Boomers: The Cold-War Generation Grows Up

by Victor D. Brooks

  The draft lottery represented one of the two last communal Boomer experiences of the sixties, and, as with many events of the decade, evoked varied emotions, depending upon whether an individual “won” or “lost.” A similar mix of emotions emerged at about the same time when a group of California promoters tried to stage a West Coast version of Woodstock. In an attempt to counter charges they had surrendered to commercialism, the Rolling Stones offered to give a free concert at Altamont Speedway. When top-tier groups such as the Grateful Dead, Santana, and Jefferson Airplane signed on for the show, nearly 300,000 fans descended on the Speedway, a site only one-sixth as large as Max Yasgur’s farm. As huge numbers of fans ringed the hillside above the stage and attempted to listen to the bands, the throng nearest the stage pushed and shoved against a security screen dominated by the dubious law enforcement of a phalanx of Hell’s Angels motorcyclists. When Mick Jagger began the first part of the controversial song “Sympathy for the Devil,” a small-time hoodlum pulled a gun and was immediately surrounded by Angels, one of whom stabbed him to death. Fans at a distance remembered Altamont primarily for the music while stage-side participants left with images of mayhem.

  In the wake of disorders at the 1968 Democratic Convention, the trial of the Chicago 7 and the continuation of the Vietnam War into 1969 provided the catalyst for massive student protests, like the Weathermen’s “Days of Rage” in Chicago. (Getty Images)

  As the lottery and Altamont put a period to a raucous decade, Boomers and their seniors wondered how the new decade might resemble the recent past. One national magazine suggested, “There is no spelled-out forecast for the new decade because the unpredictable 1960s cracked the crystal ball too badly and proved that all we can prophesy with certainty is change. The 1960s shook us all so deeply that few easy assumptions can still be made about our basic beliefs, about our opinions of ourselves, about our social divisions, fears or hopes.” No one could predict how many Boomers would keep the fifties and sixties of their childhood in their memories, if not on their calendars.

  In the summer of 1973, as the Vietnam experience faded and the turmoil of Watergate appeared, a young producer named George Lucas released a film that chronicled the experiences of a small group of teenagers on one night in the Kennedy era. As posters filled movie theaters with the tantalizing question, “Where were you in ’62?” huge audiences followed largely unknown actors—Ron Howard, Cindy Williams, McKenzie Phillips, Harrison Ford, and Richard Dreyfus—as they negotiated the teen experience in small-town California. Lucas used most of his budget for the nonstop soundtrack that opens with a booming rendition of “Rock Around the Clock” outside a classic drive-in restaurant and closes with the Beach Boys’ “All Summer Long” as Dreyfus boards a plane to leave his family and friends behind on his way to an Eastern college. As the 1973 audience remarked to one another on the short hair of the boys and the conservative dresses worn by the girls in 1962, more than a few viewers sensed the nostalgia of the passing of an era. Soon the success of American Graffiti spawned the television hits Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley and the musical nostalgia of Billy Joel and other singers. “Fifties” and “sixties” theme parties and dances drew large crowds of high school and college students, now increasingly made up of younger Boomers anxious to feel vicariously the excitement of their older siblings at a time when young people seemed on their way to dominating American culture. These younger Boomers would have their own dreams and their own memories, and as the millennium approached, retro “disco” and “seventies” events would evoke the same laughter and nostalgia in this younger cohort who had never experienced Howdy Doody or the original Mousketeers but could name every character on The Brady Bunch. The generation of children who had known Sputnik, Camelot, and the Beatles were now becoming parents of their own children. Younger Boomers were about to make the dawning seventies their own time.

  11

  A GOOD TIME TO GROW UP

  THE END of the 1960s marked the climax of a fascinating and influential era in the history of American childhood and youth culture. Many of the older Boomers were making the transition from student to worker and parent, perhaps wondering whether their generational warning to “not trust anyone over thirty” would apply to themselves, for that milestone loomed just over half a decade away. Meanwhile, behind the older Boomers were tens of millions of younger postwar children who would enter the seventies as preschoolers. They were Brady Bunch children, not members of Howdy Doody’s Peanut Gallery, and their childhood and adolescence would be influenced by disco, Star Wars, Atari games, and MTV. If the older Boomers’ classes were interrupted by news of John Kennedy’s assassination, the younger Boomers’ classroom television sets would be tuned to the Watergate hearings.

  Postwar children who were old enough to experience a substantial portion of the fifties and sixties would spend much of the next few decades trying to understand their experience and how it jibed with broader depictions of the era. Much of my purpose in this book has been to frame the period in terms of its particular perspectives. When the template is configured to include the experiences of typical, average participants in the fifties and sixties, a number of realities may be seen.

  First, the Boomer generation grew up at a time when adult society was more interested in the activities of the nation’s young people than in most other eras. From Benjamin Spock’s best-selling book on babies to late-sixties adults adopting many of the fashions and hairstyles of their children, kid-watching became a national pastime. Just as seventeenth-century Puritan family portraits depict children as miniature adults, with scaled-down adult clothing and facial expressions, 1960s snapshots of teenage daughters and their mothers attired in blue jeans, and middle-aged fathers displaying the same long sideburns and wide belts as their sons, provide a visual clue that many adults closely watched the cultural activities of their children, and sometimes not so secretly envied them.

