Boomers: The Cold-War Generation Grows Up

by Victor D. Brooks

  During the war, adults cringed at the dress and morals of “Zoot Suiters” and “Victory Girls,” but most young people spent the war maturing rapidly as paratroopers or welders or even baby-sitters as they aided the war effort in many ways. By 1944 psychology, sociology, and education textbooks were just beginning to call this age group “teen-agers” (the hyphen was soon dropped), and late that summer Seventeen magazine sold out its first issues as it trumpeted the intelligence, energy, and style of this newly defined cohort. Then, as America reached midcentury, a new watershed was reached. For the first time more young people graduated from high school than dropped out, and educators predicted that this percentage would surge during the coming decade. For a brief time in the early fifties it seemed that the only unique aspect of this newly designated group called “teenagers” was their common experience in completing high school more frequently than their parents.

  In mid-decade the motion picture industry, the recording industry, radio, and television all began to create or reflect an image of a new cultural subgroup in America, an “invasion of teenagers.” The first hints of change occurred with a surge of articles dealing with the rapid increase in juvenile delinquency and juvenile crimes. The phenomenon did not reach the epidemic proportions implied in print, but Hollywood quickly latched onto the theme. A disturbing film of 1953, The Wild One, had featured Marlon Brando as an angry, violent member of a motorcycle gang terrorizing a small California town. While Brando and his minions were clearly well past adolescence, the film resonated with some teenagers, and black leather jackets and tight jeans began to enter the periphery of young male fashion. Two years later, in 1955, producers shifted this surly, anti-social behavior to the high school environment and dropped the young rebels’ ages from the twenties to their teens. Rebel Without a Cause and Blackboard Jungle were huge hits, and the opening song in the latter film, “Rock Around the Clock,” became the first clearly designated rock-and-roll tune to reach number one in sales in Billboard magazine’s “Hot 100” survey. At almost the exact moment when Davy Crockett and Mickey Mouse Club mania was producing iconic images of Boomers at play, the media were just as eagerly reporting the new “teenage craze” of rock-and-roll music. Radio stations discovered they could reclaim ratings lost to adult television watchers by adopting a “Top 40” format of new rock-and-roll songs geared to a teenage audience. The genial Bill Haley and his Comets became the first contenders for rock-star status when “Rock Around the Clock,” “See You Later Alligator,” and “Shake, Rattle and Roll” all emerged as Top 10 songs. The Pennsylvania group was mobbed in London, sold out in West Germany, and was vilified as crazed, capitalist hoodlums on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Yet if Haley’s music was enormously popular, he was a little too old and a little too bland to have the sex appeal needed for a truly magnetic superstar. That role would fall to a young Southerner who began a rise to stardom just as the Comets were beginning to fade. Elvis Presley was younger than Bill Haley but just a bit older than mid-fifties teens when he made the transition from regional favorite to national idol. After individual appearances on the Jimmy Dorsey Hour (full shot) and the Ed Sullivan Show (waist up), Presley became the focal point of teen music and a demon to some elements of adult society. The singer’s slightly snarling demeanor, tight pants, leather jacket, and long sideburns produced a legion of teenage followers and alternately attracted and repelled everyone else. “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Hound Dog,” and “All Shook Up” were almost impossible to ignore as background music for the mid-decade soundtrack, and for every adult who decried Presley’s “sexually suggestive” gyrations, another would emphasize his nonsmoking, nondrinking, churchgoing demeanor.

  A number of contemporary and more recent narratives of the 1950s have emphasized the generational conflict between teenagers and their new music and a relatively conservative adult society that allegedly looked upon this subculture as a major threat. The real situation was considerably more complex, as both rock-and-roll music and the teens who listened to it formed a complicated entity. Much of adult derision of the new music focused on a relatively few high-profile acts such as the very loud and strange-looking Little Richard (the African American Richard Wayne Pennimay), and the equally loud, equally strange-looking Jerry Lee Lewis, who followed early divorces with a marriage to his early-teen cousin. These twin (yet racially diverse) threats to adult propriety were often coupled with lower-profile, subversion-of-authority songs such as “Get a Job,” “Yakety Yak,” and “Summertime Blues,” which provided detractors with ammunition to emphasize the danger of the new music.

