you can sitting right here below your little lamp." He clinched his sale less by convincing Great-Grandfather than by entrancing my grandmother and her sister. They soon made a habit of studying in corners--just because they could.

The telephone came next on Grandma Mac's list, which she dialed using the crank on the side of the phone. Then came the radio, an Atwater Kent. This, she said, had a huge effect on her family's life. They huddled in front of that not-so-small box listening to sermons, news, weather reports and entertainment programs. For the first time, they heard about the world beyond the county line. For my grandma, it was the most important leap in the Information Age. Neither TV nor the ...