Consigning P. G. Wodehouse to the same attic as rug beaters, car cranks and India ink?

The corollary of state-of-the-art technology is obsolete technology.

We have recently contemplated here the plight of a fifth-grade schoolboy who couldn’t call home from school because he didn’t know how to use a dial telephone.

Before long the dial telephone will be gone, and no schoolboy can be embarrassed by its sudden appearance.

George Matter of Fullerton notes the passing of a humbler tool of everyday life--the carpet (or rug) beater.

“Do you remember spending hours as a boy with a carpet beater beating the dust and dirt out of rugs hung on the clothesline each spring and fall? Where would one find a carpet beater today?”

Indeed I do remember the carpet beater. Carpets or rugs were always beaten on a nice spring day. You helped your mother drag the rug out of the house and hang it on the clothesline. Then your mother handed you the rug beater and said, “Here.”

It was unthinkable, of course, that your mother should be seen beating a rug. So you had no choice. I can remember no boyhood chore that was more degrading than standing out there in the yard, visible to all the neighbors, beating dust out of a rug. With each whack the dust exploded out of the rug in a cloud. You chocked and sneezed. Then, whack! you hit the rug again.

It was not only humiliating to be assigned to such a mean task, it was embarrassing that the rug that had lain in your living room could be so filthy.

There were compensations. You could think of the rug as the cause of your humiliation, and that way you could enjoy each punitive whack. Put your shoulder in it. In a way, it was man’s work. You were a knight. Beating that rug was a way of exorcising all your devils. In the very act of helping your mother you could be symbolically punishing her for subjecting you to such a debasing chore.

As I remember it, the rug beater was made of heavy webbed wire, something like a snowshoe, with a wooden handle. It could have served no other purpose.

They do not exist today. The vacuum cleaner has replaced them. Or the man who comes to your house to do the rugs.

I doubt that you could even find a clothesline to hang a rug on.

Matter also remembers automobile cranks. “Now where,” he asks, “would you find a crank today, or even a slot and shaft to use it on?”

Cranking a car was worse than beating a rug, because it was more dangerous. Many a hapless motorist sprained or even broke an arm trying to crank a reluctant engine into life on a cold morning. But at least it was a manly chore, with strength required and a risk involved, and the sound of an engine catching and roaring into its cycle was its reward.

Not only does technology fall quickly into the void, but so also do our heroes--especially our literary heroes.

Gene Dow reports on the almost complete disappearance of the once-beloved British humorist, P. G. Wodehouse, creator of the inimitable Jeeves.

“I went to three bookstores in search of a book by that master of comedy writing (Waldenbooks, Crown and Dalton’s). In none of them had the clerks even heard of P. G. I think he would have been delighted at the last store, where the clerk asked me, ‘Is that the Englishwoman on TV who trains dogs?’ ”

Karel Lea Meyer, office administrator for Data Resources Inc., assures me that there are a few young people, like her, “who know a little history and read a little Shakespeare.”

Ms. Meyer thinks many young people don’t take to history because of the way it is taught, as a recitation of facts. She thinks “history is fun when it deals with everyday life, with the motivations of the people involved, and with intrigue.

“My best friend, Donna, had a high school history teacher who acted out the roles of the various figures they were studying at the time and consequently got her hooked on history as a hobby.” That sounds like a good idea. I wonder how that teacher did Richard III. The way Richard Dreyfuss played him in “The Goodbye Girl”? That would make history come alive.

Lynne Page of Thousand Oaks has an easy answer to what’s wrong with youth today: felt-tip pens.

“What can we expect of a generation who never lettered a map with nib and India ink?” she asks.

“Who can forget the map that had to be redone after hours of painstaking work because, when scratching across the last T in the last line of the legend, the nib sprayed black spots like a plague across Europe?

“That was how we learned that life may not be fair, but we must persevere.

“Who can forget the geology illustration dominated by what began as a sketch of a chip of obsidian but grew blotch by blotch into a black glass boulder. That was how we learned to be flexible. Who can forget cutting out little yellow poppies to paste on the map of California to cover the ink drops that rained in the desert where they couldn’t authentically be covered by a mission? That was how we learned ingenuity.”

What I remember about India ink is that it was absolutely ineradicable, despite the little bottles of a clear fluid that was guaranteed to remove it.

That’s how we learned to live with our mistakes.