26 posts tagged “baby boomers”
One November day early in the Boomer years, the poet T. S. Eliot won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Although it would be several years before I made my appearance, I’m sure I never did realize that Mr. Eliot actually lived right up until 1965—only a few years before his name made its appearance in one of my classes.
Oh, do not ask "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.
I wasted a lot of time in high school, much of it in my lit classes, but the name T.S. Eliot stuck with me for a couple of reasons. First off, though I have no memory of what it was about, I have always adored the title of his famous first poem: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. I mean, really. Doesn’t that just roll off the tongue like the chorus of a good dance tune? There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet The second reason was Mr. Patterson, the teacher in that lit class. Along with almost all of his other students, I adored Mr. Patterson. And why did we adore him? Was it his ability to evoke a scene from Our Town? Was it the mellifluous tones of his elegant voice as he recited his own inimitable poetry? Was it his handsome visage? None, as they say on so many high school quizzes, of the above. He was simply, amazingly, invariably unflappable. The goal of nearly every one of his classes was to get him to flap. But, alas! We all failed! And indeed there will be time To wonder "Do I dare?" and "Do I dare?" Once I remember that the clock fell off the wall in the midst of our class. (Was this an accident? Who knows?) He didn’t even flinch! He just turned around and looked at it, then returned to the lesson at hand. My own sister, who sat in his class a couple years before I did, told me of turning a waste basket upside down on desk prior to his entering the room. He came in, turned the can back over, refilled it, and began teaching. Nary a word, a glance, a scowl! But perhaps they were studying The Waste Land. Perhaps that’s why, two years later, he chose to focus on The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock instead! And would it have been worth it, after all, Ah, Mr. Patterson, I grow old… I grow old… I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled…
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question
But in my old age, maybe I’ll pull old J Alfred out again, read it with care, and think of those tumultuous years and that classroom filled with squeaking chairs, youthful restlessness and one unflappable teacher.
I doubt I saw the Wizard of Oz when it first hit the small screen, which was on November 3, 1956. I was a too young to be watching something that scary, and I’m not sure how much TV watching we did back in those days, anyway.
I do remember my surprise when I realized that the Land of Oz was so danged colorful! I believe that was in the 70s. I’d seen the movie a bunch of times as a youngster, but I’m guessing I just didn’t watch it after we got our first color television sometime in the latter half of the 1960s. It really seemed like a whole new movie to me after that.
I still love that movie. Don’t you?
Check out this Dorothy/Scarecrow/Tin Man mashup I found on YouTube:
While it wasn’t until 1983 that the term “nuclear winter” was coined by American physicist Richard P. Turco (a cohort of Carl Sagan, who literally wrote the book on the subject), no Boomer had been untouched by the whole idea of nuclear war and its concomitant MAD philosophy (not to be confused with the computer game of the same name). Who among us hasn’t hidden under a desk to avoid being annihilated by an atom bomb? I would guess the real driving force behind MAD and the eventual fear of a nuclear winter came about on a lovely fall day in 1949, when President Harry Truman announced to a shocked nation: "We have evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the USSR." The race was on! I grew up in quite a small town planted pretty much right smack in the middle of nowhere (which turns out to be a good place to park ammunition dumps and nuclear power plants, by the way), so we didn’t have much of an airport. I can still remember trembling in my bed whenever I heard an airplane fly overhead for fear that it would be the one that brought a big bomb home to me. I realize now that this doesn’t make sense, but like most little girls, I had a big imagination and only a little strategic defense education. It took 47 years, but on Sept. 24, 1996, the U.S., along with a bunch of the world's other nuclear powers (though not all), signed the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty to end all testing and development of nuclear weapons. (Go to article.) While I applaud this effort, like so much of what we do, this treaty looks like too little, too late. OK, maybe not too late. I’m really the eternal optimist—if an optimist can also be a cynic. I suspect a lot of people who get a little power can’t see the trees for the forest, but I also think most people are really pretty decent; they don’t look forward to wars or even rumors of wars. I suspect that, like me, most of them just want to eat, have a roof over their heads and have happy children—and grandchildren. I know I want my grandchildren to be happy. I sure as heck don’t want them lying awake at night wondering if the airplane droning overhead is going to drop a bomb on them! So I guess I’ll keep walking and talking the peace and love walk and talk, all the while maintaining a little low-key constituent pressure on those elected officials who claim to represent me among those powerful people who are lost in the woods. Hope they find their way home before winter.
