Boomers: The Cold-War Generation Grows Up (8 page)

Most schoolchildren of the cold-war period became experienced veterans of duck-and-cover activities. Even the animated advice of Bert the Turtle and the suggestion that part of the exercise was in preparation for a natural disaster could not conceal the grim possibility of nuclear war.
(Bettmann/CORBIS)

Tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union never deteriorated to the point where the protection of school desks against atomic attack was tested. Yet, just as the oldest Boomer children settled into their sixth-grade routine, a real threat from the skies rocked the American school system to its core. On Friday, October 4, 1957, the Soviet space agency successfully launched the first man-made
object to achieve orbit around the Earth. A Soviet R-7 rocket lifted from the ground with a thunderous roar as five engines supplied over a million pounds of thrust. Speeding at more than 17,000 miles an hour, the rocket reached an altitude of 142 miles and released a 184-pound sphere studded with four antennae. Seconds later, radio signals beamed toward Earth with a distinct beeping sound. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev soon announced to the world that the age of space exploration had begun with a “demonstration of the advantage of socialism in actual practice.”

The launch of Sputnik was a fantastic propaganda triumph for the Soviet Union. Every ninety-six minutes a vehicle bearing a hammer-and-sickle insignia passed over the planet in an orbit that allowed Americans from New York City to Kansas an opportunity to glimpse mankind's first tentative baby steps into the cosmos. American newspapers and commentators gave a grudging compliment to their ideological rivals: “Orbiting with an eerie intermittent croak that sounds like a cricket with a cold, picked up by radio receivers around the world, Sputnik passes through the stratosphere on an epochal journey.”

When American children returned to school the following Monday, the repercussions of this achievement were already creeping into the classroom. During much of the preceding decade a significant portion of American educational thought had argued that American children were exposed to a curriculum that sacrificed essential academic skills in favor of socialization, peer acceptance, and marginally beneficial school activities. Now books such as
Why Johnny Can't Read
, lamenting the shortcomings of American schools, were joined by
What Ivan Knows That Johnny Doesn't
and
The Little Red Schoolhouse
, which promised to divulge what
Soviet schools did right.
Life
magazine spent much of the 1957–1958 school year publishing cover stories on “The Crisis in Education,” filled with comparison photos of Russian and American school activities. One pair of images showed a group of serious-minded Soviet children huddled over an imposing array of scientific equipment, contrasted with an American classroom where carefree students were learning the newest popular dance. An educational journal noted that “up to Sputnik, Little Ivan, just like little Johnny, went to school period, no story, no comment, and no one gave a hoot about the fact that Ivan was learning not quite the same thing in school as Johnny. Now we have the ‘Cold War Classroom' with press lines almost to the point of hysteria, as average Americans cannot believe that the educational effort of ‘backward Russia with savage Communist masters' could be so significant and important.”

Events over the next few months merely added to the growing sense of alarm. On the eve of the anniversary of the Russian Revolution in early November, Sputnik II was launched, and the thousand-pound sphere carried the first space passenger, a female terrier named Laika, who was placed in a pressurized cabin equipped with food dispensers and water. Laika did not survive a partial power failure, but the sound of a dog barking inside the massive craft scored another impressive Soviet propaganda triumph.

A December 1957 American launch attempt produced a stark contrast in space technology when the Vanguard rocket exploded into thousands of pieces, barely fifty feet above the Cape Canaveral launch pad. On the last day of January 1958 the United States salvaged a measure of pride when an army Jupiter rocket carried an 80-inch-long cylinder named Explorer I into successful orbit. America had entered the space
race, and Explorer achieved an orbit an impressive 1,563 miles above Earth. Yet its 30-pound, six-inch-diameter size seemed puny, and the launch did little to convince many Americans that Soviet schools were not outperforming American institutions. While many proposals for educational reform were focused on colleges and high schools, millions of Boomer elementary school children would be affected by Sputnik.

Salt Lake City became one of the first school districts to add Russian to its elementary school curriculum. Children at Bonneville Elementary School were profiled studying the rather exotic language by using Soviet textbooks, since no Russian texts were currently printed in the United States. Because Soviet texts were filled with pro-Communist propaganda, questionable paragraphs were cut out with razor blades. One cheerful pupil insisted, “This will help me get a good job with the government.” In Oklahoma City, TV station
KBTA
gave Russian courses for grade-school children three days a week while Portland, Oregon, elementary school kids peered through a telescope set up in a teacher's garden as every morning at 6
A.M
. they watched for Sputnik to pass over.

