Boomers: The Cold-War Generation Grows Up

by Victor D. Brooks

  Most of the new ranches and at least some of the colonials and split-levels had a feature that illustrated the downside of postwar tract housing. Many 1950s and 1960s homes were not only considerably smaller than their twenty-first-century counterparts, they were also more cramped and shoddily constructed than models built several decades earlier. Traditional attics and basements had become less than standard features on “contemporary” homes, creating a never-ending storage crisis. Bulky children’s items such as tricycles, bicycles, and strollers vied with lawn mowers, grills, and gardening equipment in crawl spaces, garages, and driveways. Even that icon of suburban upward mobility, the two-car garage, frequently became the no-car garage, containing every wheeled object except an automobile.

  The interior of a new Boomer-era home was often equally cramped. Cost-cutting imperatives reduced halls to a claustrophobic width of thirty-six inches, which turned passage from one room to another into a complex maneuver when two family members met along the route. Many new kitchens had space for a counter and stools, but the absence of a traditional table often turned breakfast into a stand-up meal on the go. The combination of thin walls and one-floor design in a ranch home often made adult television viewing in the living room a major sleep impediment for younger children, who might have to put pillows over their ears to reduce laugh tracks and commercial noise. One of many Life articles on the realities of suburban living implied that behind the façade of cozy ranches were frayed nerves and petty arguments caused by close quarters and unstored toys.

  Whatever the merits or defects of postwar homes, they became the setting for a frenetic social drama centered on new parents and their burgeoning families. While there was no “ideal” or “typical” Boomer family, some general patterns are noticeable. First, the average marriage age for young men and women was gradually falling until in 1957 it reached 21.5 years for males and 19.5 for females. This meant that a large percentage of girls were becoming engaged late in high school or very early in college. Newspaper wedding announcements featured great numbers of teenage brides and only marginally more mature grooms. Second, these young newlyweds started their families quickly, which in turn pushed the average family size toward four children. By the mid-1950s more families had six children than had one child, while childless couples seemed relegated to peripheral status in family dynamics. The cast of characters in these ongoing family dramas also included fewer non-nuclear family members as the number of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins living full time in the same family home as mother, father, and children dropped substantially.

  The family-life dramas that engaged young Americans across the continent showed considerable continuity with past counterparts but contained enough unique aspects to promote interest decades later. A peek into a representative 1950s home would often reveal an amazingly young, rather formally dressed mother barely out of her teens, organizing a household of several children and deputizing the slightly older ones to take some responsibility for their younger siblings while she cleaned, shopped, and cooked. In this occasionally magic and frequently hectic environment, older children became confidants to their young mothers as they formed a special bond based on their partial responsibility for the great enterprise of “family life.”

  While spanking and screaming at children had not disappeared from parents’ corrective repertoire, the strict environment of earlier decades had mellowed considerably as many mothers exhibited the patience, grace, and intelligence of the well-known TV mothers—a June Cleaver, a Donna Reed, or a Harriet Nelson—while often interacting with far more children than their television counterparts.

  Gender roles also seemed to be gradually softening as the postwar family structure crystallized. Far more postwar women drove automobiles than their mothers had, both through the necessity of a car-oriented suburban culture and a sense of empowerment that driving was not exclusively a male prerogative. In those suburbs with access to public transportation, the wife often logged more driving time than the commuter train—dependent father, who was now relegated to weekend and vacation driving in a vehicle that had tacitly become “mom’s car.” As driving errands now shifted to more of a female role, the rise of the “barbeque” culture turned more than a few men into amateur cooks. Contrary to myths that hapless 1950s males found heating a frozen TV dinner daunting, this era turned much of the outdoor cooking experience into a male domain. From backyard grills to picnic fireplaces, young fathers, with or without “World’s Greatest Chef” hats, became iconic figures of the period and often passed their skills to their sons. The gradual shift to more night and weekend hours, from pediatricians’ offices to supermarkets, also contributed to a softening of gender roles as doctors’ visits and shopping excursions more frequently engaged both husband and wife far more than the strict weekday hours of prewar shopping and services.