  Second, it seems probable that most postwar children recognized their status as members of a huge numerical cohort relatively early in their childhood, and that more often than not they viewed this phenomenon as a blessing rather than a curse. Contemporary articles and my own interviews suggest that Boomers viewed their situation with anything from bemused acceptance to outright delight. Sharing bunk beds, cramped bedrooms, and playthings often became a virtual badge of honor, not unlike the “we can take it” pride of Londoners who endured the German Blitz. If the Boomer experience often meant that cakes and pizzas had to be sliced into smaller portions, it also provided a much greater assortment of potential playmates and friends in the neighborhood. A child seeking a “best friend” with compatible attributes did not have to venture far to locate a likely candidate. The pool was often so large that a child could locate multiple “best friends,” which conveniently offered spare candidates in case of periodic disruptions.

  Third, the emergence of the first young “television generation” proved to be quite different from what pessimistic critics or euphoric supporters of TV imagined. Boomers were the first generation of children exposed to the influence of television, and there is little doubt that many children did their homework on the living-room floor in front of a television, were sometimes more likely to watch a flickering video screen than read a good book, and spent more time memorizing the characters of TV Westerns than the multiplication tables. On the other hand, as late as the end of the sixties the average child had access to a television that carried only three or four channels, only a tiny fraction of twenty-first-century counterparts. Most contemporary accounts and interviews with Boomers indicate that they loved television, had numerous favorite programs, and watched far more late-night, adult-oriented shows than their parents either knew about or admitted. But in summer, on weekends, and in late afternoons many children preferred outdoor play to television viewing, and even at night the television provided mainly background noise as friends or family played Scrabble, Monopoly, or Game of Life, or enjoyed their toys. In fact, television
often encouraged children to read more about the topic of a program. If TV was often distracting, it also could expand children’s horizons in ways undreamed of even a generation earlier, and as the sixties ended it was clear that television was not about to recede as a major factor in the childhood experience.

  Fourth, as the title of this book indicates, the children of this era are clearly the definitive “cold-war generation.” The all-encompassing reality of growing up in the quarter-century after World War II was the apparently permanent state of hostility and confrontation between the United States and the Communist bloc, led by the Soviet Union and supported by the People’s Republic of China. Historians dealing with this period may argue over who initiated the cold war, how close civilization came to a nuclear Armageddon, and whether the confrontation was avoidable, but there is little argument that the cold war permeated American life.

  Children of this era grew acclimated to the rhythms of the confrontation through numerous civil defense films, the “duck and cover” activities of the animated Bert the Turtle, and weekly air raid drills. Boomers wondered what would happen if a nuclear attack found them at school and separated from their parents, or on a bike ride home. Terms such as “fallout” and “radiation” were as familiar as “hopscotch” and “Wiffle ball.” Illustrated magazines on the living room coffee table provided photo essays on how to build a backyard fallout shelter and showed children playing board games in a basement crammed with survival gear.

  On television the cold war sometimes offered more real-life drama than Westerns or action shows. The kindly, grandfatherly demeanor of Dwight Eisenhower and the youth, vigor, and determination of John Kennedy contrasted with the shoe-pounding threats of “We will bury you” from the menacing Nikita Khrushchev. If all the Boomers did not experience a Pearl Harbor or a 9/11, they endured a much longer period of vague threat punctuated by the major crises of Sputnik and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

  Yet just as Pearl Harbor and the World Trade Center produced positive emotions of solidarity, generosity, and personal sacrifice, the Boomer experience with the cold war was not uniformly negative. The initial shock of Sputnik gave way to more positive emotions in the building of model kits of the orbiting craft, construction of cardboard rockets in school classrooms, and the heightened availability of space helmets and futuristic play clothes in stores. If Twilight Zone episodes dealing with nuclear war were sobering, the activities of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo astronauts were breathtaking. This book ends just after the triumphant landing of Apollo XI effectively “won” the space-race component of the cold war.

  These four provable realities of the Boomer childhood experience between 1946 and 1969 make it one of the best eras for growing up in America. Taking into account the implications of ongoing (if gradually diminishing) racial discrimination, gender bias, religious tensions, and ethnic exclusion, the period nonetheless was a genuinely positive time for most Boomers.

  The children of the postwar era grew up in a period when the economic distress, dislocation, hardship, and lack of parental supervision of the depression and World War II had largely ended. Prosperity was sufficiently widespread that a reasonably comfortable lifestyle could be had with the earnings of one parent if the other chose to stay home. While some women did grow bored and unfulfilled in their roles as full-time housewives and mothers, the culture of the time certainly reinforced the vital importance of their contributions, and there is every suspicion that most children who lived in a home with a mother as homemaker had no desire to trade places with their friends who had two working parents. Many homemaker mothers were involved with much more than shopping lists and meal preparations. They joined PTAs, served as den mothers or Girl Scout advisers, and volunteered for charity drives, all of which directly or indirectly had a positive effect on their children. On the other hand, if Boomer children were generally insulated from the dislocation and economic distress of the 1930s and early 1940s, they often grew up before the soaring divorce rate, the rise in out-of-wedlock births, and the economic necessity of two working parents turned the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries into a sometimes lonely and confusing experience. The children of this more contemporary era have sometimes been defined as “a tribe apart” as they confront blended families, parents working extended hours, and a world in which iPods, text messaging, and the internet often replace personal contact.

