Boomers: The Cold-War Generation Grows Up (23 page)

THE END
of the 1960s marked the climax of a fascinating and influential era in the history of American childhood and youth culture. Many of the older Boomers were making the transition from student to worker and parent, perhaps wondering whether their generational warning to “not trust anyone over thirty” would apply to themselves, for that milestone loomed just over half a decade away. Meanwhile, behind the older Boomers were tens of millions of younger postwar children who would enter the seventies as preschoolers. They were
Brady Bunch
children, not members of Howdy Doody's Peanut Gallery, and their childhood and adolescence would be influenced by disco,
Star Wars
, Atari games, and MTV. If the older Boomers' classes were interrupted by news of John Kennedy's assassination, the younger Boomers' classroom television sets would be tuned to the Watergate hearings.

Postwar children who were old enough to experience a substantial portion of the fifties and sixties would spend much of the next few decades trying to understand their experience and how it jibed with broader depictions of the
era. Much of my purpose in this book has been to frame the period in terms of its particular perspectives. When the template is configured to include the experiences of typical, average participants in the fifties and sixties, a number of realities may be seen.

First, the Boomer generation grew up at a time when adult society was more interested in the activities of the nation's young people than in most other eras. From Benjamin Spock's best-selling book on babies to late-sixties adults adopting many of the fashions and hairstyles of their children, kid-watching became a national pastime. Just as seventeenth-century Puritan family portraits depict children as miniature adults, with scaled-down adult clothing and facial expressions, 1960s snapshots of teenage daughters
and
their mothers attired in blue jeans, and middle-aged fathers displaying the same long sideburns and wide belts as their sons, provide a visual clue that many adults closely watched the cultural activities of their children, and sometimes not so secretly envied them.

Second, it seems probable that most postwar children recognized their status as members of a huge numerical cohort relatively early in their childhood, and that more often than not they viewed this phenomenon as a blessing rather than a curse. Contemporary articles and my own interviews suggest that Boomers viewed their situation with anything from bemused acceptance to outright delight. Sharing bunk beds, cramped bedrooms, and playthings often became a virtual badge of honor, not unlike the “we can take it” pride of Londoners who endured the German Blitz. If the Boomer experience often meant that cakes and pizzas had to be sliced into smaller portions, it also provided a much greater assortment of potential playmates and friends in the
neighborhood. A child seeking a “best friend” with compatible attributes did not have to venture far to locate a likely candidate. The pool was often so large that a child could locate multiple “best friends,” which conveniently offered spare candidates in case of periodic disruptions.

Third, the emergence of the first young “television generation” proved to be quite different from what pessimistic critics or euphoric supporters of TV imagined. Boomers were the first generation of children exposed to the influence of television, and there is little doubt that many children did their homework on the living-room floor in front of a television, were sometimes more likely to watch a flickering video screen than read a good book, and spent more time memorizing the characters of TV Westerns than the multiplication tables. On the other hand, as late as the end of the sixties the average child had access to a television that carried only three or four channels, only a tiny fraction of twenty-first-century counterparts. Most contemporary accounts and interviews with Boomers indicate that they loved television, had numerous favorite programs, and watched far more late-night, adult-oriented shows than their parents either knew about or admitted. But in summer, on weekends, and in late afternoons many children preferred outdoor play to television viewing, and even at night the television provided mainly background noise as friends or family played Scrabble, Monopoly, or Game of Life, or enjoyed their toys. In fact, television often encouraged children to read more about the topic of a program. If TV was often distracting, it also could expand children's horizons in ways undreamed of even a generation earlier, and as the sixties ended it was clear that television was not about to recede as a major factor in the childhood experience.

Fourth, as the title of this book indicates, the children of this era are clearly the definitive “cold-war generation.” The all-encompassing reality of growing up in the quarter-century after World War II was the apparently permanent state of hostility and confrontation between the United States and the Communist bloc, led by the Soviet Union and supported by the People's Republic of China. Historians dealing with this period may argue over who initiated the cold war, how close civilization came to a nuclear Armageddon, and whether the confrontation was avoidable, but there is little argument that the cold war permeated American life.

Children of this era grew acclimated to the rhythms of the confrontation through numerous civil defense films, the “duck and cover” activities of the animated Bert the Turtle, and weekly air raid drills. Boomers wondered what would happen if a nuclear attack found them at school and separated from their parents, or on a bike ride home. Terms such as “fallout” and “radiation” were as familiar as “hopscotch” and “Wiffle ball.” Illustrated magazines on the living room coffee table provided photo essays on how to build a backyard fallout shelter and showed children playing board games in a basement crammed with survival gear.

On television the cold war sometimes offered more real-life drama than Westerns or action shows. The kindly, grandfatherly demeanor of Dwight Eisenhower and the youth, vigor, and determination of John Kennedy contrasted with the shoe-pounding threats of “We will bury you” from the menacing Nikita Khrushchev. If all the Boomers did not experience a Pearl Harbor or a 9/11, they endured a much longer period of vague threat punctuated by the major crises of Sputnik and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Yet just as Pearl Harbor and the World Trade Center produced positive emotions of solidarity, generosity, and personal sacrifice, the Boomer experience with the cold war was not uniformly negative. The initial shock of Sputnik gave way to more positive emotions in the building of model kits of the orbiting craft, construction of cardboard rockets in school classrooms, and the heightened availability of space helmets and futuristic play clothes in stores. If
Twilight Zone
episodes dealing with nuclear war were sobering, the activities of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo astronauts were breathtaking. This book ends just after the triumphant landing of Apollo XI effectively “won” the space-race component of the cold war.

