Boomers: The Cold-War Generation Grows Up (15 page)

Midway between Manhattan's Brill Building and Malibu's beach parties, a third new kind of music was rising from the gritty streets of Detroit. Energetic entrepreneur Berry Gordy was spending the Kennedy years fashioning a music empire by forming primarily African-American groups with an appeal that would transcend race among Boomers. By 1963 the distinctive purple record label of Motown Records was a major element in most stocks of 45s as the Miracles' “Mickey's Monkey,” Martha and the Vandellas' “Heat Wave,” and Stevie Wonder's “Fingertips” became summer anthems. While these songs secured Gordy's place as an enormously successful minority business leader, he was already busy auditioning groups such as the Temptations, the Four Tops, and the Supremes, who would form much of the soundtrack of the rest of the decade.

Thus any Boomer armed with a transistor radio in 1963 was probably unaware that a group of young men from Liverpool would be needed to “rescue” rock and roll from its imminent demise. In fact the Beatles were so excited by the American scene that their early albums consisted primarily of covers of the same songs that later chronicles would dismiss as banal or sterile. Not only were the Boomers excited about “their” music well before the Beatles' arrival, members of their own generation were just now emerging as recognizable performers. By 1963 postwar babies such as Peggy March, Lesley Gore, and Stevie Wonder were piling up strings of hits, and Gore's birthday lament of “It's My
Party” came from an authentic Boomer sixteen-year-old, not a young adult looking back in time.

Many Boomers recall the Kennedy era as a real-life Camelot, punctuated by music, television, and films that chronicled their passage through childhood and adolescence. But at the time, adults of the era, unaware of the looming cultural upheaval, had more mixed reviews of the new generation. A growing number of magazine articles and television specials suggested that these postwar children were growing up before they were ready to handle minimal adult responsibility. In “Boys and Girls Too Old Too Soon,”
Life
magazine warned that America's preteens were rushing toward trouble as ten-to-twelve-year-old girls turned themselves out in mascara and high-style hairdos, and boys turned into party hounds. Under pressure to go steady, engaged in constant campaigns to captivate each other or be captured, young boys and girls became involved in subteen romances complete with wraparound dancing and necking. Profiling one twelve-year-old girl,
Life
described her as a “pocket
femme fatale
who can wrap a boy around her little finger and works hard at it.” She was considered representative of “a generation whose jumble of innocence and worldly wisdom is unnaturally precocious and alarming.”

Interviews with early-sixties preteens revealed that parents often considered the young relationships “cute,” or simply allowed themselves to be stampeded by the sheer numbers involved. Some women took their daughters to suburban beauty parlors to keep up with the latest coiffure while other girls routinely spent two hours with friends creating beehive hairdos. The garment industry tapped into this market with “training bras” and small-size garter belts to hold up special small-size stockings. Some newspaper advertisements
enticed girls to purchase wigs so that “now you can be as glamorous as mother.”

In large families of the period, some parents who had their hands full with babies or toddlers regarded preteen dating as the least of their immediate concerns. In a period of continued low divorce rates, marriage was still viewed as the institution that guaranteed happiness and security to all, especially as it was depicted in movies, television, and romance magazines. Thus some preteens who should have had a person of their age and gender as their best friend often found themselves with a miniature husband or wife. While they needed to belong in groups, pairing often was the necessary ticket of admission to many social functions.

While preteens basked in the ingratiating attention of their “steadies” and talked incessantly on the telephone hashing over the boys and girls in their lives, the Boomers who had become the vanguard of the high school generation in the early sixties were more frequently being noted for their restlessness and anti-social behavior. By the time the high school became the exclusive domain of the postwar baby surge, otherwise peaceful suburban communities tried to cope with teenagers who lacked the black leather jackets and pompadours of the fifties juvenile delinquents but could become equally threatening in khakis and crew cuts.

The summer vacation season became a potential time of trouble as waves of Boomer teens competing for limited summer jobs pushed a growing minority of bored adolescents toward gate-crashing, vandalism, and violence. Journalists cited the almost biblical status among teens of books such as
Catcher in the Rye, A Separate Peace
, and
Lord of the Flies
, and noted that an almost tribal atmosphere was developing in the parking lots and booths of suburban
restaurants as boys and girls shuttled from car to car and booth to booth with the single greeting, “Where's the party?” As one writer observed, “Almost every high school student in the nation has access to a car, his own, his parents' or that of a friend, while teens evade the liquor laws just as successfully as his father or grandfather dodged the Volstead Act.” Critics emphasized that while parents of earlier generations had considered themselves negligent if they did not know the whereabouts of their children at all times, in the sixties a teen could announce, in all honesty, that he was driving over to a friend's house to watch television. He might do so, and yet, before the evening was over, he and his friend, plus others picked up along the way, might visit a drive-in restaurant, a liquor store, look in on two or three parties, and cruise twenty miles on back roads to the music of blaring radios. Unless the teen telephoned home every half-hour, his or her parents would not know the exact location of their son or daughter.