The Sputnik launch produced a barrage of calls for more toughness and rigor in American elementary schools. Substantial increases in foreign language, physical education, and science, down to the first-grade level, could be accomplished by cutting back on art and music instruction. Homework assignments could be substantially increased. The school year could be lengthened, and calls for that bane of childhood, year-round school, floated from one community to another. Yet most of these urgings proved to be less intrusive than children feared or educators hoped. Much of the new science education in elementary schools tended to
be more fun than drudgery. For example, a Riverside, California, elementary school quickly developed a science fair based on space exploration. A photo image shows a crowd of children, faces half hidden under cardboard space helmets, constructing a thirteen-foot-high cardboard rocket, control panel, and launching pad designed for a mock trip to the moon, while their delighted teacher insists that such activities will encourage students to “think mathematically.” Many young children were now determined to become astronauts, and new heroes were the handsome rocket scientist Wernher von Braun (a German refugee) and soon the astronauts Alan Shepard and John Glenn. Year-round schools, shorter vacations, and lengthened school days sounded frightening to an average ten-year-old Boomer child; but, in a mix of wishful thinking and almost adult perspective, these same ten-year-olds reasoned that their teachers too would not welcome year-round school and longer school days. Recreational and amusement interests would challenge the loss of revenue, and parents could never take a family vacation if holiday periods were staggered among different grades. In this case the kids were more on target about the real world than many educational theorists. While some school districts tinkered with their schedules, most Boomer children would retain their long summer vacations and mid-afternoon dismissals. On weekday afternoons and evenings, weekends, holiday breaks, and summer vacations, these postwar children would enter a world far removed from school. Their play and recreation would be nostalgically remembered a half-century later.

THE IMAGES
of a young generation at play in the 1950s are impossible to avoid: freckle-faced boys adjusting Mickey Mouse ears or Davy Crockett coonskin caps, giggling girls gyrating to the motion of colorful Hula Hoops, smiling children leaning out of the windows of the family station wagon as they near a beach resort or picnic grounds. Whatever the specific type of activity, the Boomers, like most children of any generation, were engaged in an adventure that expanded their horizons outward from their homes to the nation or world at large. Yet, more than most previous generations, this very act of recreation and exploration encouraged massive adult discussion, debate, and commentary. The birth of 76 million children between 1946 and 1964 produced an enormous incentive to channel the energies of this youth tidal wave into positive directions. But for the main players in this drama, the kids, the leisure world of the 1950s would produce a nostalgia that would stay with them through their adult lives.

The boys and girls who would become the parents of the Boomers had already experienced their own magical world
of play in the 1930s and 1940s. They had listened to Little Orphan Annie on the radio, read Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys books, followed comic-book heroes, and watched Dorothy travel from Kansas to Oz. Their world had offered Shirley Temple dolls, Red Ryder toy rifles, and Big Little books. But the magical world always had finite limits as depression and war instilled the need to sacrifice and make do with less. Now the prewar children had sons and daughters of their own, and much of the 1950s would be spent in an emotional tug-of-war. While the booming economy offered parents the opportunity to give their children more than they had experienced, the austerity of their own childhoods suggested that kids who received too much would become spoiled brats, unable to function well in a still conservative society.

The first hint that the Boomer generation would spend at least part of their leisure time differently from their parents could be seen in the transition in living-room furniture. The children of the 1930s and World War II had formed the one and only “radio generation.” The first decade of commercial radio broadcasting in the twenties held little of interest for children as the medium focused on news, farm reports, sports events, and recorded music. The more iconic programs—comedies, mysteries, and, above all, children's shows—began in the early to mid-thirties. Boys and girls sprawled on living-room floors and lounged on couches or chairs, always with their attention directed to the radio set that held pride of place in the parlor. The sons and daughters of the “radio kids” generation also sprawled and lounged in much the same positions, but their attention was focused on a flickering black-and-white screen that replaced the radio as the magic carpet to new worlds and adventures.

The first children's television hit show: the interaction between live actress Fran Allison and puppets Kukla and Ollie not only entranced postwar children but brought many adults into a charming and magical world that demonstrated the potential of the new medium.
(Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Remarkable new characters entranced Boomers and even their parents before the kids could even pronounce their names. Burr Tillstrom, a thirty-two-year-old puppeteer, teamed with Fran Allison, a middle-aged former teacher, radio singer, and actress, to present NBC's huge hit
Kukla, Fran and Ollie
. Allison was the human mediator between Kukla, a balding, beetle-browed puppet with an efficient, slightly superior air, and Ollie, a dragon with one tooth and a playboy personality who was a severe trial to Kukla's patience. “It is the undeniable opinion of many television set owners,” one magazine wrote, “that this is the most delightful program on the air.” For the first time in history, young parents could sit next to their wide-eyed children in their own living room and, for a moment, learn once again how
much fun it was to believe in the other realities their television set offered.