One of the most generous, thoughtful and noble ventures in recent memory was inaugurated at the outset of the Boomer era. This would be George C. Marshall’s plan to get Europe back on its feet after World War II, which he outlined on June 5, 1947 in a talk he gave at Harvard University. It was such a great idea that he won the 1953 Nobel Peace Prize for it. The Marshall Plan, as it came to be known, may well be the reason so many of us Americans think of ourselves as the good guys. OK, we think of ourselves as the good guys because of that cognitive dissonance thing, but we WERE noble and wonderful when we agreed to carry out the Marshall Plan. For this 60th anniversary year of the Marshall Plan, Greg Behrman wrote a book titled The Most Noble Adventure: The Marshall Plan and the Time When America Helped Save Europe. Let’s hope those Europeans remember that noble adventure should WE need to be saved.
The very first black light was sold on this day in 1961, giving us Boomers a chance to show off glowing teeth and T-shirts along with those psychedelic faces in Daliesque posters. Black lights and strobes let us see the world in a whole new way, and probably led us down that slippery slope between the Evil Weed and LSD. Or maybe the slope went the other direction. Who knows? Those strobe lights gave me a headache, though they were at least legal, unlike most of the other things that gave me headaches as a teenager.
Here are some links to articles that tell how black lights and strobe lights work, along with a long list of materials that glow under black lights, including body fluids, antifreeze and teeth whiteners. Have fun!
Now here’s an intriguing irony. I’d guess most of us Boomers would say the
the women’s movement gained its greatest momentum during our generation, but it wasn't until May 22, 2003 that a woman (that would be Annika Sörenstam) played in a PGA-sanctioned tournament. That is, the first woman to play in a PGA tournament since Babe Zaharias did the same thing—in 1945, the year BEFORE Boomers began to populate the earth.
Here’s another little aside for this week: I don’t know if women or men are the biggest mystery fans, but I know I always loved Perry Mason. The original, not the older Perry Mason version and certainly not the Seventies version, which I never even knew about until today. Sadly, it was May of 1966 when the very last of the original Perry Mason episodes was aired. Here are two possible trivia questions (or answers) for you. The name of the episode: The Case of the Final Fade-Out. The name of the person playing the judge on that episode: Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of the fictional lawyer.
Velcro is definitely a product of the Baby Boomer era. We may not remember having grown up with it, but it’s been around most of our lives.
This hook-and-loop type fastener was invented by a Swiss guy who got the idea from burrs and was originally patented in 1951. The trademark for Velcro was registered in the U.S. in this week in 1958 and the rest, as they say, is history.
But it’s not the history I’m interested in here. It’s what I call the Velcro Principle, which is applied to any thing wherein its good quality is also its bad quality. For Velcro, of course, its good quality is that it really sticks together well. As many Boomers on the upper end of the age range are beginning to discover, Velcro’s bad quality is that it REALLY sticks together well, which is a bane to those whose fingers just aren’t as strong and nimble as they used to be.
Here’s another example: The good thing about working in a small office is that everyone knows everyone else. This is also the bad thing about working in a small office.
If you can think of more examples, I’d love to hear them. If you just want to learn more about Velcro, you can download a PDF with a cute story and timeline about the product. If you want to come up with your own principle... well, that's another proposition altogether.
