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By EUGENE MCCARTHY
Rappahannock New* Contributing Writer
Consumers’ Union has recently published a 50-year retrospective on products made and marketed during that half century. Included are items the editors call “small wonders and big deals,” which according to the editors have revolutionized the lives of consumers. Consumers’ Union evidently has been affected by the tendency, manifest most strongly in television news, to use more language or more intense and extreme language than is warranted by reality.
All of the products included in the book have changed the lives of Americans, in some cases significantly, in others moderately, and in some cases minimally, for good or for bad, but few have changed things in a revolutionary way.
Among the 50 products listed in the book, seven, possibly eight, may be said to have had or to be having a revolutionary effect on American life.
Air conditioning, for example, has eliminated differences among the seasons of the year, and differences between life in the sun belt and the sleet belt and the snow belt. It has also all but eliminated the screened porch, both front and back, and with it courting as well as the family and neighborhood activities that went on within the protective confines of those porches.
The electric washer has affected life and culture only marginally. The dryer (gas or electric), however, has destroyed the social and natural character of drying clothes, eliminating the dependence of that process on sun and wind, and eliminating the occasions it provided for talk across backyard fences.
Running shoes (once called tennis shoes) have made a revolutionary mark. In backward countries, they have become standard foot wear. Once the distinguishing foot wear of “little old ladies in tennis shoes” in advanced countries, they have been taken over by emancipated, professional and para-professional women (at least on the way to work and on the way home) as a mark of independence from hobbling custom-im
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