  There is no “best” or “worst” time to be a child. The spectrum of childhood experience in any era exhibits a sometimes horrifying range between happiness and terror. Many Boomers who were old enough to experience the fifties and sixties in some form quickly adopted a special feeling about the fashion, the films, the music, and the attitudes of the these decades almost as soon as they ended. Boomers who were barely adults themselves looked sourly at disco, seventies television, and new fashions, and searched for the “good old days” in Oldies radio stations, Happy Days on television, and Grease on stage and screen. Yet as nostalgia swept through one part of the Boomer generation during the seventies, millions of their younger siblings and neighbors saw only magic in the newly dawning era. But that experience is another story.

  A NOTE ON SOURCES

  THE PERIOD from 1946 to 1969 quite probably witnessed the peak influence of mass-circulation magazines and journals in the United States, and many families were affluent enough to subscribe to a broad range of them. The media domination of cable television and the internet was still to come. Substantial elements of this book were gleaned from hundreds of period journals. An almost mandatory activity in a project of this nature is the investigation of Life and Look, the two major mass-circulation magazines of the era. While both of these periodicals contain the celebrity orientation of modern journals such as People and Us, they also presented serious discussions of the national and international scene and focused heavily on contemporary family life, parenthood, and childhood experiences. Coupled with their extensive, largely full-color advertisements, these two periodicals provide priceless glimpses into the daily world of the Boomers and their families.

  The major news weeklies of the era are invaluable for their chronicles of important events of the period. Time and Newsweek provide an excellent narrative of primary news events while U.S. News offers substantially more material on school issues, parenting concerns, the economic and social impact of the Baby Boom, and projections of future trends in society. Several other general-audience periodicals proved surprisingly valuable. Fortune magazine featured highly readable assessments of the economic and marketing aspects of the ongoing population explosion and included several multi-issue predictions about life in America in both the 1980s and the early twenty-first century. Sports Illustrated varied its nuts-and-bolts reports on sporting events with articles on the role of sports in all levels of education and the impact of race and gender changes in sports on the broader society. T.V. Guide offered far more than grids that highlighted television programming for a particular week in a particular year. It also featured extensive articles on the impact of television violence on young children, the possible effect of global television on education, and the future role of adult Boomers when they became the gatekeepers for their children’s viewing experiences.

  The role of children in families and the broader adult society seemed to be a perennial theme in mass-market women’s magazines such as Redbook, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Good Housekeeping. “Back to School” child fashion layouts were interspersed with features on discipline, social and school success, and the shared responsibilities of mothers and fathers. Even Better Homes and Gardens offered features on coping with overcrowding in new suburban houses and hints on managing the issues of shared bedrooms and study spaces. Parents magazine at times seemed almost, but not quite, a women’s journal, as it conceded that mothers spent far more time with their children than fathers. But it carried just enough features on joint parents’ concerns and the special roles of the male parent to provide a slightly different perspective than
more general periodicals.

  Two valuable references aimed at child readers were Jack and Jill and the Mickey Mouse Club Magazine. The former magazine offers excellent insights into the stories, games, and activities that were approved by parents of the time. Disney’s offering features fascinating features on the relationship of 1950s children to young people of yesterday and tomorrow. In fact the initial article in the first issue in 1956 featured two children and their parents preparing to celebrate New Year 2000, and comparing their lifestyles to those of their counterparts nearly five decades earlier. While the feature provided only mixed results in the accuracy of its predictions, it offered an excellent perspective on how child Boomers may have perceived their adult future.

  The world of preteen and teenage girls of the era received massive coverage in Seventeen and Glamour, both of which explored attitudes about relationships, popularity, school issues, and career prospects. Equivalent sources for a male Boomer perspective are more difficult to find. Boys’ attitudes about adolescence must often be filtered through indirect sources, such as the enormously popular DC and Marvel comic books and satire magazines such as Mad and Cracked, with proper allowance for the nature of these publications.

  While contemporary periodicals proved invaluable to the research for this book, some fifty contemporary and later books added greater perspective. A number of excellent general histories of the fifties and sixties were written between the early 1970s and the early 1990s. Works on the earlier decade include Douglas Miller and Marion Novak, The Fifties the Way They Really Were (New York, 1977); J. Ronald Oakley, God’s Country: America in the Fifties (New York, 1986); William L. O’Neill, American High: The Years of Confidence (New York, 1986); and the magisterial David Halberstam work, The Fifties (New York, 1993), which is a necessity for gaining a full appreciation of the decade. Works on the 1960s include William L. O’Neill, Coming Apart: An Informal History of America in the 1960’s (Chicago, 1971); David Faber, The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s (New York, 1974); and Joseph Peter, An Oral History of the 1960s (New York, 1974).