Boomers: The Cold-War Generation Grows Up

by Victor D. Brooks

  The family outing to a movie theater in the evening, a major part of social life in the 1930s and during World War II, continued to be a major event throughout the fifties and early sixties. The film industry was initially terrified that the advent of television would remove the incentive for families to leave the house and pay for watching films. These fears were partially realized: two or three visits to the Bijou now became a more occasional, yet more special, event. Three film genres were still able to entice mother and dad to take the children to the movies. First was the “spectacular,” using new technologies in sound and wide screen, often involving a film with religious or moral overtones. Among the most successful films in this category were The Ten Commandments and Ben Hur. The second theme focused on Walt Disney’s ability to entice families to view a combination of re-released and new animated features. In the postwar era parents relived Dumbo and Snow White with their children while all experienced first-time screenings of Lady and the Tramp and Sleeping Beauty. Finally, Disney and some competing companies updated the prewar family comedy and adventure movies, offering the added attraction of a wide screen and color, not available at home. These offerings included The AbsentMinded Professor and, remarkably, a compilation of the three-episode television presentation of Davy Crockett. A final postwar movie theme, developed with little concern for a young audience yet experienced by a great many Boomer children, centered on adult tastes in music. The fifties and early sixties were replete with biographies of famous big-bandleaders, such as The Benny Goodman Story and The Glenn Miller Story, and film versions of Broadway musicals such as My Fair Lady and The King and I. All these films offered catchy tunes and relatively accessible plot lines, but this part of the “family” movie experience was probably more memorable for the parents than the kids.

  If television represented the most visible break with earlier childhood leisure activities, and movies maintained the most significant bridge between the generations, the toy and game industry offered traditional play activities as well as new experiences. The parents of the Boomers had grown up in a period when a cornucopia of toys were mass produced and heavily advertised on radio, in newspaper ads, and in increasingly colorful catalogues. The children of the 1930s who lived in families that were less damaged by the depression had access to erector sets, electric trains, Shirley Temple dolls, Red Ryder toy rifles, and Monopoly games. Many of these toys were colorful, sturdy, and durable, if also made of relatively expensive materials that limited their accessibility. If metal toy dirigibles, electric trains, and dollhouses represented the Age of Metal, Boomer children would be the first to encounter the Age of Plastic. It is no coincidence that the most popular range of train accessory buildings for budding railroad tycoons of the fifties and sixties was labeled “Plasticville,” and offered distinctive postwar structures such as “Tasty Freeze” ice cream stands, spacious supermarkets, and even pastel-colored motels, producing a far different rail layout than the tin litho structures of the thirties. And while Boomer children continued to develop holiday and birthday lists around Sears, Macy’s, Lionel, or American Flyer catalogues, television advertising now allowed them to see their desired toys in action, which hardly discouraged demand.

  The large numbers of children coupled with an escalating number of toy lines produced conflicting tastes. Children argued whether Lionel or American Flyer made the best trains, whether Ideal or Mattel made more realistic dolls, and whether Milton Bradley’s Easy Money was superior to Parker Brothers’ Monopoly. Still, it is possible to paint a broad canvas of the postwar generation at play.

  One common element of Boomers at play was the formalization of traditional role-playing, encouraged by the emergence of relatively inexpensive plastic toys. Role-playing included historical re-creations, such as the Wild West and the recently ended World War II; contemporary adult occupations, such as physician or nurse; and a speculative yet exciting future revolving around space exploration that, at least theoretically, might become reality during the children’s adult lives.

  The prewar interest in frontier exploits, transmitted by numerous films and radio programs, became even more pronounced in the fifties and sixties. Not only were there big-budget color movies, but television rapidly became a giant corral for Western series. By 1959 twenty-six prime-time series were concerned with frontier life, with nearly twenty other syndicated Western programs airing on Saturday morning and weekday early evenings. Many of these shows, including Bonanza, Gene Autry, and Roy Rogers, had extensive toy company tie-ins that allowed boys and girls to reenact the Wild West in their own homes or neighborhoods with cowboy or cowgirl hats, fringed jackets, boots, and authentic-looking weapons.

