Boomers: The Cold-War Generation Grows Up (14 page)

Children who lived during the Kennedy era experienced a moment in American youth culture that continued to fascinate Boomers far beyond the tragedy of Dallas. Almost as soon as the sixties ended, movie producers enticed patrons with catchphrases such as “Where Were You in '62?” and used the New Frontier era as a backdrop for Catskill dance contests, college food fights, and Baltimore teen rebellion against segregation. Probably 50 million Boomers were old enough to experience the Camelot years on some level, and most of the remaining members of that generation participated indirectly through “Oldies” music, retrospective films, or DVDs of period television series. What they witnessed was a transition in which television, films, popular music, and fashion would ultimately make the Boomers a prime target of attention.

In the early sixties two television programming trends and a significant technological innovation influenced Boomer viewing habits and their interaction with other family members. First, beginning in 1962, the television networks dropped most of their Westerns and filled many of these time slots with programs centered on World War II themes. Program developers who had exploited every conceivable aspect of the frontier experience now treated the recent global conflict from multiple angles.
Combat!, The Gallant Men
, and
Twelve O'clock High
focused respectively on the war in France, Italy, and the bomber offensive against Germany.
McHale's Navy
and
Broadside
provided comic views of the
Pacific war, featuring the crew of a PT boat and a detachment of W
AVES
.
The Rat Patrol
chronicled the North African campaign, and
Garrison's Guerrillas
delivered stories of undercover operations and spies. While historical accuracy and plot development varied enormously, these programs offered Boomer children a new perspective on the wartime experiences of their parents and an opportunity for discussion with them about this defining event. Every character, from the gritty bravery of Sergeant Saunders of
Combat!
to the officious pettiness of Captain Binghamton of
McHale's Navy
, provided a backdrop for family interchange between the “Greatest Generation” and their postwar heirs.

While this trend encouraged Boomers to see recent historical events from their parents' perspective, the other major programming shift emphasized the comic and dramatic aspects of growing up in the 1960s and sparked a different kind of dialogue. Comedies such as
Dobie Gillis
and
Patty Duke
viewed the high school experience through the interactions of teenagers and their parents.
Mr. Novak
added the perspective of an idealistic young English teacher and a somewhat more cynical school principal.
Fair Exchange
offered the intriguing premise of transatlantic comparisons of teenage experiences through young female exchange students.

If both these program concepts offered opportunities to bridge the parent-child divide, a major technological innovation began the move toward more isolated and fragmented viewing habits that are so much a part of twenty-first-century leisure activities. In the fifties most television sets had been bulky and seldom-moved pieces of furniture as much as entertainment appliances. Late in the decade, portable televisions were introduced that could be moved from room to room on a wheeled cart or carried with some difficulty.
In 1963 General Electric introduced a “personal portable” television, essentially an array of tubes encased in a lightweight plastic shell, which weighed about ten pounds and sold for $99. The new sets were colorful, relatively durable, and easily transportable, and quickly became a popular gift to children and teenagers, who could now watch their own choice of programs relatively free of adult supervision or decision-making. Yet the fifties tradition of family television viewing was not immediately broken, and for the near term Boomer kids seemed to slide effortlessly between the larger-screen (and, increasingly) color television in the living room or family room and the privacy of the new portable models.

Just as television viewing habits seemed to straddle two eras during the Kennedy years, the films watched by young people during this era looked backward and forward in their cultural impact. As noted earlier, teen horror and juvenile delinquency films largely peaked in the mid-to-late fifties and then rapidly disappeared in favor of new concepts. On the one hand, the films produced primarily for adolescent or preteen audiences in the early sixties demonstrate a trend away from young people as threats to society and more toward mildly comical adventures. This era produced the beginning of the “surf” trend, with teen heartthrobs Sandra Dee and James Darren initiating the
Gidget
series, and Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon countering with the
Beach Party
series. By this time, switchblades and leather jackets (in black and white) had given way to surfboards and skis (in color) as adults ranging from meddling parents to curious college professors looked on in bemusement at the sometimes incomprehensible antics of the young generation.

While the shift of film teens from gang wars to surfing tournaments was probably a net gain for parental piece of
mind, the trend in horror films clearly increased adult concern about influences on their children's behavior. The teen horror films of the fifties had been modestly violent but, in perspective, probably no more violent than the Westerns of that era. By the early sixties young people were temporarily supplanted as the focus of horror, but the plots, still often watched by young audiences, were far more disturbing. Two Alfred Hitchcock films released during the Kennedy era made the earlier teen horror films look mild by comparison and initiated a still controversial trend in youth viewing habits. Hitchcock's 1960 film
Psycho
shocked audiences with its famous “shower scene,” in which Janet Leigh's character is slashed to death by a psychotic motel manager played by Anthony Perkins. While the film attracted far more adult patrons than the teen horror movies, a good many young people viewed this genesis of the “slasher” genre. Three years later Hitchcock added a new dimension with
The Birds
. Filmed in color, it heightened the shock effect, replacing the single slasher scene with repeated bloody confrontations between malevolent birds and largely helpless humans. In one scene youngsters are savagely attacked at a birthday party, in another scene outside their classroom, and an eleven-year-old girl becomes a focal point for the terror as the threat heightens. While neither of these films offered the pessimistic vision of young people depicted in the fifties, their style served as a gateway for the genre that would concern parents and teachers for the foreseeable future.