Within a few years such concerns would pale in comparison to the generational confrontations instigated by the Vietnam War and the rising counterculture. By the standards of 1968 or 1969, preteens of 1962 and high school students of 1963 seemed far less threatening and far more integrated into the overall American culture. As the final summer of the Kennedy era drifted from one sun-drenched day to another, and throngs of adoring European citizens mobbed the young president, the Boomers emerged as idols for much of the young population of the planet. American popular music, films, and television spread the nation's ideas and values over the globe. The Boomers were the youngest citizens of a young country that, despite significant challenges, was basically rich, free, and envied. Around the globe, young people
of other nations played American records, watched American television and films, spoke American slang, and copied American youth fashions in a yearning to feel, at least vicariously, in touch with their counterparts in the United States. For one last summer season in Camelot, young American boys in chinos, loafers, and madras sport shirts, and young girls in Capri pants or Bermuda shorts, tennis shoes or sandals, defined modernity and youthfulness far beyond their nation's borders. Then, in the words of Nat “King” Cole's last hit that season, those “Hazy, Lazy, Crazy Days of Summer” drew to an inevitable close, and the oldest Boomers entered their senior year of high school with college on the horizon for many. Before their senior year was half finished, the idolized president would be slain, and before their final college exams, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy would join John Fitzgerald Kennedy in the pantheon of recent American martyrs.

SOON AFTER
Labor Day 1963, the promises and challenges of the great postwar birth surge coalesced in a major milestone. As beaches, campgrounds, and amusement parks became noticeably quiet, the children returning to school from kindergarten to the twelfth grade were, for the first time, all Boomers. Predictions from the forties and fifties that the surge in births would eventually affect every aspect of the public school system had now become reality, and there was no hint that the situation would change in the foreseeable future. One small consolation in this ongoing demographic crisis was that the United States now had a school population that completed the entire sequence of grades up to high school graduation in overwhelming numbers. Thus projections for future enrollments would be accurate enough to plan for faculty and facilities expansion if teachers could be found and funds raised.

Yet in the fall of 1963 the educational establishment, the Boomers, and their parents were about to enter uncharted
territory: students had a legal right to education through high school, but they had no such right to higher education. Each public and private institution was relatively free to expand as little or much as it chose, regardless of the needs of the Boomers who were about to seek admission to its campus. As Boomer seniors settled into their twelfth-grade rituals and routines, many faced not only the opportunities and challenges of their final year of traditional public education but also a complex national game of academic musical chairs where the number of college applicants exceeded the seats that could accommodate them. The teenagers who entered the college admissions sweepstakes of the 1960s faced an anxiety level that would never fully be appreciated or duplicated by their descendants in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The number of applicants was growing faster than colleges were expanding to accommodate them, while the whole process of acceptance and rejection was played against the backdrop of military conscription and the Vietnam War.

For most postwar children the transition from high school to college began as they moved from tenth to eleventh grade. Junior year of high school was the time for the first formal prom, the training course that would lead to a coveted driver's license, and the first career workshops offered by the school guidance staff. Eleventh grade also included one-on-one meetings with counselors who perused transcripts and often bluntly advised whether the child was indeed “college material.” Meanwhile “college nights” featured admissions personnel from a variety of schools who sometimes exhibited the smugness of individuals who knew their product was in greater demand than the supply could possibly accommodate.

As the juniors negotiated their way through a curriculum and grading system that had been made much more demanding in the wake of Sputnik, these early Boomers had their first encounter with the imposing bureaucracy of the
CEEB
, the College Entrance Examination Board. Sometime during the fall of their junior year, millions of teenagers took the
PSAT
, the Pre-Scholastic Aptitude Test that was a type of preview of the SAT, which was such a crucial factor in the college admissions process. Although counselors assured students that the
PSAT
did not “count” in any permanent sense, students and parents anxiously awaited the results and did the calculations that would turn the raw score into a rough preview of what might be expected in the “real thing” a few months later.

The closing months of the junior year usually brought the first encounter with the full-fledged “College Boards,” including the standard verbal and math examination and the aptitude tests that paralleled course subjects. These scores would usually arrive on a hot summer afternoon in the middle of school vacation, and the results—somewhere between the minimum of 200 and the maximum of 800—might prompt a family conference to help determine where, or if, an early Boomer would rise to the next level of education. On a group level the Boomers of the high school class of 1964 entered the testing season with enormous success. This class achieved the highest SAT scores of any group before or after, and would become the gold standard as scores gradually declined in future decades. Yet individually these children entered their final year of high school competing for college acceptance in a system that was simply not ready for them. Unlike their children, who would be asked by adults,
“Where
are you going to college?” the first Boomers would
be asked,
“Did
any college accept you?” Senior year placed these teens in two worlds, a universe of the culminating activities and events of the high school experience, and another world of tense anticipation in which alternate plans were serious possibilities in case the response from every college was the dreaded thin envelope that contained the single sheet of paper signifying rejection.

High school yearbooks of 1964 contain many features that would not look out of place in comparable annuals more than four decades later. Photos and commentary describe a breezy social whirl of homecoming dances, proms, and school plays. Successful athletic teams are held up as beacons of pride while even losing teams “played their hearts out” or gained “moral victories” in close losses. Candid classroom photos show popular teachers and eager students engaged in a more exciting learning process than most students remembered on most class days. A Who's Who section pairs a boy and girl as “Best Dressed,” “Most Musical,” “Best Looking,” “Class Clowns,” “Most Popular,” or “Most Likely to Succeed.” Photos of social events hint at the ever-changing dating universe, where the couples at the fall homecoming dance may or may not be with the same partners at the senior prom.