Setting the stage: the Depression and the Greatest Generation

We can never escape from where we came from:  our parents, the depression kids who were later named the greatest generation.  The 50s and 60s must be considered alongside the 30s and 40s which saw massive changes and upheavals of a very different kind for that preceding generation:  our parents.   Children of the depression had grown to young adulthood and were snatching up every opportunity which crossed their paths.  It was truly their time too and we shared it with them.  We were absolutely shaped by our parents’ experiences.

Depression kids are a cultural and psychological phenomenon which is still reverberating among us.  Many had gone hungry, and many had never enjoyed indoor plumbing and electricity in their childhoods.  In their own young years, they had seen their own parents struggle desperately to put food on the table and provide basic shelter.  There were no government safety nets such as food stamps and the search for work led to desperation.  Some of them had fled on the fabled Route 66 out of the Midwest dust bowl.

The world had woken up on a Sunday morning in 1941 to be confronted with Pearl Harbor.  The following day, most of our parents listened to a radio broadcast of President Roosevelt requesting a declaration of war against Japan and Germany.  From 1941 to 1945, they lived that devastating war, including the first thermonuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.   Without a second thought, they had plunged themselves and their country into a war to stop tyranny.  That job done, their efforts to return to normalcy over the next 15 years and their outlook and way of thinking would absolutely shape and affect those of us who already were or soon to be.  America, love it or leave it, was a cornerstone of their outlook on life. 

1941 and its aftermath had restored, with a few hiccups here and there, the prosperity of a nation still haunted by the Great Depression and its scarring economic aftermath.  After Pearl Harbor in 1941, the need for goods catapulted American factories into life, building the aircraft, tanks and bombs needed by our European allies, and ultimately by our own soldiers.  Work was available to almost anyone who wanted it, including a new and quite different pool of ready and willing workers:  young women.  The war’s end in 1945 did not spell the end of an economy on the roll.  The prosperity continued from 1945 on, with a post-war generation of young men and women who were now ready to roll up their sleeves and make a new and different life for themselves, far removed from the deprivations they had suffered as children.  They flooded into urban areas and created a demand for housing, services and goods that fed upon itself.  The GI bill sent many young men on to college or technical training, enabling them to enter a well paying profession, a dream which had been merely remote in their own school years.  Prosperity and economic growth begat even more prosperity.   

This was the stage our parents walked across.   They were conventional, conservative, and conforming.  They had enormous faith in their country and their leaders and did not take well to any criticism of their society.  They had lived through a war and experiences most of us, their children, could not even fathom.  Many WW2 veterans flatly refused to even discuss the war.  It came.  They did what they had to do, and they were ready to put it completely behind them and get on with better things.  This was the beginning of us, their late 40s and early 50s offspring.   We would gray their hair within when we came of age in the 60s, but that was little more than sheet lightning on the horizon in their time.