These four provable realities of the Boomer childhood experience between 1946 and 1969 make it one of the best eras for growing up in America. Taking into account the implications of ongoing (if gradually diminishing) racial discrimination, gender bias, religious tensions, and ethnic exclusion, the period nonetheless was a genuinely positive time for most Boomers.

The children of the postwar era grew up in a period when the economic distress, dislocation, hardship, and lack of parental supervision of the depression and World War II had largely ended. Prosperity was sufficiently widespread that a reasonably comfortable lifestyle could be had with the earnings of one parent if the other chose to stay home. While some women did grow bored and unfulfilled in their roles as full-time housewives and mothers, the culture of the time certainly reinforced the vital importance of their contributions, and there is every suspicion that most children who lived in a home with a mother as homemaker had no desire to trade places with their friends who had two working
parents. Many homemaker mothers were involved with much more than shopping lists and meal preparations. They joined PTAs, served as den mothers or Girl Scout advisers, and volunteered for charity drives, all of which directly or indirectly had a positive effect on their children. On the other hand, if Boomer children were generally insulated from the dislocation and economic distress of the 1930s and early 1940s, they often grew up before the soaring divorce rate, the rise in out-of-wedlock births, and the economic necessity of two working parents turned the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries into a sometimes lonely and confusing experience. The children of this more contemporary era have sometimes been defined as “a tribe apart” as they confront blended families, parents working extended hours, and a world in which iPods, text messaging, and the internet often replace personal contact.

There is no “best” or “worst” time to be a child. The spectrum of childhood experience in any era exhibits a sometimes horrifying range between happiness and terror. Many Boomers who were old enough to experience the fifties and sixties in some form quickly adopted a special feeling about the fashion, the films, the music, and the attitudes of the these decades almost as soon as they ended. Boomers who were barely adults themselves looked sourly at disco, seventies television, and new fashions, and searched for the “good old days” in Oldies radio stations,
Happy Days
on television, and
Grease
on stage and screen. Yet as nostalgia swept through one part of the Boomer generation during the seventies, millions of their younger siblings and neighbors saw only magic in the newly dawning era. But that experience is another story.

THE PERIOD
from 1946 to 1969 quite probably witnessed the peak influence of mass-circulation magazines and journals in the United States, and many families were affluent enough to subscribe to a broad range of them. The media domination of cable television and the internet was still to come. Substantial elements of this book were gleaned from hundreds of period journals. An almost mandatory activity in a project of this nature is the investigation of
Life
and
Look
, the two major mass-circulation magazines of the era. While both of these periodicals contain the celebrity orientation of modern journals such as
People
and
Us
, they also presented serious discussions of the national and international scene and focused heavily on contemporary family life, parenthood, and childhood experiences. Coupled with their extensive, largely full-color advertisements, these two periodicals provide priceless glimpses into the daily world of the Boomers and their families.

The major news weeklies of the era are invaluable for their chronicles of important events of the period.
Time
and
Newsweek
provide an excellent narrative of primary news events while
U.S. News
offers substantially more material on school issues, parenting concerns, the economic and social impact of the Baby Boom, and projections of future trends in society. Several other general-audience periodicals proved surprisingly valuable.
Fortune
magazine featured highly readable assessments of the economic and
marketing aspects of the ongoing population explosion and included several multi-issue predictions about life in America in both the 1980s and the early twenty-first century.
Sports Illustrated
varied its nuts-and-bolts reports on sporting events with articles on the role of sports in all levels of education and the impact of race and gender changes in sports on the broader society.
T.V. Guide
offered far more than grids that highlighted television programming for a particular week in a particular year. It also featured extensive articles on the impact of television violence on young children, the possible effect of global television on education, and the future role of adult Boomers when they became the gatekeepers for their children's viewing experiences.

The role of children in families and the broader adult society seemed to be a perennial theme in mass-market women's magazines such as
Redbook, Ladies' Home Journal
, and
Good Housekeeping
. “Back to School” child fashion layouts were interspersed with features on discipline, social and school success, and the shared responsibilities of mothers and fathers. Even
Better Homes and Gardens
offered features on coping with overcrowding in new suburban houses and hints on managing the issues of shared bedrooms and study spaces.
Parents
magazine at times seemed almost, but not quite, a women's journal, as it conceded that mothers spent far more time with their children than fathers. But it carried just enough features on joint parents' concerns and the special roles of the male parent to provide a slightly different perspective than more general periodicals.

Two valuable references aimed at child readers were
Jack and Jill
and the
Mickey Mouse Club Magazine
. The former magazine offers excellent insights into the stories, games, and activities that were approved by parents of the time. Disney's offering features fascinating features on the relationship of 1950s children to young people of yesterday and tomorrow. In fact the initial article in the first issue in 1956 featured two children and their parents preparing to celebrate New Year 2000, and comparing their lifestyles to those of their counterparts nearly five decades earlier. While the feature provided only mixed results in the accuracy of its predictions, it offered an excellent perspective on how child Boomers may have perceived their adult future.