By Joe Darby

First, I hope that you all had a blessed, enjoyable and safe Christmas, that all of your Santas were good to you and that you — if you played Santa –were good to your elves.

Now, to the topic of this week’s column. We are just about ready to start on a new decade. The Twenties!

If you have already read more than one or two of my columns you will know that I am a genuine geezer. And that means that my Mamma was born quite a long while ago — on June 23, 1909, to be exact, in New Orleans..

So the date and place of her birth situated her perfectly to enjoy and play an active part of the last years of last century’s Roaring Twenties. Daddy was one of those silent types, who didn’t talk much about his youth, but Mamma loved telling stories of the late 1920s, riding with friends in the rumble seats of their roadsters (that’s a small convertible car for you youngsters), dancing the Charleston to jazz music, wearing her hair bobbed short, the whole bit. She was indeed a genuine Flapper.

That decade was called the Roaring Twenties because it was a time of rapid growth, in technology, events and achievements. Cars were becoming quite common, most everybody had a telephone and later radios, electric refrigerators, washing machines and many other gadgets of the new modern world.

Also, the Twenties were probably one of the better decades of the last century. Compared to other decades, which were characterized by war, depression, oppression, loss of freedom in many countries and many natural and man-made catastrophes worldwide, the Twenties of 100 years ago were not too bad of a time at all.

Lindbergh flew the Atlantic! Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs for the New York Yankees, an unheard of feat at the time. Other sports were becoming ever more popular. Brilliant, if silent, movies were enjoyed by millions all over the Western world.

It all ended, of course, with the stock market Crash of 1929, which quickly led to the Great Depression, the rise of dictators and later, World War II.

And here we are, about to start our own Twenties. But we can hope that our Twenties will be a tolerably nice decade also. Maybe terrorism will begin to fade away, the economy will continue to be healthy, that people worldwide — and us Americans, too — will learn to get along better. I can’t say I am overly optimistic that these good things will come to pass, particularly the part about people getting along together. But, we can hope, can’t we.

Yes, we can hope that the 2020s will be peaceful, prosperous and plentiful for all of us. And we can all play our small little parts in trying to make it so. Happy New Year and New Decade, my friends.