For The Old Geezers ...

[Flashermac]

Children of the 1930s & 1940s: "The Last Ones" A Short Memoir

 

 

Born in the 1930s and early 1940s, we exist as a very special age cohort. We are the "last ones." We are the last, climbing out of the depression, who can remember the winds of war and the war itself with fathers and uncles going off. We are the last to remember ration books for everything from sugar to shoes to stoves. We saved tin foil and poured fat into tin cans. We saw cars up on blocks because tires weren't available.

 

We are the last to hear Roosevelt's radio assurances and to see gold stars in the front windows of our grieving neighbors. We can also remember the parades on August 15, 1945; VJ Day. We saw the 'boys' home from the war build their Cape Cod style houses, pouring the cellar, tar papering it over and living there until they could afford the time and money to build it out. We are the last who spent childhood without television, instead imagining what we heard on the radio. As we all like to brag, with no TV, we spent our childhood "playing outside until the street lights came on." We did play outside and we did play on our own. There was no little league. The lack of television in our early years meant, for most of us, that we had little real understanding of what the world was like. Our Saturday afternoons, if at the movies, gave us newsreels of the war and the holocaust sandwiched in between westerns and cartoons. Newspapers and magazines were written for adults. We are the last who had to find out for ourselves.

 

As we grew up, the country was exploding with growth. The G.I. Bill gave returning veterans the means to get an education and spurred colleges to grow. VA loans fanned a housing boom. Pent up demand coupled with new installment payment plans put factories to work. New highways would bring jobs and mobility. The veterans joined civic clubs and became active in politics. In the late 40s and early 50's the country seemed to lie in the embrace of brisk but quiet order as it gave birth to its new middle class. Our parents understandably became absorbed with their own new lives. They were free from the confines of the depression and the war. They threw themselves into exploring opportunities they had never imagined. We weren't neglected but we weren't today's all-consuming family focus. They were glad we played by ourselves 'until the street lights came on.' They were busy discovering the post war world.

 

Most of us had no life plan, but with the unexpected virtue of ignorance and an economic rising tide we simply stepped into the world and went to find out. We entered a world of overflowing plenty and opportunity; a world where we were welcomed. Based on our naïve belief that there was more where this came from, we shaped life as we went. We enjoyed a luxury; we felt secure in our future. Of course, just as today, not all Americans shared in this experience. Depression poverty was deep rooted, and racism far too common. Polio was still a crippler. The Korean War was a dark presage in the early 1950s and by mid-decade school children were ducking under desks. China became Red China. Eisenhower sent the first "advisors" to South Vietnam. Castro set up camp in Cuba and Khrushchev came to power. We are the last to experience an interlude when there were no existential threats to our homeland.

 

We came of age in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The war was over and the cold war, terrorism, climate change, technological upheaval and perpetual economic insecurity had yet to haunt life with insistent unease. Only we can remember both a time of apocalyptic war and a time when our world was secure and full of bright promise and plenty. We experienced both. We grew up at the best possible time, a time when the world was getting better not worse. We did not have it easy. Our wages were low, we did without, we lived within our means, we worked hard to get a job, and harder still to keep it. Things that today are considered necessities, we considered unreachable luxuries. We made things last. We fixed, rather than replaced. We had values and did not take for granted that "Somebody will take care of us". We cared for ourselves and we also cared for others.

 

We are the 'last ones.'

[bust]

I will read this thread in 30 years

[baa99]

Some how he forgot nuclear bomb shelters, 'nam, jim crow laws, etc. A very selective memory that comes with age.

[Flashermac]

No, a very selective reading that comes from not looking.

 

"... and racism far too common."

 

"... by mid-decade school children were ducking under desks."

 

"... Eisenhower sent the first "advisors" to South Vietnam."

[baa99]

The war was over and the cold war, terrorism, climate change, technological upheaval and perpetual economic insecurity had yet to haunt life with insistent unease.

 

We are the last to experience an interlude when there were no existential threats to our homeland.

 

Very selective reading! Especially of history. The Cold War started at the end of WWII with the Soviets occupying Eastern Europe. That essay sure wasn't written by a Mississippi Delta black man. The writer probably learned US history from visiting Disney World.

[Flashermac]

No, the Cold War took a while to get going. It was after the communists had overthrown the non-communist government in Czechoslovakia and Truman responded with his own "doctrine". Even then things didn't really get nasty until Stalin supported N Korea in its attack on the South.

 

"Historians do not fully agree on the dates, but a common time frame is the period (the second half of the 20th century) between 1947, the year the Truman Doctrine (a U.S. foreign policy pledging to aid nations threatened by Soviet expansionism) was announced, and 1991, the year the Soviet Union collapsed."

 

Maybe the writer was an Australian, since you seem to know US history better than we do.

 

 

http://www.nma.gov.au/online_features/defining_moments/featured/white_australia_policy_begins

[baa99]

The term Iron Curtain had been in occasional and varied use as a metaphor since the 19th century, but it came to prominence only after it was used by the former British prime minister Winston Churchill in a speech at Fulton, Missouri, U.S., on March 5, 1946, when he said of the communist states, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.â€

 

https://www.britannica.com/event/Iron-Curtain