  But several contradictory forces seemed to keep the adult protest from reaching a critical mass. First, some of the most popular acts, such as crooner Pat Boone, had an appearance and demeanor that would make them welcome in most adult homes; second, Elvis Presley’s army induction and exemplary service dispelled much of the “rebel” myth; and third, the young but incredibly clean-cut Dick Clark quickly emerged as an arbitrator between teen and adult society. Rather symbolically, Clark’s Philadelphia-based American Bandstand television show was paired in the ABC schedule with the Mickey Mouse Club as each program became a fixture for one of the age groups that constituted 1950s childhood.

  Clark was neither quite peer nor parent to the teen dancers on Bandstand. Rather, he was a responsible older sibling who imposed a strict dress code, inspected report cards, and banned anyone who dropped out of school. The few fifties kinescopes of Bandstand still available reveal that the more “rocking” songs and guests were interspersed with a surprisingly large number of ballads by Nat “King” Cole, Perry Como, and other performers who attracted young mothers as well as many teens. The combination of parental viewership and anticipation of the forthcoming Mousketeers activities also meant that a large number of Boomers were at least passively involved in the Bandstand experience, even if they were difficult to measure in demographic studies.

  The reality of teen music in the fifties, one part Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, another part Pat Boone and Dick Clark, is perhaps a microcosm of the relationship between adults and adolescents in the period. Religious groups and parental organizations decried the sexual content, violence, and anarchism of many teen films, yet virtually every situation comedy had a Mary Stone or Wally Cleaver, whom most adults would have been glad to have in their own home. Newsreels from the era show ministers condemning rock and roll from the pulpit as “jungle music” and adults enthusiastically (with teens less enthusiastically) burning piles of 45 rpm records as if to erase all memory of the awful genre. Yet newspapers and magazines are filled with articles only gently poking fun at teens’ activities or lauding their diligence. Most parents and teens in the fifties were clearly aware that some form of social revolution was occurring in the relationship between adults and adolescents, but both sides seemed ripe for compromise, and adults may have suspected that the big change might be exciting and fun.

  One episode of the definitive family situation comedy Ozzie and Harriet featured the newly emerging rock-and-roll superstar Ricky Nelson discussing the merits of his music with his parents. When Ricky asks his mother’s opinion of the new music, Harriet Nelson kiddingly says she can now stay in the same room with Ricky’s record player. Then, more seriously, she admits there is plenty of excitement that seems to reflect the emotion of the new teen generation. Similarly, most of the “teenpics” films had far less threatening plots than their advertisements promised. Blackboard Jungle ends with a teen—played by Sidney Poitier—and other kids allying themselves with the teacher—played by Glenn Ford—against the mindless violence of a punk nemesis played by Vic Morrow. I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein show the real villains as adult scientists who short-circuit the laws of nature and God while the transformed teens are merely dupes who return to good behavior just before their destruction. Teenager from Outer Space produces a revolt of alien adolescents against their adult supervisors, but those adults are planning to conq
uer Earth, and the teens foil the plot.

  Supposedly “subversive” and “satanic” rock-and-roll music appears far less contentious if more than a handful of songs is considered. A perusal of Billboard’s Top 10 charts for the first three years of the rock-and-roll experience produces more than a few surprises. Top 40 rock-and-roll radio stations played many hits by such decidedly nonrock artists as Mitch Miller, Nelson Riddle and his Orchestra, Perry Como, Teresa Brewer, Pattie Page, and Doris Day. At the end of 1956, Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender” was dueling for number one with “True Love” by Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly—hardly symbols of teen rebellion. Even top hits by performers calling themselves “rock-and-roll singers”—“That’ll Be the Day” by Buddy Holly, “Bye Bye Love” by the Everly Brothers, and “Little Darlin’ ” by the Diamonds—provided few opportunities for adult dread of a social revolution. The widely derided teen jargon of the fifties—a litany of “cool,” “chicks,” and “squares”—seems no more threatening than the “hep” words of the forties or the “23 skidoo” of the twenties, and were more often used in film, television, and records than in everyday teen conversation.

  While much has been written about the relationship of fifties teens with the adult world, there has been less interest in the interaction between adolescents and younger children in the era. If the “first teenagers” were perplexing, bewildering, and exasperating to parents, they also evoked a response from their sibling rivals.