  Gender roles among children were also changing, more than is apparent from looking merely at the doctor/nurse divide in medically oriented toys. The black toy doctor bag did have stern-looking glasses, absent from the white nurse bag, and included more active diagnostic instruments and fewer bandages. But the distinction between “cowboys” and “cowgirls” was much smaller, as girls were “allowed” to have guns, holsters, hats, and boots, much the same as boys.

  Perhaps the most flexible gender relationships occurred as older children were often designated junior parents in the crowded households of the times. Many boys changed younger siblings’ diapers, took them for walks in strollers, and rode their bikes to the store with a grocery list from their mothers. Girls helped move heavy furniture, showed their little brothers how to play basketball, and helped their mothers wash and polish the car. Various levels of babysitting experience often depended more on age than on gender; few parents would hire an outside baby-sitter to watch younger children if there was a twelve-year-old son in the house, and at least some boys expanded their baby-sitting to include neighbors’ kids, just as girls took on newspaper deliveries in some communities.

  Much of the image of American society from the late 1940s to the early 1960s is based on the concept of a comfortable but rather conservative lifestyle with relatively little questioning of the status quo. Yet investigation of contemporary sources reveals that discussions about optimal methods of parenting and adult-child relations were noticeable in almost every medium, and young couples were convinced and delighted that they were entering a new frontier of family relationships. In fact, period discussions about the 1950s equivalents of “soccer moms,” “helicopter parents,” and “tweeners” culture appear quite modern in tone. Yet, along with these recognizable concerns there are strong suggestions that the fifteen to twenty years following World War II were indeed “Happy Days” for both parents and their children.

  Most important, this period represents one of the high points of family stability in the entire American experience. Earlier in the century, the high mortality of parents from epidemics, work-related accidents, and childbirth complications produced a strong possibility that childhood would be marred by orphanage residence, unpleasant stepparents, difficult stepsiblings, or placement with less than welcoming aunts, uncles, or cousins. Later in the century, after the Boomer age, skyrocketing divorce rates and a sharp rise in out-of-wedlock births created a parallel world of uncertainty and lack of affection for children. Yet for a relatively brief period, the optimistic portrayal of childhood and family experience in the media and literature of postwar America did reflect reality. Children lived in a world of stable and seemingly happy marriages where divorce seemed to be a feature primarily of the Hollywood acting community, and fatalities from work accidents, disease, and childbirth were substantially reduced. The only family distress that was significantly more likely in the early postwar period than in the twenty-first century was the far higher incidence of childhood disease. At best, most children and their frazzled parents lived through bouts of measles, chickenpox, and mumps, which, if seldom fatal, were rather serious illnesses requir
ing considerable bed rest and intense parental care. The majority of early Boomer children also experienced a painful trip to the hospital as pediatricians seemed obsessed about the health implications of swollen tonsils. Relatively few children escaped a tonsillectomy, whose pain and hospitalization were offset by the dubious promise of “all the ice cream you can eat” after the operation. But by far the most terrifying shadow hovering over any family was infantile paralysis, the polio that had crippled the recently deceased president and spurred the annual March of Dimes campaigns. The crippling or death of tens of thousands of Boomer children was quite possibly the single greatest calamity in postwar households until Dr. Jonas Salk joined Benjamin Spock in the pantheon of parental heroes when he perfected the first successful polio immunization vaccine in 1955.

  The benign influence of relatively high levels of family stability was paired with relaxed discipline and heightened parental involvement that made the period a nostalgic era for children. American mothers of the period often appear as confident, friendly, caring young women who drove children to shopping centers, splashed them in a backyard pool, and served milk and cookies to a circle of avid television viewers. Fathers emerge as relaxed, strong, involved figures who were less likely to spend the evening with “the boys” in a local tavern or bowling alley and were now finding their stride as Little League coaches and scout leaders. But if the specter of childhood disease was the dark cloud threatening an otherwise stable family structure, excessive parental involvement now emerged as a less positive side of the “child-friendly” attitude of the period.