  Most Boomers had at least one parent who had been actively involved in some aspect of World War II, and while some of these men and women were reluctant to discuss their experiences, many others served as models for role-playing activities. A degree of realism was provided when the toy companies’ weapons and accessories were supplemented by children’s use of their parents’ canteens, helmets, rank insignia, and even uniform articles, as imaginary Axis replaced Western outlaws as adversaries.

  The postwar period saw role-playing in a future world seriously challenge the reenactment of historical events in children’s play experiences. Boomers’ parents had had a taste of science fiction with the comic-strip and film serials of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon and related toy spinoffs. But the “Atomic Age” of the fifties and early sixties prompted a quantum leap in these activities among postwar children. This was the first golden age of science fiction films with robots, spaceships, and futuristic weapons featured in movies such as Forbidden Planet, Invaders from Mars, and This Island Earth, and in television programs such as Tom Corbett—Space Cadet, Space Patrol, and The Jetsons. Along with the real-life exploits of Sputnik and NASA’s Mercury programs was the imaginative extrapolation of these events by children.

  While one aspect of role-playing was based on children becoming actors in a mini-drama, ranging from contemporary medical care to wartime combat, another major element of this experience was to use toys as surrogates in a miniaturized version of real or imaginary events. In the fifties and early sixties, girls often created this “small world” through dolls, boys through action figures and model railroads.

  One of the most notable effects of the postwar revolution in plastics was the greater sophistication of dolls and related accessories available to Boomer girls. Prewar girls might have thought it marvelous that their doll could open and close its eyes, but postwar dolls could require diaper changes (Betsey Wetsy) and even hold a minor conversation (Chatty Cathy). The age of plastics also created a miniature modern household universe in which sinks had working faucets that sprayed real water, refrigerators had tiny ice-cube trays, and stoves had battery-operated burners that lit up like a real oven. Just as their mothers were managing an increasingly complex household, daughters were mirroring much of this experience in miniature, on a level unheard of even a generation earlier.

  Probably the most pervasive doll-oriented development of the era occurred just as the oldest Boomer girls were making the transition from childhood to adolescence. At the very end of the 1950s the Mattel Corporation introduced the Barbie doll, which instead of looking like a baby or toddler, was designed to be an attractive, fashion-conscious teenager. Along with boyfriend Ken and little sister Skipper, Barbie offered the possibility of a miniature teen life, with so many wardrobe changes and accessories that Mattel would soon emerge as one of the leading American clothing manufacturers. Barbie would take the role-playing of doll activities from simulated motherhood to a primer in adolescent relationships just as Boomer girls were making this transition themselves.

  The booming toy industry of the fifties and sixties encouraged young girls to replicate many aspects of their mothers’ homemaking experience. (Lambert, Hulton Archive)

  As girls’ role-playing was increasingly defined by Barbie, Boomer boys were initiated into a more warlike com
petition with the emergence of G.I. Joe. Before the postwar boom in plastic toys, boys had created a military universe through lead or tin toy soldiers and a transportation universe of metal cars, trucks, and model railroads. One significant limitation of these generally sturdy, colorful toys was that they were so expensive that a child’s “army” might include only twenty or thirty soldiers or cowboys, and home rail empires were limited to one or two trains and a handful of buildings. This situation began to alter radically during the decades after World War II. Toy companies such as Marx began selling new plastic figures ranging from 35 mm to 60 mm in size for a nickel or a dime each, while combining elaborate sets, including figures, forts, buildings, and accessories, for about five dollars. These included play sets based on television programs, such as a Fort Apache set from Rin Tin Tin and Nottingham Castle from Robin Hood, as well as World War II and contemporary military forces. In the wake of Barbie’s success, toy companies enlarged the size of the figures to six to twenty-four inches and offered changes of uniforms, weapons, accessories, and other features in a figure that was rapidly emerging as a military doll. The most iconic of these figures, G.I. Joe, set the stage for an action-figure boom that would explode during the 1970s with the emergence of the Star Wars films.

