A friend gave me some DVDs of Groucho Marx’s game show from the ‘50s. One of the contestants was an older man and Groucho asked him what his first job was. The man casually responded, “Well, after the Civil War I worked as a courier.” I just stared in awe. He said it so matter-of-factly...like we might say we remember Desert Storm or Vietnam. It really gave me a sense of how young this country is.
There was a great movie about a Sergeant at West Point who had worked there for 50 years. He had joined the Army to get out of paying for (his) broken dishes at the West Point mess hall, which job he got right off the boat from Ireland. At the end of the movie he was asking Eisenhower for permission to not retire... When the movie was made, West Point had only been an institution for 150 years.