I have a theory that the earth is actually spinning faster than it used to. That’s the only logical explanation for how short the days, weeks, and years have become. Looking back on this week in Boomer history, it’s not surprising that the world seems to be spinning out of control.
The very first Baby Boomers were just popping out of the womb when the Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Company was founded. We all know this little firm by its current name, Sony, a company which has long given us immediacy in media entertainment.
Polaroid, the company that delivered instant photos in the analog age, sold its first instant camera in 1949. The price tag? $89.99. Translated into today’s dollars? $777.00.
That same year, the very first launderette opened in Queensway, London, so by the time Dacron suits were produced 1951, a guy could get off work at 5:00, zoom to the Laundromat, take off his suit, wash it, dry it and put it back on in time for dinner! Of course, the suit might have shrunk, since the fabric for these suits was a polyester and worsted blend. And I’m not sure how many men actually knew about the launderette in the 1950s. Plus, standing around a Laundromat in your undies in those days could get you arrested.
Then came something Dummer—Geoffrey Dummer. In 1952 Mr. Dummer published the very first concept for an integrated circuit, the basis for all modern computers. I’m sitting in front of the result of that right now, still wondering if I love this machine or despise it. It certainly uses up a lot of my precious time. Plus, computers are getting smarter, and I suspect I’m not. Some of them can already outsmart me, and I’m not just talking about the confusion of the so-called User Manuals. Nope. It’s already been 10 years since Deep Blue, the IBM computer, defeated human chess master Garry Kasparov to win a six-game chess match in New York.
Bill Haley, along with his Comets, made music a 24/7 proposition with the release of “Rock Around the Clock,” the first rock and roll record to reach number one on the Billboard charts. ("Rock Around the Clock" released)
That same year a mild-mannered medical student, Roger Bannister, dashed into the fray when he became the first known person in history to run a mile in less than four minutes. (First four-minute mile) Even the foot traffic is picking up speed! These days the speed isn’t just in the feet, unfortunately. In the first week of May in 1989, Canadian Olympian Ben Johnson admitted having used anabolic steroids to “enhance performance.” He wasn’t the only one, of course. Lots of athletes think they can’t perform without help. Take Seattle Slew, who won the first of his Triple Crown races on May 7, 1977—that poor horse really had a jockey on his back!
In 1961, Federal Communications Commission chairman Newton N. Minow condemned TV programming as a "vast wasteland" in a speech to the National Association of Broadcasters. Only two years later, AT&T’s Telstar II communications satellite was launched, so we could get to a now much vaster wasteland much more quickly—and in living color! But bouncing color TV signals around the earth’s atmosphere doesn’t seem like that much of an achievement when you compare it to shooting the moon (literally) with a laser beam, which was done by MIT scientists in the year between Minow’s speech and the launch of Telstar II.
For those who don’t want to run, ride a horse or wait for a laser beam to make the trip between Great Britain and mainland Europe, there’s the Channel tunnel—referred to playfully as the Chunnel (because we’re in too much of a hurry to have to use two words, when one will do), which was officially opened by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth and France’s President Francois Mitterrand on May 6, 1994 [English Channel tunnel opens]. Here we are flying through the sky and digging tunnels under the sea in order to KEEP ON TRUCKIN’! Maybe those holes are what’s making the earth spin faster. Hmm…
What with TV and the moon so easily within our reach, print media is really having a hard time keeping up. During this week in 1971, the Daily Sketch newspaper closed its doors. It was Britain’s oldest tabloid, having been founded in 1909. Trees just don’t grow fast enough to keep up in the digital age. More bad news for the laid back crowd when Bob Marley died just 10 years later. In a world where things seem to be picking up speed by the second, another slowdown occurred—and I really got a kick out of this—when in 2003 fifty-nine Democratic lawmakers brought the Texas House of Representatives to a standstill by going into hiding in a dispute over a Republican congressional redistricting plan. Of course, slowing down a legislature probably doesn’t really count. That seems to be one of the few areas of our universe that has remained stubbornly hard to get moving at all.