  The arrival of 76 million children between 1941 and 1964 guaranteed that Barbie and G.I. Joe would not be the only new toys to tempt boys and girls. Toy companies delighted children, and sometimes their parents, with Mr. Potato Head, Slinky, Hula Hoops, Twisters, Wiffle ball sets, and Silly Putty. Some game manufacturers introduced Scrabble, Battleship, The Game of Life, and an “electronic” football game where miniature red and yellow players seemed to circle endlessly on a green metal gridiron. Game shows, such as Concentration, Tic Tac Dough, and Dotto, promoted their home versions. The profusion of new toys meant that children’s wish lists often grew so long that even relatively affluent parents had to disappoint their children.

  The emergence of television and the expansion of the toy inventory convinced many teachers and parents that the era of reading for pleasure was largely over. In one sense they were correct, as curling up with a book was no longer the only diversion on a rainy afternoon or a snowy evening. Yet television channels and broadcast times were still relatively limited, and toy boxes were not quite so overflowing that children could not still be tempted to escape to a world of print that was at once familiar and new to their parents.

  Books that bridged the time between the 1930s and the 1950s included The Bobsey Twins, Nancy Drew, and The Hardy Boys series, which often included new cover artwork but otherwise remained as popular to Boomer children as to their parents. On the other hand, comic strips and comic books were undergoing more significant changes. By the end of the fifties a few prewar comic strips still inhabited the Sunday comics section of the newspaper, as Blondie, Mutt and Jeff, and Henry still attracted kids’ attention. But newer strips, including Beetle Bailey, Dennis the Menace, and Peanuts were emerging as stars. Most newspapers could carry only a finite number of daily and Sunday comics, and Katzenjammer Kids, Little Orphan Annie, Buck Rogers, and other icons of the thirties often surrendered their places to a new generation of characters.

  The world of comic books was somewhat less constrained as the number of publications was limited only to the ability of children to afford them. Therefore many of the most visible comic heroes of the thirties remained more or less intact a generation later. Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and The Flash were still very popular, but plot lines changed in several areas. Superman’s enemies tended to be extraterrestrials rather than gangsters, as befitting the emergence of atomic power and possible space exploration. The Man of Steel had also acquired a female teenage cousin who was soon featured in her own comic book. Supergirl joined Lois Lane as a strong female role model with her own plot lines where Superman was a relatively peripheral character. Also, in an ironic twist, D.C. Publishers launched a Superboy comic book chronicling adventures in the Smallville of the 1930s, which had been the contemporary time frame of the original adult character.

  As fifties and sixties superheroes were called upon to deal increasingly with visitors from outer space, as opposed to gangsters or spies, publishers added anthology-oriented science fiction comic books, such as Strange Adventures and Mystery in Space. The relatively few continuing characters in these publications possessed no supernatural powers but were usually ordinary individuals faced with extraordinary situations, such as the Atomic Knights, who used specially treated suits of armor to survive the distant post-nuclear-war future of 1999.

  While this was considered the “Silver Age” of comic book superheroes, many Boomer children paid just as much attention to more comedy-oriented comic books. Archie, Nancy, Little Lulu, and Dennis the Menace were all top-selling franchises. Walt Disney used comic books to feature characters that were less prominent in his on-screen cartoons, probably the best-selling feature being Donald Duck’s mischievous nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie, and Donald’s rich, cantankerous uncle, Scrooge McDuck. This quartet largely pushed Donald to the background in the comic book universe and introduced characters that would become particularly identified with the Boomer generation.

