Boomers: The Cold-War Generation Grows Up

by Victor D. Brooks

  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.

  4

  LEISURE WORLD

  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.

  Tillstrom and Allison soon had competition in the form of another, more frenetic human-marionette interchange. The Howdy Doody Show featured a live audience of exuberant preschoolers seated in a row of bleachers calle
d the Peanut Gallery. The two stars of the daily show were genial, burly “Buffalo Bob” Smith, dressed in a Western-style fringe outfit, and his puppet counterpart, Howdy Doody, a freckle-faced redheaded boy dressed in miniature plaid shirt, neckerchief, and blue jeans. Buffalo Bob’s major nemesis was the irrepressible clown Clarabelle, who communicated only through honks of a horn while spraying victims with seltzer bottles, while Howdy’s antagonist in the town of Doodyville was the mean, supercilious banker Phineas T. Bluster. The show was fast-paced yet gentle. By episode’s end, Clarabelle would behave, Mr. Bluster would prove capable of good deeds and empathy, and the television audience would learn much about friendship and conflict resolution.

  Kinescope recordings of Kukla, Fran and Ollie and Howdy Doody often appear primitive compared to Sesame Street and The Electric Company, yet for the first cohorts of Boomers and many of their parents they offered access to an almost unlimited universe beyond the home. Because television was so new, it carried some of the same shared wonder now produced by the internet. Even as these original programs gave way to more sophisticated fare, some portion of the special bond between television and the first generation that grew up with the medium would remain.

  Television is the leisure activity most associated with children of the fifties and early sixties, not because it was the Boomers’ dominant recreation—it probably was not—but because of their unique status as the first “TV generation.” The limited number of channels in the precable era, the limited hours each station broadcast, and the limited number of television sets in each household ensured that the youngsters of this era could never match their children or grandchildren in the opportunity to watch television almost continuously. Yet these very limitations created a much stronger sense of shared community, an almost village-like experience of viewing in which family members, friends, and schoolmates often watched the same program so that discussion of a particular show might carry over from the living room to the schoolyard the next day. The viewing of some evening programs became family events.

  Boomer children would generally participate in three sometimes distinct but overlapping television experiences: children’s television, specifically directed at young viewers, in which adults were merely tolerated; family programs, which sought to attract both children and their parents; and adult-oriented shows geared for a more mature audience but either surreptitiously or openly viewed by children as a glimpse of a world beyond childhood. Television viewing was also a changing universe: the oldest Boomers gradually left the more juvenile shows to their younger siblings, and the networks frequently canceled programs and forced children to experiment with a new show, so that no two television seasons were ever exactly alike. Yet even if the world of early television was hardly static, there were enough characteristic programs or formats to provide insight into the Boomers’ viewing experience.

  The children’s programs on the networks (NBC, CBS, ABC, and, early on, DuMont) usually featured action geared to short attention spans, sometimes used children as important characters, and advertised products aimed at a young audience. Children’s programs could be live, animated, or a combination of the two, and would usually be broadcast weekday mornings, afternoons, or early evenings, and Saturday morning, either live or on film.

  The most successful weekday children’s program of the 1950s was the Mickey Mouse Club, which captured the attention of much of the young population of that era. The program featured a cast dominated by talented, photogenic children between eight and twelve years of age, who danced and sang in almost vaudevillian routines, introduced by the only significant adult presence, Jimmy Dodd. While all the Mouseketeers quickly enjoyed fan clubs, a few children became early idols of Boomer kids. The two youngest performers, eight-year-olds Cubby O’Brien and Karen Pendleton, were precocious, cute, and the only kids who were actual Boomers themselves. Twelve-year-olds Annette Funicello and Tommy Kirk were the most versatile, which led them to post-Mousketeer acting and singing careers. One of the most attractive elements of the program was that each day had a separate theme, such as “Fun with Music” day, and stage action was interspersed with filmed serials, such as Spin and Marty and the Hardy Boys episodes. Product tieins to the series were heavily advertised, and millions of children clamored for the attachable mouse ears that would become one of the symbolic images of Boomer childhood.

  The hugely successful Mickey Mouse Club usually led into more localized children’s fare in the time slots just before or even during dinnertime. Many local stations found a profitable niche for recycled 1930s and 1940s comedy shorts and cartoons, so that many Boomer children watched various Three Stooges Shows and Popeye Theaters hosted by local personalities. More than a few perplexed children tried to decipher Swing Era slang and jokes or wondered why Popeye was fighting 1950s allies such as the Germans or Japanese.

