LIVING IN THREE CENTURIES MEANS ADJUSTING TO CHANGE

Olivia in 1911.

Advances in technology have changed people's lives more in the last century than in any other.

There are few people left who were born in the late 1800s, lived through the 1900s and can still talk about the changes they've seen now that we're entering the 2000s.

Two such people shared their memories for this story.

Olivia Glueck

Olivia Glueck is as amazed at the computers, jets and medical advances she hears about today as she was at the wonders she saw as a 6-year-old at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair.

"There were so many wonderful things there," said the 101-year-old as she sat in the lobby of Cape Girardeau Residential Care Center recalling this momentous trip made in her young life. "I can still close my eyes and see this little grass mower that would mow over the grass, then the grass would spring up behind it," she said as she described what she believes was a demonstration model for a lawn mower company. "My mother had to drag me away from it."

Glueck was born Oct. 17, 1898, and raised on a farm near Kelso. A trip to St. Louis was uncommon enough, but one to the World's Fair left lasting memories.

Her sixth year was a momentous one for Glueck, because it was also when she saw the first car drive past her house.

"We thought the world was coming to an end," she said with a laugh. It only made her feel slightly more secure when she saw a passenger in the car was the priest from Oran.

Telephones wouldn't come to the area until Glueck was in her early 20s, but neighbors found ways to keep up with events such as the priest riding in a car or a cyclone that destroyed a bridge, which Glueck said was one of her most vivid members from when she was about 16.

"News traveled from one ear to another," Glueck said. "If one neighbor found out about something, the other neighbors found out, too."

She said her family's nearest neighbor was about one-fourth of a mile away but that wasn't considered much of a walk. And walking was about the only way for children on the farms in the area to get around.

When Glueck and her siblings heard about the above-mentioned cyclone, they took off across the fields, walking more than a mile, to see the damage.

"We didn't think much about the walk," she said. "We heard about the storm and had to go see it."

There was one walk Glueck didn't like, however. That was the walk to school, a small building about a mile from her home.

"The first day of school, my father walked me in. But the second day I had to go by myself. I got about halfway there, then turned around and walked back home," she said.

It wasn't that she didn't like school. But she found the pigs and cattle that wandered the woods she had to walk through more intimidating than a 6-year-old could handle.

Glueck said she hardly recognizes now the Kelso area where she grew up, spent all of her married life and lived until she moved into Cape Girardeau Residential Center a few years ago.

Dirt roads that would become muddy bogs after a rain are now paved. Farms are much more mechanized than when she was having to milk cows and feed chickens, two chores she disliked as a girl. Department store clothing has replaced the handmade garments she and her mother used to make for the family.

But Glueck doesn't focus too much on the past and there are still firsts to conquer for this 101-year-old.

For her 101st birthday last October, Glueck went for her first airplane ride. She had been asked if there was anything she hadn't done and flying in an airplane was one of them.

"It was a thrill," she said.

The Rev. Walter Keisker

For the Rev. Walter Keisker, the 20th century in which he spent most of his life has been a series of milestones he recognized as the beginnings of something bigger.

Keisker, who will turn 101 on July 19, remembers running out into the yard of the farmhouse he grew up on near Hillsboro to catch sight of the first automobile to pass down that road.

"I thought, It has happened,'" he said. "I knew a new age was coming."

Keisker, who was a Lutheran minister in this area for 52 years, got that same feeling when he heard the news that Charles Lindbergh had made the first nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927.

"The iron horse which served us so long began to go out of service in 1930, and the streamlined train took its place," Keisker said. "Now, except for Amtrack service to crowded population areas, the streamliner doesn't roar through the night or chug through the day, instead we see the crisscrossing of vapor trails in the stratosphere."

Keisker saw another new age coming when he stepped into a room at the preparatory school he was attended in Concordia in 1917 to see a boy tinkering with a board filled with dials and tubes.

"I asked him what he was doing and he said, Shut up, I'm trying to get Kansas City," said Keisker as he remembered his first experience with a radio.

The contraption had four dials, that each had to be set just so, and a large horn that magnified the sound, he said.

"From there the radio got to be something that would be used and enjoyed," Keisker said.

He noted that the radio was king until television came on the scene in the early 1950s. He noted he bought his family its first television set in 1953, partly so he could see himself. During the early 50s, Keisker, who was then pastor of St. Paul Lutheran Church in Jackson, and other local ministers appeared on KFVS-TV.

While Keisker said he doesn't know much about them himself, he realizes that the development of computers is a milestone his grandchildren may remember.

While such developments mean change and adjustment, Keisker sees them as generally good things.

"America over this past century has brought to fruition the proverb, Seek that ye may excel,'" he said.

As a clergyman, Keisker sees the hand of God in many of the developments of the last 100 years. But he also credits the American tendency to be "wholesomely dissatisfied."

He said never being satisfied is also a reason for his long life.

"I try to do the best I can each day," he said. "When the sun leaves the sky, I ask myself, 'Did I do today what I could have done and should have done.' If something is left undone, I tell myself to not forget it tomorrow. Life has so many challenges if you you'll come meet them."