  The combination of television, a much wider range of affordable toys, a significant increase in child-oriented films, and the expansion of children’s book and comic-book titles guaranteed that Boomer children would have access to a cornucopia of leisure activities unprecedented in the nation’s history. Yet the sheer size of this generation of children persuaded more than a few parents that organized, adult-directed activities were the best antidote to watching a youth culture spin out of control.

  The fifties and sixties were a time not only of Hula Hoops and hopscotch but also of Little League, Brownies, Cub Scouts, and Campfire girls, when the true prototype of “soccer moms” and “football dads” emerged on the American scene. The casual pickup game on the local sandlot gradually gave way to the Tri-State Laundry Cubs meeting the Pepsi-Cola Yankees in a contest directed by adult coaches and supervised by adult umpires. Little Leagues in turn soon shared attention with Pop Warner football, Biddy Basketball, and a number of youth soccer leagues. A smaller but growing parallel universe of softball, basketball, soccer, and cheerleading programs attracted thousands of young girls to organized sports.

  Millions of Boomers seamlessly traded baseball or cheer-leading uniforms for the blue shirts and yellow neckerchiefs of Cub Scouts or the brown beanies of Brownies, as scouting seemed to grow in geometric progression with young moms shuttling between den-mother duties for their sons and helping distribute Girl Scout cookies with their daughters.

  As in any cross-generational conversation, it is not difficult to imagine the children and grandchildren of the Boomer generation rolling their eyes in disbelief as middle-aged adults fondly recount watching grainy black-and-while television programs or playing with decidedly low-tech toys. Children of more recent decades, exposed to a sensory bombardment of video games, high-definition cable television, and iPods, wonder how anyone could have had fun in a far more unplugged era. Yet the iconic images of midcentury childhood—Hula Hoop contests, smiling children in Davy Crockett caps, and mesmerized attention to the antics of Howdy Doody—are not illusions or gross exaggerations. The children of that era somehow instinctively knew that they lived in a magical time that could never be fully replicated. Boomer children certainly captured the attention of the adult world in the fifties. The one complicating factor was that these kids were fated to share the spotlight with slightly older youngsters who in some cases were their brothers and sisters. These siblings were producing their own iconic images as America’s first “teenagers.”

  5

  SIBLING RIVALRY

  ONE OF THE IRONIES of the Boomer childhood experience in the 1950s was that postwar children had to share center stage in the youth culture arena with older siblings and neighbors who spent the same decade emerging as the nation’s first real “teenage” generation. Pictures o
f Boomer kids in Mickey Mouse ears and twirling inside Hula Hoops always seemed to compete with images of Elvis Presley, James Dean, and teen girls in poodle skirts. If postwar kids had the edge in sheer numbers, the emerging teenage generation had age and spending money on its side in this friendly generational rivalry. On one side were real-life versions of Jeff Stone, “Beaver” Cleaver, and “Kitten” Anderson, kids making their way through the fifties as children and preteens. Their older siblings were the new generation of teens portrayed on television by Mary Stone, Wally Cleaver, and “Princess” Anderson in a variety of same-sex and opposite-gender squabbles that stopped just long enough to form a united front against parents or other adult authority figures.

  Fifties Boomers and teenagers shared common neighborhoods, common homes, and even common bedrooms, but they experienced the first full postwar decade at different points in their young lives. The pre-Boomer generation spent much of the fifties collecting Elvis Presley records, showing off leather jackets, cashmere sweaters, pompadours, and ponytails. Contrary to depictions in Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause, most of these young people were well-behaved and polite. Yet they were the “first teenagers,” and even well-behaved kids scared adults when they swung or shook to the startling rhythms of Chuck Berry or Little Richard.

  In the period before World War II, adults generally referred to young people between thirteen and nineteen as “adolescents” or “youth,” and possibly drew some comfort from the fact that most of this group would spend at least half of these years working or seeking a job.