  Daily afternoon programs were followed by early evening primetime shows that emphasized a family-friendly or child-friendly component. Rin Tin Tin, Lassie, My Friend Flicka, and Circus Boy were filmed dramatic series in which the central characters were children, often orphaned or in a single-parent home, and frequently paired with a highly intelligent animal. The evening time slots of these programs ensured at least some level of adult audience, and commercials were a mix of general family products and items of specific interest to children.

  Prime-time children’s programs either competed with or led into the broadest category of network television programming, shows developed for the entire family with sponsors geared to adult purchase. Ten years after the first tentative steps toward network broadcasting, a fairly standardized series of formats began to dominate mid-evening family viewing. A glance at a network program grid from 1957 reveals a variety of formats centered on programs that would become icons of fifties popular culture. Situation comedies such as I Love Lucy, Father Knows Best, and Ozzie and Harriet; Westerns such as Maverick, Wyatt Earp, and Sugarfoot; and comedy/variety programs including Jackie Gleason, Red Skelton, and George Gobel were eagerly anticipated events for all age groups. Only the enormously popular and mostly rigged quiz-show format of Twenty-One, Sixty-Four Thousand Dollar Question, and Tic Tac Dough was an endangered species, and as congressional pressure forced their cancellation, they were quickly replaced by Donna Reed, Leave It to Beaver, and Bonanza. Generally Westerns had enough action and comedies offered enough slapstick or young characters that children were entranced, even if the advertisements were for floor wax or deodorant. Since rules governing bedtime varied by household, not all kids saw all of these programs, yet a family audience encouraged a discussion about shows that attracted children as listeners or participants, far more than twenty-first-century parents might imagine.

  The situation comedies of the postwar era, like Leave It to Beaver, became a shared experience for all members of Boomer-era families, even if real households were considerably larger than their TV counterparts. (Getty Images)

  For most children, the least accessible television programming was the increasingly mature fare after 9 or 10 P.M. Even the most “adult” drama then would receive a PG rating in modern coding, but many fifties parents were nonetheless concerned about the impact of television on their children. Some children who were able to negotiate lenient terms from their parents were sometimes permitted to sample “adult” programs such as Perry Como or Andy Williams, simply because the “mature” character of the program was its music content, which would be supremely boring to a ten-year-old. Slightly older children might be permitted to stay up late enough to view weekend episodes of moderately scary but not particularly violent or suggestive shows, such as One Step Beyond or Twilight Zone. Programs that were extremely violent or sexually suggestive, however, represented the parental line in the sand, as the furor over the body count and implied sexuality of the late fifties program The Untouchables testified. Still, this reality was far removed from V-chips and parental lockboxes, and children’s viewing habits tended to remain rather tightly under adult control and s
upervision.

  By the late 1950s more than 90 percent of households had television sets. Yet many of children’s leisure-time activities exhibited direct continuity with those of prewar youngsters. In the summer, for example, many beach resorts, camping areas, and other vacation spots were too far from cities with television stations to provide viewing opportunities. And more than a few parents felt that in summertime their children should be doing something other than watching reruns, so that in many cases the breakdown-prone TV sets weren’t repaired, or adults imposed stringent viewing restrictions during vacation months.

  One classic prewar activity in a world of limited television channels and summer “blackouts” was that other visual medium, the motion picture. Postwar children had fewer movie theaters and fewer films than their parents had enjoyed in their childhoods, but most of the thirties and forties movie experience was still largely intact. Much like their parents’ era, Boomer movie viewing was roughly divided into two experiences, Saturday matinees for kids and evening shows with parental accompaniment.

  Urban or suburban neighborhood theaters accessible by foot or bicycle, and newer theaters in shopping centers that catered to auto traffic, both provided that staple of childhood recreation, the Saturday matinee. These shows offered a low admission price, often a quarter or half-dollar, and tended to have an audience composed primarily of children, with older siblings chaperoning younger brothers or sisters. The features often included one or two low-budget comedies, such as Ma and Pa Kettle or Francis the Talking Mule, or equally low-budget science fiction, horror, or World War II films, supplemented by strings of cartoons that offered the advantage of being in color in the theater while on television they were only black and white. Many parents were happy to unload some or all of their children for a Saturday afternoon, much to the consternation of harried ushers and candy-counter personnel. Altogether the experience was close to what the Boomers’ parents had known in the 1930s—and even their grandparents remembered from the silent-film era.