I remember it as clearly as yesterday. There it was in my Weekly Reader: “By the year 2000, the United States and the rest of the world will be using the metric system.”

When you’re in the third grade, you typically don’t have a subscription to the Wall Street Journal, so the Weekly Reader was pretty much my go-to publication for all things current and what would be decades in the future.

And believe me, in 1970, the year 2000 sounded like ...

My hometown of Ashdown, Arkansas, had Wal Mart #17. They’ve since built a Super Center, but during my early teen years, it was a small store.

It was the early 1970s and Sam Walton still made trips to the grand openings of his new stores. He was there when ours opened, ball cap, pick up truck, and all.

But at my age, I was far more interested in what was sitting in the entrance than what was inside the store.

A pinball machine.

It ...