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100 years ago, people needed other people

3 min read

Will there be a time when we can go about our normal activities, day after day, and never have actual contact with other human beings? Absurd? Think again. We may already be there.

It’s been many years since we started pumping our own gasoline and severed contact with gas-station attendants. Later, we stopped going into the bank and getting cash from a human teller. Then we noticed that businesses replaced their telephone receptionists with machines. Then we got our own answering machines, and now we’d prefer to send text messages rather than actually talk to people on our phones.

At the supermarket, we opt to check out at the self-service register, scanning our own items, rather than wait to interact with a store employee. We read about our friends on Facebook and post our own personal news so that we need not bother communicating face to face or with our voices.

Rather than go shopping and have to deal with store clerks, we sit at our computers and order everything under the sun from Amazon and wait for the items to show up in boxes by the front door.

At some restaurants now, you place your order on a digital device at your table. Soon, some entrepreneur will figure out how to deliver your meal in some nonhuman way. And a car-rental company advertises that customers can choose any car on the lot and never have to deal with a living, breathing company representative.

Some day in the future, your pizza may be delivered by drone.

But there was a time when human contact was what people yearned for and would go to great lengths to achieve. For evidence we scanned the pages of this newspaper printed exactly 100 years ago.

On Saturday, Sept. 4, 1915, an editorial in The Washington Reporter promoted what it called the nation’s first community-wide picnic planned for the upcoming Labor Day at Arden Fairgrounds. “Get acquainted with your neighbor; you may like him,” was the theme for the picnic.

“When it is remembered that church and lodge outings are by no means small, think of practically all of Washington and a large part of the other towns of Washington County and many of the rural inhabitants all gathered in one spot at the same time!” the editorial read.

The event was to feature a parade, band performances, horse races, six baseball games, track and field events, Washington & Jefferson College’s football practice, a speech by suffragist Helen Allen and free coffee and lemonade.

The Reporter believes that the picnic Monday will be every bit the success which the business men and their employees have tried to make it. And we hope, furthermore, that the first attempt to hold the affair will so delight the people of the county that they will decide that they cannot do without it in after years.”

The following Tuesday’s newspaper noted that, despite rain in the morning, an estimated 25,000 people attended the picnic.

“The social feature of the day was prominent,” the newspaper reported. “Anywhere on the grounds that one went there could be seen greetings extended, introductions being given, family gatherings, etc. Town and country mingled in one big day of enjoyment.”

An editorial that day predicted the event would become one of the county’s most memorable days in history. “The day’s outing has filled a want that was felt but not understood.”

What a difference a century makes.

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