Boomers: The Cold-War Generation Grows Up (6 page)

Most important, this period represents one of the high points of family stability in the entire American experience. Earlier in the century, the high mortality of parents from
epidemics, work-related accidents, and childbirth complications produced a strong possibility that childhood would be marred by orphanage residence, unpleasant stepparents, difficult stepsiblings, or placement with less than welcoming aunts, uncles, or cousins. Later in the century, after the Boomer age, skyrocketing divorce rates and a sharp rise in out-of-wedlock births created a parallel world of uncertainty and lack of affection for children. Yet for a relatively brief period, the optimistic portrayal of childhood and family experience in the media and literature of postwar America did reflect reality. Children lived in a world of stable and seemingly happy marriages where divorce seemed to be a feature primarily of the Hollywood acting community, and fatalities from work accidents, disease, and childbirth were substantially reduced. The only family distress that was significantly more likely in the early postwar period than in the twenty-first century was the far higher incidence of childhood disease. At best, most children and their frazzled parents lived through bouts of measles, chickenpox, and mumps, which, if seldom fatal, were rather serious illnesses requiring considerable bed rest and intense parental care. The majority of early Boomer children also experienced a painful trip to the hospital as pediatricians seemed obsessed about the health implications of swollen tonsils. Relatively few children escaped a tonsillectomy, whose pain and hospitalization were offset by the dubious promise of “all the ice cream you can eat” after the operation. But by far the most terrifying shadow hovering over any family was infantile paralysis, the polio that had crippled the recently deceased president and spurred the annual March of Dimes campaigns. The crippling or death of tens of thousands of Boomer children was quite possibly the single greatest calamity in postwar
households until Dr. Jonas Salk joined Benjamin Spock in the pantheon of parental heroes when he perfected the first successful polio immunization vaccine in 1955.

The benign influence of relatively high levels of family stability was paired with relaxed discipline and heightened parental involvement that made the period a nostalgic era for children. American mothers of the period often appear as confident, friendly, caring young women who drove children to shopping centers, splashed them in a backyard pool, and served milk and cookies to a circle of avid television viewers. Fathers emerge as relaxed, strong, involved figures who were less likely to spend the evening with “the boys” in a local tavern or bowling alley and were now finding their stride as Little League coaches and scout leaders. But if the specter of childhood disease was the dark cloud threatening an otherwise stable family structure, excessive parental involvement now emerged as a less positive side of the “child-friendly” attitude of the period.

A 1958 article by Robert Paul Smith, a rising expert on parent-child relations, coined the mildly disturbing term “Big Brother Parents,” which hinted at an almost Orwellian control of childhood activities. Smith lamented the rise of “a well-intentioned horde of interfering parents who give their kids no chance to have fun by themselves.” In an almost eerie preview of twenty-first-century issues, the author insisted, “The way you play soccer now is you bring home from school a mimeographed schedule for the Saturday morning leagues. The schedule is arranged by a mathematical process of permutation that would take six mathematicians to figure out. Parents are now playing someone else's game. All the parents who cannot refrain from interfering in the wonderful world of a child have invented a whole new modern
posture—child watching.” Smith empathized with a young mother who complained that when her daughter was “initiated” in the Brownies, all the mothers had to be admitted too, a ceremony that concluded with an almost comic scene of the mothers standing in a line and reciting the Brownie oath. Similar articles reported that while young parents were often delighted that their children liked spending time playing under adult supervision, many of the youngsters were embarrassed when the parents made spectacles of themselves as Little League umpires or replaced their daughters when going door-to-door to sell Girl Scout cookies. A major question of the time was whether parents wanted their children to be more grown up, or whether parents wanted to be more like their kids.

At first glance the home setting for young Boomer children would look rather contemporary to a twenty-first-century observer. The house would be bright, airy, and well lit, the kitchen appliances would appear modern, and the youthful noise would be familiar. On closer inspection, substantial differences would begin to appear. In summer, the cool, quiet hum of central air-conditioning systems would give way to steamy warmth, only slightly moderated by noisy electric fans dotted around the house. Before the very end of the 1950s, entertainment and communication devices would most likely be limited to one black-and-white television with a twelve-to twenty-one-inch screen; a floor-or table-model radio in the living room; one or two black, dial telephones, one located in the kitchen, living room, or entrance hall with a possible second in the parents' bedroom; and a “hi-fi” record player stocked with 33⅓ rpm albums.

A glance at children's bedrooms would reveal two important differences from the twenty-first century. Depending
on the age of the occupants, the bedrooms would include toy chests; posters of movies, comic-book heroes, or music celebrities; sports pennants and photos; and similar decorations. Few electronic devices could be found, and human child voices would be much more common than any other sound. Some fortunate children of the late 1950s might have their families' old twelve-inch television sets if a new twenty-one-inch model had been purchased; some children would have a small plastic clock radio on a nightstand. Preteens might have a small record player capable of playing a stack of the new 45 rpm “singles” that emerged with the birth of rock music. A tiny number of relatively affluent preteens or early teenagers, especially girls, might have their own phones, but this was a coveted possession seen much more often on television or in films than in real bedrooms.

