Welcome to the future. We’ve been waiting all our lives for 2017.
For generations, people have wondered what life would be like in this glorious time. With the aid of library databases, we searched for “the year 2017” in news articles over the past century or so.
Put on your paper clothes and enjoy your breakfast capsules. Let’s journey back to the fascinating future of 2017.
• 1913: Dr. J.H. Kellogg of Denver predicted nothing more than the end of U.S. civilization in 2017 because women were “losing their maternal instinct and the capacity for motherhood.”
According to his calculations, “the fertility of the American wives is decreasing at the rate of 1 percent per year,” and “insanity and idiocy are on the increase.”
By 2017, there would be no babies left, he calculated. The youngest children would be 5 years old.
• 1917: The Scarab Club of Detroit held a dance in which attendees were asked “to attend garbed in the clothes of 2017, A.D.”
The Detroit News predicted that 21st century people would dress “to their caste and estate” because society would be divided between “half-enslaved laborers” and “the monied classes.”
People would “tear open the sealed packet that contains your simple paper garb for the day,” and break open “a couple of hermetically sealed capsules” to “sip your concentrated breakfast.”
Fashions would be unisex. “You might not be able to tell a man from a woman at fifty yards!” the newspaper said. “Perhaps 2017 A.D. won’t want to.”
• 1917: The Butte Daily Post of Montana published this knee-slapper titled “In 2017.” Apparently, you had to be there to fully appreciate it.
“What you are reading about?”
“Ancient customs in 1917. It seems the ancients used to find food very cheap as compared with us. They had dollar dinners.”
“Some of these stories about the ancients we have to take with a grain of salt. There is even a tradition that they had free lunches.”
• 1932: Dr. Samuel A. Mitchell, director of the Leander McCormick Observatory at the University of Virginia, said the New England solar eclipse of Aug. 31, 1932, would be the last promising opportunity for North American astronomers to gather vital information until Aug. 21, 2017.
“The coming generation may find methods of investigating chromosphere and corona with such success that observations at eclipses will no longer be necessary,” he said.
• 1957: Percival Brundage, budget director of the House Appropriations Committee, said the national debt would be wiped out by 2017 — if the U.S. government paid $9.1 billion every year for the next 60 years.
• 1959: Meeting with 9-year-old Cub Scouts in the White House, President Dwight D. Eisenhower said:
“Add 60 years to the year in which we now are. That would be the year 2017 when this child, this individual, will be attaining my fairly venerable years. This world is going at such a rapid state he and Americans like him will need to know much more than we do. And they must do it.”
• 1966: With only 13.49 inches of rain, it was the driest year ever recorded in Kansas. As the Hutchinson News reported:
“Clip this little item and file it where your grandchildren can have access to it half a century hence. If you lived in Hutchinson, Reno County, or within a 40-mile radius of same, you had a part in making climactic history — stuff that makes dry reading, but which will interest them in the year 2017.”
• 1967: Dorothy Gray cosmetic company looked into its crystal ball to predict trends for 2017.
Paste-on features would change the structure of a face from neckline to hairline. Toss-in-the-wash wigs would be freshly coiffed in “the supersonic laundry of tomorrow.” Plastic surgery in the form of silicone injections would provide instant youth.
• 1967: Dr. John R. Platt, a biophysicist with the Mental Health Research Institute at the University of Michigan, predicted that 2017 couples would practice birth control through an oral contraceptive placed in common food such as salt, sugar, bread, rice or beer.
“Of course, any couple that really wanted to have a baby would have to go down the street and buy untreated food from the other store,” he said.
• 1971: The NBC-TV series The Name of the Game featured an episode titled “LA 2017” in which lead character Glenn Howard (Gene Barry) was transported to 2017 when everyone in Los Angeles was forced underground by air pollution.
• 1972: Georgia-Pacific Corp. began helicopter “air drops” of fertilizer across 4,423 forested acres in Oregon “to speed up the harvest” of trees for plywood and lumber products in 2017.
1981: Statistics Canada, a national agency, noted that women’s wages were playing a slow-but-steady game of catch-up with men’s wages and “should be equal by the year 2017.”
“I think it’s encouraging, although we still have a long way to go,” noted Alison Roberts, director of the Ontario labor ministry’s women’s bureau.
• 1982: Lloyd Kaye, an executive at New York consulting firm William M. Mercer Inc., warned that because of inflationary pressures, a man would need $1 million or more in 2017 “to live as comfortably in retirement as he did during his working years.”
• 1984: U.S. Sen. Howard Metzenbaum led a filibuster as the Senate considered a bill to extend until 2017 a Depression-era contract selling electricity from Hoover Dam at half-cent per kilowatt hour. “This is a giveaway,” the Democrat fumed. “It is a throwaway. It is illogical. It is absurd.”
• 1986: Television networks refused to air a W.R. Grace & Co. ad that criticized the “Me” generation for failing to halt the national debt when it was climbing above $2 trillion. The ad showed children in the year 2017 putting parents on trial for not addressing the deficit.
“Are you ever going to forgive us?” one elderly defendant wailed.
• 1987: Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in the movie The Running Man about a futuristic TV game show in which citizens were hunted for entertainment. “It is the year 2017, and America is ruled by a totalitarian government that controls the hungry masses with brutality and lots of bad TV programming,” one critic noted.
Mark J. Price is a Beacon Journal copy editor. You can reach him at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.