  A 1958 article by Robert Paul Smith, a rising expert on parent-child relations, coined the mildly disturbing term “Big Brother Parents,” which hinted at an almost Orwellian control of childhood activities. Smith lamented the rise of “a well-intentioned horde of interfering parents who give their kids no chance to have fun by themselves.” In an almost eerie preview of twenty-first-century issues, the author insisted, “The way you play soccer now is you bring home from school a mimeographed schedule for the Saturday morning leagues. The schedule is arranged by a mathematical process of permutation that would take six mathematicians to figure out. Parents are now playing someone else’s game. All the parents who cannot refrain from interfering in the wonderful world of a child have invented a whole new modern posture—child watching.” Smith empathized with a young mother who complained that when her daughter was “initiated” in the Brownies, all the mothers had to be admitted too, a ceremony that concluded with an almost comic scene of the mothers standing in a line and reciting the Brownie oath. Similar articles reported that while young parents were often delighted that their children liked spending time playing under adult supervision, many of the youngsters were embarrassed when the parents made spectacles of themselves as Little League umpires or replaced their daughters when going door-to-door to sell Girl Scout cookies. A major question of the time was whether parents wanted their children to be more grown up, or whether parents wanted to be more like their kids.

  At first glance the home setting for young Boomer children would look rather contemporary to a twenty-first-century observer. The house would be bright, airy, and well lit, the kitchen appliances would appear modern, and the youthful noise would be familiar. On closer inspection, substantial differences would begin to appear. In summer, the cool, quiet hum of central air-conditioning systems would give way to steamy warmth, only slightly moderated by noisy electric fans dotted around the house. Before the very end of the 1950s, entertainment and communication devices would most likely be limited to one black-and-white television with a twelve-to twenty-one-inch screen; a floor-or table-model radio in the living room; one or two black, dial telephones, one located in the kitchen, living room, or entrance hall with a possible second in the parents’ bedroom; and a “hi-fi” record player stocked with 33⅓ rpm albums.

  A glance at children’s bedrooms would reveal two important differences from the twenty-first century. Depending on the age of the occupants, the bedrooms would include toy chests; posters of movies, comic-book heroes, or music celebrities; sports pennants and photos; and similar decorations. Few electronic devices could be found, and human child voices would be much more common than any other sound. Some fortunate children of the late 1950s might have their families’ old twelve-inch television sets if a new twenty-one-inch model had been purchased; some children would have a small plastic clock radio on a nightstand. Preteens might have a small record player capable of playing a stack of the new 45 rpm “singles” that emerged with the birth of rock music. A tiny number of relatively affluent preteens or early teenagers, especially girls, might have their own phones, but this was a coveted possession seen much more often on television or in films than in real bedrooms.

  A second important difference, compared to the twenty-first century, was the bedroom with two or even three beds. The growing number of bedrooms in new home styles never kept pace with the increase in family size of the period, and the result was a premium on shared sleeping space. Most new homes featured three bedrooms, and since a fairly typical Boomer-era family had three to five children, bedroom sharing was almost inevitable. Most children’s bedrooms featured either two twin beds or a bunk-bed configuration, but a single twin bed and a double bunk were also common in families with five or more children or families with four kids with a 3-to-1 gender ratio. Given space limitations, families might allow mixed accommodations among young children, but this was usually a temporary stopgap before a move or home expansion.

