A front row seat to history in the making.

Eugene Allen died yesterday at the age of 90. Who was Eugene Allen you may ask? Well, Mr. Allen was an unassuming African American who happened to be able to witness the often troubling history of America from a rather unique vantage point: as butler to 8 presidents; Truman through Reagan (see this story). Mr. Allen's period of service coincided with the great turmoil of the Civil Rights era to which he had a front row seat. He was a man who served the president but couldn't walk through the front door of a restaurant in his native Virginia. That he lived to witness the inauguration of President Obama, to be able to vote for a black man for president (his wife of 65 years died the day before the election), must have been an experience that I could not even begin to imagine.

I write about Mr. Allen because I often fnd myself thinking about the people of his generation; the generation of my grandparents. I don't think of them in terms of monikers like"The Great Generation", but I do look at them in terms of history: mainly I think of the history that they, as a generation, witnessed. Think about it for a minute. Mr. Allen was born in 1919. My mother's mother was born in 1910. Think of the changes that have occured not only in the U.S., but in the world in that time. Air travel, which most of us take for granted today, was in its infancy. The automobile was only starting to become the transportation of choice. The Golden Age of Radio hadn't begun, and television was still a whisper in the subconscious of its inventors (my students laugh when I tell them that I was the TV remote when I was a kid). Can't live without the internet, you say? How about living with no refrigerator, air conditioning, or a washing machine? My grandparents and their contemporaries survived the Great Depression and two world wars. They watched the rise AND fall of communism. They witnessed first hand the civil rights struggles of the 50s and 60s and watched a man land on the moon. And some of them, like Mr. Allen, got to witness an event that I wasn't sure would happen in MY lifetime: the election of a black man as President of the United States (race issues being what they are even today, I was always pretty sure a white woman would be elected first).

This litany of immense historical change always leaves me to wonder what will happen in my lifetime? Will the generations that follow be witness to change on the scale of the last hundred years? Time will tell.