How the Good Times Rolled: What We Did for Fun Before the Digital Age with Historical Photos from the Grand Traverse Area

Not so long ago, we spent our hours enjoying life in a world of hunting and fishing, playing card games and working jigsaw puzzles, reading books and writing postcards, making music and listening to it. We played sports, we danced, we went to occasional movies and were enthralled. We sat and talked with our friends, we celebrated our holidays modestly, but well. Sometimes, we smoked and we drank.

Then we became distracted by the tools of our age: computers, smart phones, tablets, video games,

and television. We began to forget the things we used to do as we pursued lives embedded in social media and virtual worlds of our making. We began to lose the capacity to be alone in nature. We began to forget where we came from.

How the Good Times Rolled tells how we used to take joy in life before the digital age.
It reminds us that the real world of nature – and of flesh-and-blood people – offers the greatest
reward of happiness. As we hurtle forward to a future we do not understand, it bids us to
remember who we were and who, in our heart of hearts, we really are.