The southern California youth culture, centered on surfing, cars, and high school sports rivalries, proved to be easily transportable to many parts of America far from an ocean, and made stars of California's Beach Boys.
(Michael Ochs Archives/CORBIS)

While a substantial number of television programs and motion pictures were clearly made with a Boomer audience in mind, much of the music industry was also concentrating on young people as its primary customers. Adult music enthusiasts still enjoyed dominance in prime-time television programs such as the
Perry Como Show
and the
Lawrence Welk Show
, and long-playing stereo albums commanded a majority of adult sales until later in the decade. But the targeted audience for the enormously popular “singles” format was now primarily Boomers while the rock-and-roll format preferred by this age group was becoming more sophisticated and sometimes inviting adults to join the fun.

As John Kennedy was settling into the White House, a new music craze was firmly drawing a line between the fifties and the sixties, and persuading more than a few adults that rock music was not as threatening as they initially believed. A few months earlier a young South Philadelphia teenager named Ernest Evans had released a record called
“The Twist” under the name of Chubby Checker. Beyond the catchy music, this new dance released listeners from the rules of couples' or line dancing and essentially made each person on the dance floor a free agent. Dancers on
American Bandstand
quickly adapted to the Twist, and soon very adult nightclubbers at trendy New York venues such as the Peppermint Lounge discovered that this was the first rock-and-roll format that could be adapted to older dancers—a reality made even more exciting by the emergence of women's fashions designed primarily for an evening of carefree Twisting. As this form of early-sixties rock and roll attracted a new, older audience that had previously rejected the music, other new trends solidified the preteen and adolescent Boomer audience that had initially been the target of the novelty tunes and teen idols of the late fifties.

A number of print, television, or motion picture chronicles of the sixties have emphasized the role of the Beatles and other British bands in “rescuing” a dying American popular music scene that had begun to unravel with the death or retirement of numerous rock pioneers. A closer examination of the period reveals that rock and roll had already entered an exciting transformation period by late 1962 or early 1963, fully a year before most Americans had heard of Paul McCartney or John Lennon. Much of the rebirth was the result of Boomers engaged as both consumers and creators of the new music. At least three major formats are evident in 1963, and each would have an important cultural and social impact on Boomer perceptions of their childhood and their environment.

The first trend was the emergence of a more substantial feminine presence in rock and roll in the form of “girl groups,” which included both ensembles and individual performers. While fifties teenage girls had bought substantial
numbers of rock-and-roll records, the music was sung almost entirely by male artists. Many hit songs were about girls but mostly concerned the triumph and tragedy of romance from a male perspective. This reality began to change in the early 1960s when a group called the Shirelles made a top hit with the haunting ballad “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” Quickly building on that success, three young husband-and-wife teams working out of the Brill Building in New York City, and a young male alumnus of a 1950s group working out of Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles, produced a string of records that featured female singers backed by increasingly sophisticated production values.

Chubby Checker, left, became the first superstar of the sixties when he enticed adults to enter the teenage world of rock and roll through the medium of the “Twist” dance craze.
(Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

The three couples, Gerry Geffen and Carole King, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, and Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, and the single man, Phil Specter, engaged in friendly
competition and lucrative collaborations to produce songs that often defined female Boomer adolescence yet had a pulsing, danceable beat that attracted male listeners. Enlisting female singers from a diversity of African-American, Latino, and white backgrounds, girl groups such as the Crystals, the Ronettes, and the Angels sang about a wide range of emotions, from pride in a nonconformist boyfriend (“He's a Rebel”) to frustration with parental interference (“We're Not Too Young to Get Married”), to the magic of meeting a potential life partner (“Today I Met the Boy I'm Going to Marry”). While often dismissed by adult critics as “teen operas,” these songs resonated so heavily with Boomer audiences that advertising executives of later decades would use songs like “Be My Baby” and “My Boyfriend's Back” as soundtracks for numerous commercials. The catchy lyrics continued to appeal to listeners who were born long after the original recordings.

While the girl groups were recruited primarily from the Northeast, a parallel but mostly male celebration of Boomer adolescence was growing at the other end of the continent. As the sport of surfing swept California beaches in the early sixties, a surfer-musician named Dick Dale provided an instrumental background to the pounding waves and the foaming sea. By 1962 an aspiring songwriter named Brian Wilson formed a group with his two brothers, a cousin, and a family friend and began to add lyrics to the surfing saga. They called themselves the Beach Boys, and their first album, “Surfin' Safari,” became a huge regional hit and a modest national success. In the summer of 1963 follow-up songs “Surfin' USA” and “Surfer Girl” carried the images of the California beach scene to Boomers who had never seen the ocean. Soon vocal duo Jan and Dean's song “Surf City,”
and instrumentals such as “Wipe Out” and “Pipeline,” were hinting that the West Coast, where the suntans of endless summer and the freeways patrolled by fleets of convertibles formed an adolescent paradise, was the single most attractive place in the world to be young.