Elk Grove and Iceland

For an old lady living in a retirement home who does not get out much, I thought I was keeping up to date with the World.  I watch the news on television.  During long dialysis sessions, I read TIME, The New Worker, and The Week – all weekly magazines that report on everything. 

But sometimes I get tired.  At home I sit in my recliner and watch old movies.  But there is no DVD or Roku at the dialysis center.  I watch dumb things like Family Feud.  And I can’t stand any more unmarried mothers finding fathers for their kids with help from Maury Povich.

Lately I’ve looked for diversion on HGTV.  This week I received a double shock.  Shocked once by a young couple looking for a home in the Chicago suburbs.  Shocked a second time by another young couple moving to Iceland.  I had personal associations with both places.  How times have changed!

I was surprised when the narrator in the Illinois episode said the young people’s preferred location was the “up-scale neighborhood” of Elk Grove Village   In 1960 our friends, Don and Darlene, bought a house in Elk Grove Village.  It was a brand new community with the cheapest houses available at that time, all little frame bungalows.  No basements   One-car garages.  It was definitely NOT  “up-scale” at that time. 

On television I saw streets were now lined with tall trees, giving the town a genteel look.  The little frame houses were still little frame houses.  It was a shock when the young couple paid $200,000 for a house which had sold in 1960 for $15,000.

It was in Grove Junior High in Elk Grove Village that I taught seventh grade for two years.  It was a brand new school.  The first day there were no sidewalks; to enter the building we walked on temporary wooden platforms.  My classroom had no blackboards.  I took a world map from home to teach geography to a class of wild 13-year-olds, no two of whom had ever been in class together before.  It was bedlam. 

We lived a few minutes and a few miles north in Arlington Heights, where Wally built our house, all brick with a custom kitchen.  He did the masonry and carpentry and contracted plumbing, electrical, concrete work for the basement, and the roof.  He let me help lay the vinyl flooring in the kitchen.  I wonder what that little house would sell for today.  .       

The thing about Elk Grove Village was that the houses were basically the same as in 1960.  Only the inflated price was different.   In Rejavik, the capital of Iceland, the whole landscape had changed.

Wally and I went to Iceland in 1975 with a group of stamp collectors.  (That’s another story!)  At that time Rejavik looked like a little town in West Texas.  I don’t remember a single two-story building.  Even the nation’s capitol had only one story.  Without a dome it looked more like an elementary school than a county courthouse, much less like a place where parliament met. 

The people lived in little concrete bungalows with metal roofs (no trees in Iceland).  What I remember best were crisp white curtains in all the windows. 

On television today I saw a completely different city.  The voice on the tube mentioned “prosperous days in the ‘80's.”   The main shopping street, where I walked for miles looking for Wally in little shops, is now a big city thoroughfare with tall buildings on each side. 

Looking for a home, the young couple were taken to several neighborhoods, all having row after row of multi-story apartment buildings, all built of gleaming white concrete.  I felt as if the country town I remembered had become New York.

The young couple were delighted to find an apartment within walking distance of the center of the city.   They paid $200,000 for five small rooms. 

All this made me wonder about changes in other places I visited in my travels.  How about China?  Beijing was primitive when I was there in 1993.   From now on all I know I have to learn from reading and television.  That is never the same as seeing a place in person.