Boomers: The Cold-War Generation Grows Up (11 page)

Millions of Boomers seamlessly traded baseball or cheer-leading uniforms for the blue shirts and yellow neckerchiefs of Cub Scouts or the brown beanies of Brownies, as scouting seemed to grow in geometric progression with young moms shuttling between den-mother duties for their sons and helping distribute Girl Scout cookies with their daughters.

As in any cross-generational conversation, it is not difficult to imagine the children and grandchildren of the Boomer generation rolling their eyes in disbelief as middle-aged adults fondly recount watching grainy black-and-while television programs or playing with decidedly low-tech toys. Children of more recent decades, exposed to a sensory bombardment of video games, high-definition cable television, and iPods, wonder how anyone could have had fun in a far more unplugged era. Yet the iconic images of midcentury childhood—Hula Hoop contests, smiling children in Davy Crockett caps, and mesmerized attention to the antics of Howdy Doody—are not illusions or gross exaggerations. The children of that era somehow instinctively knew that they lived in a magical time that could never be fully replicated. Boomer children certainly captured the attention of the adult world in the fifties. The one complicating factor was that these kids were fated to share the spotlight with slightly older youngsters who in some cases were their brothers and sisters. These siblings were producing their own iconic images as America's first “teenagers.”

ONE OF THE IRONIES
of the Boomer childhood experience in the 1950s was that postwar children had to share center stage in the youth culture arena with older siblings and neighbors who spent the same decade emerging as the nation's first real “teenage” generation. Pictures of Boomer kids in Mickey Mouse ears and twirling inside Hula Hoops always seemed to compete with images of Elvis Presley, James Dean, and teen girls in poodle skirts. If postwar kids had the edge in sheer numbers, the emerging teenage generation had age and spending money on its side in this friendly generational rivalry. On one side were real-life versions of Jeff Stone, “Beaver” Cleaver, and “Kitten” Anderson, kids making their way through the fifties as children and preteens. Their older siblings were the new generation of teens portrayed on television by Mary Stone, Wally Cleaver, and “Princess” Anderson in a variety of same-sex and opposite-gender squabbles that stopped just long enough to form a united front against parents or other adult authority figures.

Fifties Boomers and teenagers shared common neighborhoods, common homes, and even common bedrooms,
but they experienced the first full postwar decade at different points in their young lives. The pre-Boomer generation spent much of the fifties collecting Elvis Presley records, showing off leather jackets, cashmere sweaters, pompadours, and ponytails. Contrary to depictions in
Blackboard Jungle
and
Rebel Without a Cause
, most of these young people were well-behaved and polite. Yet they
were
the “first teenagers,” and even well-behaved kids scared adults when they swung or shook to the startling rhythms of Chuck Berry or Little Richard.

In the period before World War II, adults generally referred to young people between thirteen and nineteen as “adolescents” or “youth,” and possibly drew some comfort from the fact that most of this group would spend at least half of these years working or seeking a job.

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 conquer 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.