A second important difference, compared to the twenty-first century, was the bedroom with two or even three beds. The growing number of bedrooms in new home styles never kept pace with the increase in family size of the period, and the result was a premium on shared sleeping space. Most new homes featured three bedrooms, and since a fairly typical Boomer-era family had three to five children, bedroom sharing was almost inevitable. Most children's bedrooms featured either two twin beds or a bunk-bed configuration, but a single twin bed and a double bunk were also common in families with five or more children or families with four kids with a 3-to-1 gender ratio. Given space limitations, families might allow mixed accommodations among young children, but this was usually a temporary stopgap before a move or home expansion.

A closer examination of other rooms in a Boomer household would reveal other technological limitations that often
affected the childhood experience. A modern 1950s kitchen included a refrigerator and stove, sometimes in matching colors, and a sink that often came with a spray hose attachment. Microwave ovens were still primarily a figment of science fiction, and automatic dishwashers would be uncommon for another decade. The “TV dinner” was now available and heavily advertised but in fact was viewed largely as a backup or emergency alternative; few housewives would dream of serving them regularly. This level of technology had relieved much of the drudgery of a half-century earlier, but in food preparation and after-meal cleanup the mother could assume that she would receive at least some family help. A laundry room or basement would reveal the same mixed technology. Most homes now had an electric washing machine; relatively few still featured the external hand-operated wringer. But automatic gas or electric dryers were still a novelty until well into the 1960s, and wash day featured a backyard filled with intricate clotheslines with an array of clothes, towels, and sheets flapping in the breeze like colorful sails. Doing the wash also called for children's help, and very few Boomer kids reached adulthood without knowing how to use clothespins or how heavy a basket of wet wash might be.

Thus even a cursory tour of an average Boomer's childhood home would reveal three somewhat different realities compared to a twenty-first-century experience. First, technology was still relatively limited; second, privacy was very limited; and third, the concept of children's chores was still an important part of family life. The many Boomer childhood ideas about cooperation, boredom, fun, and adult authority might be different from those of their children and grandchildren.

The children of this era fought over viewing preferences on the single television set, played Monopoly or Clue on the living-room floor with brothers, sisters, and friends, screamed that an obnoxious sibling had “cooties,” and helped one another put on snow boots that seemed to feature an infinite number of finicky buckles. A world of relatively large families and tighter household budgets guaranteed numerous variations on the theme of sharing, ranging from cutting jelly doughnuts in half to group ownership of some toys. Almost every household activity became an exercise in negotiating or bartering, yet these actions were so common that few children consciously thought about them.

A shared bedroom made privacy a luxury, and the limited capacity of hot-water heaters virtually guaranteed that a warm shower could turn frigid in the rush for the school bus. Yet there were always plenty of available players for Scrabble or Crazy Eights, and older brothers and sisters were more often protective and caring than obnoxious and bossy. This meant that unless a child was the oldest in the family, when Boomer kids made their first treks to school, they would not be alone. This comfort, however, was scarcely reassuring to the harried principals and teachers who watched a tidal wave of youngsters surge into their already bulging institutions. While Boomer homes might be crowded, it was the jammed classrooms that were now gaining national attention.

BENJAMIN SPOCK
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cheerful suggestions on baby and child care encouraged many young parents to believe they could somehow meet the challenges of rearing multiple children. But in school district offices across the country, the surging birthrate was prompting a crisis atmosphere that would dominate educational policies for almost two decades. Unlike parents, obstetricians, and pediatricians, most school officials and teachers did not have to deal with the impact of the Baby Boom from the time of its inception in January 1946. It would be early in the next decade before the first cohort of Boomers reached school. On a series of bright, late-summer days in 1952, however, the Boomers and the American school system were introduced to each other in the educational equivalent of the Normandy invasion.

A year earlier, school personnel had received a preview of coming attractions when a mixture of the youngest war babies and the oldest Boomers had crowded schools designed largely for low prewar birthrates. Now, in 1952, the first class
made up entirely of Boomers, the future high school class of 1964 and the college class of 1968, pushed public school attendance over the 34 million mark amid projections that even this staggering number would increase by an additional 50 percent by the end of the fifties. (In 1940 school attendance had been 25.4 million.) Unlike an enemy sneak attack or a natural disaster, the initial surge of children into first grade occurred with plenty of advance warning. But the heroic responses of a nation at war had perhaps worn thin in peacetime as half-measures, wishful thinking, and competing educational demands produced an educational crisis that at times threatened to spin out of control. For example, in the early 1950s the percentage of teenagers remaining in high school until graduation was soaring just as the Boomers hit the lower grades, forcing superintendents to create stopgap measures at opposite ends of the educational ladder. Semi-rural areas that had made do with a single consolidated school were now burgeoning suburbs requiring six new elementary schools at the same time. Low prewar birthrates had produced a meager pool of new teachers—just as the need for their services exploded.

As late summer 1952 turned to autumn, a nation concerned with Soviet spy rings, a new addition to Lucy and Ricky's television family, and the stretch drive of the baseball season would find it difficult to miss the media attention to the emerging crisis of overcrowding in the schools. Magazines, newspapers, and television news began running pictures of cute young children doubling up two to a desk, sharing textbooks, and jamming lunchrooms. Harried superintendents and principals showed visitors classrooms bulging with forty or fifty pupils, and predicted even higher numbers to come. Extensive parochial school systems in Northeastern and Midwestern cities dispatched nuns from
retirement homes and shortened training periods for young novice sisters to cover gaps in schools that often exceeded sixty students per classroom.