Boomers: The Cold-War Generation Grows Up (2 page)

Housewives were not the only people on the street. Children walked, ran, or roller-skated with the carefree abandon of pupils on summer vacation; teenage girls in bobby sox and saddle shoes playfully teased boys in baggy pants and crumpled fedoras; older men sat contentedly in the sunshine in the town park or played checkers with cronies. Yet a casual visitor would soon notice that this picturesque scene included very few young men. Millions of young Americans were either overseas in war zones, preparing for combat in training camps, or working in the never-shuttered factories that made the weapons for a conflict that General Dwight Eisenhower had recently named the Great Crusade.

The 130 million Americans of 1945 who were living in this time of high drama and significant personal sacrifice were part of a society that seemed incredibly modern and fast moving, compared even to the relatively recent turn of the century just four decades earlier. Daily newspapers, lavishly illustrated magazines, and theatrical films and newsreels were major elements in a sensory bombardment that addressed the entire enterprise called the “War Effort.” But the most intimate yet universal source of knowledge was the radio, which had become the centerpiece of virtually every family's living room. Whether it took the form of an ornate mahogany console with rows of illuminated dials or an inexpensive table model with a few functional knobs, a radio was the lifeline to the outside world as authoritative, well-modulated voices kept listeners informed of the dramatic,
sometimes tragic, events that marked a nation engaged in total war.

In the preceding twelve years, even before the terrible news of Pearl Harbor in 1941, the most recognizable voice on the radio was the melodious, confident diction of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who, through his “fireside chats,” seemed to become an additional family member in the parlor. Just as the Nazi Reich entered its final days, a radio voice trembling with emotion announced that the commander-in-chief had died in Warm Springs, Georgia. A grief-stricken nation mourned its fallen leader, even as it heard of the death of Hitler and the surrender of the German Wehrmacht.

A new voice now entered American living rooms—the flat, businesslike cadence of former Missouri senator Harry S. Truman, who was catapulted from relative obscurity into the Oval Office. Thus when network announcers notified their audience that the president would address the nation at 2
P.M
., Eastern War Time, on this summer afternoon, the voice that followed still seemed a bit strange, especially to the millions of American children who had known only one president in their living memory.

Harry Truman may have sounded a bit too abrupt to be pictured sitting by the family fireside, but the message he delivered was likely the best news in the lifetimes of most Americans. After almost four years of war, 400,000 American deaths, and 50 million worldwide fatalities, the Emperor of Japan had accepted Allied surrender terms, and peace was about to return to the United States. Twelve million American servicemen and servicewomen would now return to civilian life and experience every conceivable type of reunion,
from family picnics to engagement parties to wedding celebrations. Marines occupying the bleak landscape of Iwo Jima, airmen stationed on bomber bases in England, sailors serving on destroyers in the Pacific Ocean, soldiers manning foxholes against the last sporadic Japanese resistance on Okinawa, and nurses captured on Bataan and held in Manila internment camps for three years were all coming home. Some would come home to spouses and children, others to fiancées, boyfriends, or girlfriends. Many had met someone special during their service activities. However these young American men and women had developed relationships that led to marriage, they would produce a second legacy beyond winning World War II and securing the American way of life and the dreams that accompanied it. During the next two decades this “Greatest Generation” would in turn create a new generation of almost 76 million boys and girls who, despite enormous differences in lifestyle, education, and attitude, would share membership in a group that would soon be called simply the “Baby Boomers.” America would never again be quite the same.

NEW YEAR'S DAY
1946 represented more than the usual festive celebrations that mark the transition of one year to the next. For the first time in seven years there was neither war nor the threat of war on the horizon, and now something other than military campaigns might capture the public's attention. A nation that had just steered through the treacherous shoals of a global conflict now found itself free to look farther back and farther forward for inspiration. One of the first news stories of 1946 was the 81st annual encampment of 67 Union Army veterans in Cleveland, where 102-year-old Robert Ripley of New York was elected commander-in-chief with a mandate to invite Confederate veterans to a joint reunion that summer.

Despite the eight decades that separated the American Civil War from the 1940s, tangible links to the conflict remained. During their childhoods, many of the returning World War II veterans had met Civil War participants. The wife of Gen. James Longstreet, Robert E. Lee's deputy at Gettysburg, was photographed riding in the back of a convertible at an Independence Day celebration, and Lt. Gen.
Simon Bolivar Buckner, commander of American forces in the battle of Okinawa and the most senior general to die in combat, was the son of Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner, Sr., one of Ulysses S. Grant's closest friends at West Point and the first Confederate commander to surrender to the future Union commanding general. Older men and women still regaled wide-eyed children with stories of glimpses of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis, or even early memories of life as a slave.

Yet if America was still tethered to links with the Civil War era and nostalgic aspects of nineteenth-century life, an equally powerful attraction was the world of the twenty-first century that lay just over the horizon. The January 1946 issue of a national news magazine followed an article on Civil War veterans with a feature on the “Great Electro Mechanical Brain,” describing MIT's follow-up to the University of Pennsylvania's breakthrough
ENIAC
“differential analyzer,” with its computing machine that “advances science by freeing it from the pick and shovel work of mathematics.” The new mechanical brain in Cambridge, Massachusetts, used two thousand vacuum tubes and two hundred miles of electrical wire in one hundred tons of hardware and metal that could solve in thirty minutes a problem that would take human scientists more than ten hours to complete. The four members of
ENIAC
's technical crew fed data to the machine that “could advance the frontiers of knowledge by liberating scientists from everyday equations for more creative work.”