  A closer examination of other rooms in a Boomer household would reveal other technological limitations that often affected the childhood experience. A modern 1950s kitchen included a refrigerator and stove, sometimes in matching colors, and a sink that often came with a spray hose attachment. Microwave ovens were still primarily a figment of science fiction, and automatic dishwashers would be uncommon for another decade. The “TV dinner” was now available and heavily advertised but in fact was viewed largely as a backup or emergency alternative; few housewives would dream of serving them regularly. This level of technology had relieved much of the drudgery of a half-century earlier, but in food preparation and after-meal cleanup the mother could assume that she would receive at least some family help. A laundry room or basement would reveal the same mixed technology. Most homes now had an electric washing machine; relatively few still featured the external hand-operated wringer. But automatic gas or electric dryers were still a novelty until well into the 1960s, and wash day featured a backyard filled with intricate clotheslines with an array of clothes, towels, and sheets flapping in the breeze like colorful sails. Doing the wash also called for children’s help, and very few Boomer kids reached adulthood without knowing how to use clothespins or how heavy a basket of wet wash might be.

  Thus even a cursory tour of an average Boomer’s childhood home would reveal three somewhat different realities compared to a twenty-first-century experience. First, technology was still relatively limited; second, privacy was very limited; and third, the concept of children’s chores was still an important part of family life. The many Boomer childhood ideas about cooperation, boredom, fun, and adult authority might be different from those of their children and grandchildren.

  The children of this era fought over viewing preferences on the single television set, played Monopoly or Clue on the living-room floor with brothers, sisters, and friends, screamed that an obnoxious sibling had “cooties,” and helped one another put on snow boots that seemed to feature an infinite number of finicky buckles. A world of relatively large families and tighter household budgets guaranteed numerous variations on the theme of sharing, ranging from cutting jelly doughnuts in half to group ownership of some toys. Almost every household activity became an exercise in negotiating or bartering, yet these actions were so common that few children consciously thought about them.

  A shared bedroom made privacy a luxury, and the limited capacity of hot-water heaters virtually guaranteed that a
warm shower could turn frigid in the rush for the school bus. Yet there were always plenty of available players for Scrabble or Crazy Eights, and older brothers and sisters were more often protective and caring than obnoxious and bossy. This meant that unless a child was the oldest in the family, when Boomer kids made their first treks to school, they would not be alone. This comfort, however, was scarcely reassuring to the harried principals and teachers who watched a tidal wave of youngsters surge into their already bulging institutions. While Boomer homes might be crowded, it was the jammed classrooms that were now gaining national attention.

  3

  SCHOOL DAZE: FROM SPLIT SHIFTS TO SPUTNIK

  BENJAMIN SPOCK’S cheerful suggestions on baby and child care encouraged many young parents to believe they could somehow meet the challenges of rearing multiple children. But in school district offices across the country, the surging birthrate was prompting a crisis atmosphere that would dominate educational policies for almost two decades. Unlike parents, obstetricians, and pediatricians, most school officials and teachers did not have to deal with the impact of the Baby Boom from the time of its inception in January 1946. It would be early in the next decade before the first cohort of Boomers reached school. On a series of bright, late-summer days in 1952, however, the Boomers and the American school system were introduced to each other in the educational equivalent of the Normandy invasion.

  A year earlier, school personnel had received a preview of coming attractions when a mixture of the youngest war babies and the oldest Boomers had crowded schools designed largely for low prewar birthrates. Now, in 1952, the first class made up entirely of Boomers, the future high school class of 1964 and the college class of 1968, pushed public school attendance over the 34 million mark amid projections that even this staggering number would increase by an additional 50 percent by the end of the fifties. (In 1940 school attendance had been 25.4 million.) Unlike an enemy sneak attack or a natural disaster, the initial surge of children into first grade occurred with plenty of advance warning. But the heroic responses of a nation at war had perhaps worn thin in peacetime as half-measures, wishful thinking, and competing educational demands produced an educational crisis that at times threatened to spin out of control. For example, in the early 1950s the percentage of teenagers remaining in high school until graduation was soaring just as the Boomers hit the lower grades, forcing superintendents to create stopgap measures at opposite ends of the educational ladder. Semi-rural areas that had made do with a single consolidated school were now burgeoning suburbs requiring six new elementary schools at the same time. Low prewar birthrates had produced a meager pool of new teachers—just as the need for their services exploded.