Dinsmore’s Four Generation Portrait:

Last week I celebrated my 77th birthday. I get to share it with my father, Chester, who died on April 26, 2005 at the age of 87. I almost got to share it with the next generation of Dinsmores: Charlie Dinsmore arrived on scene on April 28, 2019. These three photos represent three points in time when there were four generations. In the first photo, taken on November 3 1966, I am there in my narrow tie, Chester Dinsmore, my father is next, Glen Dinsmore, my son, and Maudina Dinsmore my grandmother round out the group. The next opportunity was in 1992. This time Chester was the elder statesman, me and Glen joined in with Cody the tag end. This weekend we have put together another four generation group. This time I am the elder statesman, Glen and Cody are the middle men and Charlie fills out the quartet. There was one more time, I was the infant and my great grandfather, Elwood Mann Dinsmore was the elder statesman. I will get a copy of that photo into this blog if and when I can find it.

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I can’t describe with any justice, what a thrill it is for me to hold the next generation of my family and ponder what he will experience. Changes in my lifetime have been profound. I was born in a war to end all wars, World War II. My uncles and one aunt were in the service. I remember asking “Will I have to go to war too?” I think the answer was “There will always be war.” I can only speculate what would have been without that war, The generation just ahead of us, buckled down and won that war with ever improving technology.

Then “Sputnik” shocked us and we plunged into the cold war and the race for the moon. Again technology blossomed and we have become used to “New and Improved” advertising and mass marketing. We have come to expect our products to have twice the memory, twice the speed, more features and half the cost every two years. In less than 70 years we have gone from episodes of the “Lone Ranger” on scratchy old AM radios,to Harry Potter on BlueRay, Dolby sound on 80 inch TV behemoths.

What will the tiny babe see in the next 70 years. It is fun to speculate. I see suborbital Spaceliners delivering us safely from Denver to Australia in about an hour. Autonomous vehicles that pick you up at your door and deliver you to your chosen destination exactly on time. There would be no reason to own one yourself, they would be pool vehicles owned by your housing association. They will travel in a network of subterranean tunnels and elevated roads. You may not like my next prediction, I think in that interval we will have run out of pristine drinking water. I think we will be using several grades of recycled water. The poorest grade going to our landscaping. Higher grades being used for more sensitive uses with the highest grade being used for cooking and drinking. “why do you think the old square rigger sailors drank rum in their water. Answer: you never knew what bugs were in that water. Often times it was loaded into the water barrels out of coastal streams. Who knows what upstream residents dumped into that water?

I h­ope they will have conquered Parkinson’s disease, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease by then. ­Perhaps even as we speculate this young babe will grow up and solve many of the mysteries surrounding these troublesome diseases.