The exciting world of the “Atomic Age” future was a feature of current advertising. An early 1946 ad for the Hotel Pennsylvania illustrates the New York City of the twenty-first century with futuristic helicopters landing businessmen on
the hotel roof. The copy insists that “many things are sure to change our lives in the new era of a new century. However, whether you come by helicopter or jet car, the Hotel Pennsylvania will never serve concentrated food pills as even in the future, we will still have full and robust meals.”

Somewhere between the quaintness of the gaslight era and the excitement of the looming 21st century stood a real world into which 76 million babies would be born over the next 18 years. This America held tantalizing glimpses of the society we know today yet had been shaped substantially by the war and the depression decade of the 1930s. Compared to the fashion standards of twenty-first-century society, for example, most midcentury men, women, and to some extent children dressed much more formally, with propriety often trumping comfort.

The young men who would become the fathers of Boomer children included a large percentage for whom dress shirts, dress shoes, neckties, coats, and even dress hats were required wear—from work to PTA meetings to religious worship and even to summer promenades on resort boardwalks and piers. Men who worked in strenuous jobs, on assembly lines and loading docks, might be seen wearing neckties under their coveralls; and for individuals employed in corporate offices, banks, and department stores, removing a coat on a hot summer day was an act of major informality. When most male white-collar workers ventured outside, they usually wore a wide-brimmed fedora that looked very much like the headwear of most other men, with the exception of a few seniors who refused to relinquish their old-fashioned derbies or straw skimmers. Men's hairstyles were almost as standardized as their clothes, the main variation being a choice between maintaining the close-cropped “combat cut”
that had been required in the military service or returning to the longer prewar slicked-back hair held in place by large amounts of hair tonic or cream.

These young men were now pairing off with young women who in some ways looked dramatically different from their mothers and were entering a period where comfort and formality were locked in conflict. Relatively recent women's fashions had undergone far more seismic changes than men's styles. In relatively rapid succession, the piled-up hair and long dresses of the
Titanic
era had given way to the short-skirted Flapper look of the 1920s, which in turn had morphed into the plucked eyebrows, bleached hair, and longer skirts of the depression era.

By the eve of Pearl Harbor, all of these looks seemed hopelessly old-fashioned to teenagers, college girls, and young women, and the war brought still more change. Fashion for immediate postwar females in their teens or twenties featured relatively long hair, bright red lipstick, fairly short skirts, and a seemingly infinite variety of sweaters. The practicality of pants for women in wartime factories had led to a peacetime influx of slacks, pedal pushers, and even shorts, matched with bobby sox, knee socks, saddle shoes, and loafers. While skirts or dresses topped by dressy hats and gloves were still the norm for offices, shopping, and most social occasions, home wear and informal activities were becoming increasingly casual, especially for younger women.

The preschool and elementary school children of the immediate postwar period, many of whom would later become the older siblings of the Boomers, appear in most films, advertisements, and photos to be a fusion of the prewar era and the looming 1950s. Among the most notable fashion changes for boys was a new freedom from the decades-long curse
of knickers and long stockings that had separated boyhood from adolescence and produced more than a few screaming episodes of frustration as boys or their mothers tried to attach often droopy socks with tight, uncomfortable knicker pants. As prewar boys' suspenders rapidly gave way to belts, the classic prewar “newsboy” caps were being replaced by baseball caps.

Girls who would become the older sisters of the postwar generation were also caught in a bit of a fashion tug-of-war. An informal “tomboy” look of overalls, jeans, and pigtails collided with the Mary Jane dresses and bangs of the prewar era in young mothers' versions of their daughters.

The tension between past and future in American fashion was equally evident in many aspects of everyday life into which the new, postwar babies would arrive. For example, one of the first shocks that a young visitor from the twenty-first century would receive if traveling to the early postwar period would be the haze of tobacco smoke permeating almost every scene. The Boomers may have been the first generation to include substantial numbers adamantly opposed to smoking, but most of their parents and grandparents had other ideas. Nearly two of three adult males used pipes, cigars, or cigarettes, and almost two of five women were also regular smokers in the early postwar era. This was a world in which early television commercials and great numbers of full-color magazine advertisements displayed a stunningly handsome actor or a beautiful actress elegantly smoking a favorite brand of cigarette while a doctor in a white coat and stethoscope explained the ability of one brand of cigarette to keep the “T zone” free of irritation. Other doctors intoned that serious weight-watchers should “reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.” One series of magazine ads noted that in
a survey of 113,597 physicians, “more doctors smoke Camels than any other brand.” Even in the minority of homes where neither parent smoked, ashtrays were always readily available for the many relatives and friends who did use tobacco, thus ensuring that few Boomers would grow up in truly smoke-free homes.

The same young visitor from the twenty-first century who would be astonished at widespread tobacco use by the parents and grandparents of Boomers would find their eating habits equally cavalier. One of the most common scenes in films from the 1930s or the World War II era was a group of civilians or soldiers gathered around a fire or a foxhole dreaming of the “perfect” meal they would enjoy when the depression or the war ended. The dream fare always included steaks, bacon, a cornucopia of fried foods, and desserts, topped off with a good smoke. In an era when the real hunger of the depression and the shortages of the battlefield were still fresh memories, the prosperity of the late 1940s offered the possibility of meals where cardiovascular concerns made little difference.