The future that never was

Back when I was still working, I went to a conference in Seattle. As I flew from Springfield, Illinois, to the West Coast, I read a magazine article that talked about nostalgia for a future that had never materialized -- a future that was so well imagined at the Seattle World's Fair in 1962.

That year, when I was 7, the nation was in the grips of space travel fever. When John Glenn orbited the earth three times that year, I was glued to the screen of our black-and-white TV. I longed to go to the Seattle World's Fair, certainly the embodiment of the nation's bright future. The icing on the cake was the premiere of The Jetsons, a futuristic cartoon show replete with robot helpers, instant food, and space taxis.

So I was full of anticipation as I arrived in Seattle for the conference. Finally I'd get to see what was left from that long-ago fair. The first evening I walked down to a shopping center and boarded the monorail. It seemed a little clunky but I rode out to the Space Needle, which was also underwhelming. They both seemed reminders of a bygone age or more precisely an age that never materialized. And they hadn't aged particularly well.

Come to think of it, a lot of things never materialized. For a while in my teens I was a fan of science fiction, and a particular favorite was The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. Written in 1950, five years before I was born, the book is a collection of short stories set on planet Mars and featuring conflict between human colonists and Martians.

The book contained many haunting stories but the one that struck me most was called "The Martian." The story featured a human couple who live on Mars but ache for their dead son Tom. One night during a thunderstorm they see a figure that looks like Tom standing outside. In the morning, the man finds a child who looks like Tom helping his wife with his chores. After speaking privately with the being, the man learns that he is a Martian with an empathetic shape shifting ability. Because the couple wants so badly to believe he is Tom, the Martian has taken on Tom's shape.



However, when the couple goes to town that evening, they become separated from Tom. The man hears that another family has found their dead daughter and he goes to their home. He sees the Martian, now taking the dead girl's form. He convinces the Martian to return but as they run desperately through the town, each person that the Martian passes sees him as someone else, a person they have lost -- a husband, a child, a criminal.

"Before their eyes he changed. He was Tom and James and a man named Switchman, another named Butterfield; he was the town mayor and the young girl Judith and the husband William and the wife Clarisse. He was melting wax shaping to their minds.They shouted, they pressed forward, pleading. He screamed, threw out his hands, his face dissolving to each demand. ....  They snatched his wrists, whirled him about, until with one last shriek of horror he fell."

Life on Mars never came to be. Humans have never lived anywhere other than Earth and the whole book was about a future that never happened. But that doesn't make it less interesting to me.

In the 60s, there were many things we thought might happen in the future. We were optimistic, or at least I was,. The Space Race was embraced by the culture at that time and it was easy to get caught up in the excitement of the moment.

I want to think that time was simpler or more innocent or even better. But the truth is, it's the past and that is what I remember fondly. Things often turn out differently than you expect, but that doesn't mean they turn out worse.

My family (minus Dad) in 1963