  One of the first defining realities in the relationship between fifties teenagers and Baby Boomers was whether it was based on family or neighborhood, and this often depended on parents’ age and World War II experiences. Boomers with teen siblings tended to have parents who were a bit older than average or fathers who had spent a major portion of their military experience in a stateside assignment. This group included couples who had married in the 1930s and produced children relatively quickly; men who were excused from the draft because they were parents or were employed in critical occupations; or servicemen who were stationed in the United States long enough to be married and have children before the end of the war. Boomers who were acquainted with teenagers only outside the immediate family tended to have parents who had met during the war and delayed marriage or childbirth due to overseas assignments, or had met just after the war and produced postwar children.

  By the 1950s most Boomers viewed teenagers with a certain awe and probably saw many of them as “cool,” with their greater independence in clothes selection, entertainment, activities, and freedom of movement. On the other hand, in those families where the oldest children were postwar babies and teens were next door or down the street, the adolescents held more of a mystique than in those households where siblings were fighting for bathroom space or privacy in shared bedrooms. In turn, most teens were both more caring and more mature than the characters in period teen films and TV shows, and more than a few felt special protective bonds for siblings or neighbors who had adolescence ahead of them.

  Several opportunities helped create a relatively normal bond between the “first teenagers” and the Baby Boomers. First, in the fifties the American public education system was undergoing a massive administrative restructuring in which thousands of school districts transformed the old elementary and high school configuration (K–8, 9–12) into an elementary, junior high, and high school system (K–6, 7–9, 10–12). Boomer children, whose parents may have spent the seventh and eighth grades in single-teacher classrooms in a school with children as young as five, now switched classes, encountered multiple teachers, and interacted with full-fledged teens attending ninth grade. More than a few smaller districts combined junior and senior high schools in the same building, and in some elective subjects, such as creative writing, public speaking, and art, it was possible to have a twelve-year-old sitting next to an eighteen-year-old. Generally these junior high kids were called “preteens,” teenagers in training as it were. Their world was very different from the elementary school they had left behind.

  A second bonding opportunity emerged as overstretched parents used their teen children to act as parents with some of their younger siblings. Since most teenagers could drive at sixteen, teens could take younger children to doctors’ offices, stores, or movies. More than a few boys discovered, to their dismay, that a parental offer of the use of the family car for a date at the drive-in theater might also include a back seat filled with younger siblings, complicating the romantic possibilities for the evening. The numbers of young children provided an expanded opportunity for teens to sample the responsibilities of parenthood, a valuable experience in a society where the average bride was just over nineteen at marriage and the groom not much older.

  Finally, Boomers and teens bonded in their mutual fascination with an emerging popular culture that often separated them from the larger adult world. Science fiction and monster movies, television programs aimed at less than mature viewers, and new comic superheroes and satirical publications such as Mad magazine provided enormous common ground for prewar, war, and early postwar babies. The more their parents and other adults disparaged those pastimes, the more enjoyable they were for teens and Boomers. Near the end of the fifties, this shared culture gradually began shifting to the tastes of the younger generation. One of the first places it became apparent was in the world of popular music.

  By the end of 1958, rock-and-roll music had become a significant element in teenage culture. It featured celebrity performers, inexpensive record players, emerging transistor radio technology, and exposure on national television. Yet within a few months the first incarnation of this new music format was fraying markedly. When impresario Alan Freed’s Big Beat Show rock-and-roll concert series played in Boston on May 3, 1958, a frenetic white female member of the audience jumped onto the stage and began embracing a startled black performer in a cross between dancing and sexual contact. An outraged white policeman shoved through the audience toward the stage as security guards began clearing the auditorium. Soon teens and police were skirmishing outside, and media outlets reported a “teen riot.”

  At about the same time the highly publicized government investigation of corruption in the television quiz-show industry began lapping over into the popular music business. More than a few legislators believed that if game shows were rigged, so was rock and roll. Some disk jockeys, it turned out, lined their pockets while “seducing” teens into listening to particular songs that record companies had bribed them to play. Freed and a number of other pioneer rock-and-roll “DJs” would be professionally ruined by the investigations.