Well, here I am looking at the clock and completely stunned at how long it’s taken me to write less than 1,000 words. You know, these days we don’t even have time to watch our weight—May 6 is now International No Diet Day. We’ve designated a day of awareness for not maintaining our diets! Oh, wait (weight?) – this appears to be a day when we are to purposely not diet in honor of the natural human form. I don’t think I have time to not diet, do I?
I think my real political awakening came when on May 4, 1970 the National Guard opened fire on students at Kent State in Ohio who had burned down the ROTC building as part of a protest of the U.S. invasion of Cambodia. Four students were killed and nine were wounded. I was deeply shocked that U.S. troops would shoot at U.S. citizens, and the date is one that has really stuck with me. I was just about to graduate from high school that spring, and my interests were starting to shift away from sex, drugs and rock’n’roll to more serious matters. It was a serious time in our nation’s history—why else would our government be sending armed troops to small cities to kill children who didn’t accept the prevailing domino theory of geopolitics?
Because my family was big on sports, I had heard about Muhammad Ali (whom we still called Cassius Clay) refusing to be inducted into the U.S. Army on May 1 in 1967 because of his religious convictions. We knew almost nothing about Islam at that time, though I had learned a bit about it in my class on Western Civilization. But though my knowledge was limited, I was still moved by someone whose beliefs were powerful enough to cause him to give up something for which he had worked so hard, something that had temporal importance, such as a world heavyweight boxing championship.
The protests didn’t end the war right away, but the killings didn’t stop the protests either. A year almost to the day after Kent State, anti-war protesters calling themselves the Mayday Tribe spent four days trying shutting down Washington D.C. (Go to article.)
It wasn’t long after the Kent State incident that public opinion in general began to shift away from supporting that war, even though it would be another half a decade before the Vietnamese civil war ended, when the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon fell to the Viet Cong forces, which occurred on April 30, 1975. (Go to article.)
It was during this week in 1970 that the Boomer generation generated the first Earth Day and, according to Wikipedia, about 20 million people participated, not all of them hippies. Nowadays more than 500 million people and national governments in 175 countries set aside April 22 as Earth Day, though I suspect it won’t get the boost it really needs until some exceptional sporting or sales events are associated with it.
Arbor Day is also celebrated on this day and Earth Day may just be its more famous younger sibling. That national tree-planting day, which originated in 1872, is a state holiday in Nebraska, generally celebrated the last Friday in April—meaning, I’m guessing, that anyone with a government job gets another three-day weekend. I do believe that’s one of the two biggest reasons we observe most holidays in the U.S.–the other, of course, is the opportunity to spend more hours shopping for holiday bargains. The Romans also celebrated a kind of earth day called Floralia, in honor of the flower goddess Flora. The holiday became official in 238 BC, when a temple honoring Flora was opened near the Circus Maximus in Rome. What do you think? Was it or was it not a shopping temple? Interestingly, we almost had an In Memoriam moment for our planet shortly after Earth Day in 1986, when an explosion and fire at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine, at that time part of the Soviet Union. The radiation released killed at least 31 people immediately. The Soviets tried to pretend nothing happened, but Ukraine is actually in Europe, and the Europeans noticed. It took a couple days, but eventually the Soviets said, “Oops! Sorry about that.” The long-term costs of this disaster are still being calculated. (http://todayspictures.slate.com/inmotion/essay_chernobyl/) On the good news side of the Earth Day week was the 2001 trip taken by California businessman Denis Tito, the first space tourist. When asked about the wonder of viewing the earth from outer space, he said: “I’m not really a space tourist, I’m an independent researcher.” Somehow, not quite as inspiring as “One small step for mankind…” If you want to start planning for next year’s Earth Day, here’s a good starting place: http://www.earthday.org/
