Saturday Challenge 1995

Randy Seaver's weekly Saturday Challenge has us thinking back to 1995 this week. 

1)    Do you recall what you were doing in 1995?  Family, school, work, hobbies, technology, genealogy, vacations, etc?

1995? That seems so long ago. I look at pictures saved from that year and places seem vivid, but the events are few and far between in my memories.

My parents' backyard summer 1995

I lived in either North Syracuse or Liverpool in an apartment that year. Both suburbs of Syracuse, I can’t recall which apartment I was in at that time. I had completed school by then, or so I thought. A few years later I would decide to return to school to get my Master’s degree in library science.

My job does not stand out at all. I may have even had several during the year. This was a time period of recession around Syracuse and I struggled to get a foothold on the job market. Working in administrative and other office support type jobs, I was one of the last ones hired in a given company and one of the first ones to be laid-off if things started to look bad. I remember one company, probably a few years earlier than this, which I was working at doing payroll and general office support. The company sold wholesale janitorial supplies to large companies as well as doing cleaning for others on a contract basis. I left work an hour early one day for a doctor’s appointment and came in the next morning to find that a large cleaning contract for an industrial complex had been lost the afternoon before. Along with the cleaners that worked that contract, I was laid-off as they needed to immediately cut expenses. Although the most dramatic for the suddenness of the decision, it was fairly typical of the experiences I had in the job market then. It was a time to be constantly on the lookout for another job and being creative and flexible in developing my skills.

I belonged to a local computer club that was composed of users of Macintosh computers. Besides attending the meetings, I often helped out with membership and on the desk where people signed-in for the meeting. We also had a special interest group that I was the leader of concentrating on genealogy and the computer. We discussed genealogy programs, how to create reports and such in Microsoft Works and the new online resources of Bulletin Boards and America On Line that would have been coming out about then.

the homestead for sale

Times were changing for my family. My parents lived on an 87-acre farm that had been my father’s parents before them. Signs appeared in the front yard that hadn’t been there for the previous 72 years. The family farm was for sale and my parents were moving to the nearby city of Auburn where it would be easier to get to the grocery store and medical appointments as well as a much smaller house and property to take care of.

Richard and Paulette

For my oldest nephew, things were moving in a different direction. That September he was married and became a stepfather to two young boys.

It was a time of growing older for all of us in our family. The older generation was downsizing their lives and the younger generation was starting out and expanding the roles that they played. That is what I most vividly remember about 1995 and the years surrounding it; the feeling of change.