  Finally, just after the group Danny and the Juniors followed their smash hit “At the Hop” with the almost euphoric prediction song “Rock and Roll Will Never Die,” many of the genre’s stars either figuratively or literally did exactly that. In an appalling litany of death notices, Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, the Big Bopper, Eddie Cochran, and Frankie Lymon died, the first three in the same plane crash, Cochran in a British auto accident, and the teenage Lymon in a supposed drug overdose. Chuck Berry found himself fighting gun-possession charges instead of playing his guitar, Little Richard spurned music for the ministry, Jerry Lee Lewis’s marriage to his underage cousin was nearly fatal to his career, and the emerging King of rock and roll, Elvis Presley, traded his sideburns for a G.I. crewcut, beginning a two-year stint in the army.

  The summer of 1958 not only brought warm breezes across America but the hint that the music the first teenagers called their own was changing, and the new target audience was rapidly becoming the Boomers. At school, picnics, church carnivals, boardwalk hotdog stands, and other recreational activities, loudspeakers and radios blared two new hits that had a rock-and-roll beat but were quickly adopted by children and preteens. David Seville’s “Witch Doctor” and Sheb Wooley’s “Purple People Eater” were impossible to miss that summer, and both songs essentially parodied serious rock-and-roll love songs with their nonsense premises of a witch doctor as a relationship counselor and a visit
ing, one-horned alien joining a rock-and-roll band. By mid-June, “Purple People Eater” was the number-one-selling record with “Witch Doctor” close behind. Soon “novelty tunes” dominated radio play lists, as TV horror show host John Zacherle’s “Dinner with Drac,” the Playmates’ satire of car racing, “Beep Beep,” Bobby Day’s parody of avian teen romance in “Rockin’ Robin,” and Jan and Dean’s lighthearted romance between toddlers in “Baby Talk” were nudging many more serious songs off the radio waves. That 1958 holiday season produced the biggest-selling hit of the year when Seville expanded his “Witch Doctor” nonsense verses into a Christmas wish list from three chipmunks, Theodore, Simon, and the new star of novelty, Alvin. Alvin and the Chipmunks albums, toys, and paraphernalia rivaled the earlier Davy Crockett craze and left more than a few teenagers wondering what had happened to their music.

  Dick Clark, who had avoided Alan Freed’s fall from grace in congressional hearings through a combination of businesslike responses and a well-timed divestment of entangling deals, quickly emerged at the forefront of a changing popular music industry that now viewed Boomer preteens and children as the market of the future while actively toning down those musical elements that seemed to produce adult hostility. By the close of 1959 the young people who had become teenagers during the fifties were turning to a new product, compilation albums of “Golden Oldies,” presenting nostalgic collections of songs two or three years old by performers who were no longer the stars of the industry. These teens also became even more deeply connected to the Elvis Presley persona as the King returned from the service in 1960 with films and songs that found a huge audience among his initial fans.

  While teenagers who had been old enough to appreciate the excitement of rock and roll in its formative years now often returned to their roots in “Oldies but Goodies,” Dick Clark and other promoters were quickly shifting their energies to discover profitable attractions for preteen Boomers. Clark ventured from his Bandstand offices to nearby South Philadelphia to discover a quartet of Italian-American teens who had the looks and just enough musical talent to appeal to preadolescent Boomer girls. Fabian Forte, James Darren, Frankie Avalon, and Bobby Rydell all emerged as multimedia phenomena, cutting records, making television appearances, playing supporting roles in general-audience films, and even shooting TV pilots. New York talent scouts countered with Dion DiMucci, Neil Sedaka, and Bobby Darin while fifteen-year-old Paul Anka emerged from his native Montreal as a Canadian-American teen idol. In turn, preteen boys were quickly attracted to Mousketeer Annette Funicello, Connie Francis, and Brenda Lee. Even young television stars who were not primarily singers were encouraged to tap into the new young audience as Connie Stevens of Hawaiian Eye, Johnny Crawford of Rifleman, and both Shelley Fabares and Paul Peterson of Donna Reed enjoyed substantial success in the recording field. Perhaps the most successful of all teen idols was Ricky Nelson, the ebullient younger son of Ozzie and Harriet. Under the careful tutelage of his father, Ricky was given substantial time to demonstrate both acting and singing skills on the weekly program, which brought him almost twenty major records and choice movie roles.