Growing Up in the Boom

It was more than just a baby boom, you know. The postwar era marked the first time in a very long while that we, as a society, were not being put through some sort of major trauma, be it war or depression. Not only was the world (or most of it) finally at peace, our economy was booming once again. These two facts of life, added to nature's facts of life, contributed to a natural population explosion, entirely within our nation and in no need of extensive immigration to beef its numbers up.

Let the history books go on and on about the many phenomena of the era on a grand scale. Here is a look at the early boomer years from the viewpoint of one brat kid (out of millions and millions).

When we came back to Lower Marion Elementary School, outside of Philadelphia, PA, to start our second grade year, we were greeted with good news and bad news. The bad news was that we still needed to do our air raid drills, every month, because the commies were going to fly over and drop their bombs on us any day now. But there was good news too! Even after the Russkies dropped their bombs, those of us who did the drill right and lived would not get burned to a crisp, because we had brand new asbestos ceilings! Wowza!

It was in that same second grade year my inner ham emerged and, on an unrelated note, I got my first kiss from a girl I was not related to. Her name was Barbara Horowitz, and, oddly enough, at an age when boys and girls do not mix particularly well, she was the most ardent boy-hater in the whole school. I'm sure she did it just to push my buttons, and she succeeded. I was indeed mortified, not because she was a Jew-for all I knew at that age, the Jews were some ancient Biblical tribe you only heard about in church, like...oh, I don't know...the Gentiles-but because she was a girl.

My instinct for the stage actually came as somewhat of a surprise to me. We were getting ready to put on our class play for all the mommies and daddies. It was some sappy tale about love amidst the royal set. The casting was as open as could be. Our teacher, perhaps the kindest of all my grade-school teachers, an older lady we knew as Mrs. Gard, let the whole class discuss who should have what part. When it came to the king and queen, she asked us who we thought were the most mature boy and girl. The class talked the matter over extensively before we finally made our choices. Then the princess: who was the prettiest girl? (This was the 50s, remember). Then her suitor: who was the handsomest boy? These discussions took even longer to iron out, but the actors were finally chosen. They chose the villain of the piece after more debate. Then Mrs. Gard asked the class, "What about the court jester?" Every single finger in the class pointed right to me. No discussion-just fingers. Not even Barbara Horowitz, doing her worst, could have humiliated me more. All I wanted to do at that age was to avoid being noticed, but I must not have been very good at achieving my goal. I tried to weasel out of the part, insisting I was happy just to be one of the (non-speaking) palace guards, but nobody was buying.

I should add that my last grade-school stage role was a lot more nondescript and a lot less successful (Yes, I got wild applause as the jester, to my absolute chagrin.). I was a sixth-grader, in a different school, in a different state. The "play" was some didactic piece of garbage about the evils of jaywalking, in which the defendant is on trial, as though he had robbed a bank. I was to be one of the jurors. In the dress rehearsal, right after the "judge" told the jurors it was up to us to consider the guilt or innocence of the suspected jaywalker, I took out a quarter and flipped it, then checked the result.

"TOMMY LANE, YOU MARCH YOURSELF OFF THE STAGE, THIS INSTANT!"

Going back to that second grade class, I remember it was my first encounter with a "challenged" student. The young man, who had been held back a year, had what we now know to be Tourette syndrome. The problem does not typically manifest itself the way we have been led to believe from many TV representations, where its victim is compelled to blurt out all sorts of obscene language. No, this boy did not swear, but he did blurt. While I have been truthful about the names in this article (even my own, if you can imagine that), I will withhold this name so as not to cause undue embarrassment, even so many years after the fact. I will say that his last name was somewhat close to mine in the alphabet, so, since we were seated in a serpentine alphabetical order, he sat right behind me.

On this day, we were discussing birthdays and age, I guess because Dick or Jane or Spot or Puff just got a year older in our most recent chapter of their adventures in suburbia. Mrs. Gard went around the class, asking each student his or her age. Now, when you are a second-grader, you want to be considered as old and mature as possible, so no one was just "seven."

"Nancy Marshall, how old are you?"

"I'm seven and four months."

"Susie Lawson, how old are you?"

"I'm seven and a half."

"Tommy Lane, how old are you?"

"I'm seven and a half."

"T______ K_____, how old are you?

"I'M EIGHT AND A COOKOO CLOCK!"

But, for all that, we accepted our challenged classmate as a classmate, probably because of the example our teacher set with her patience and understanding.

People these days may decry how little young people seem tuned in to the world around them, but we were not all that attuned to our world either.

I remember I was running around, playing cowboys and Hindus, or some such thing, when an older boy called out, "Hey you guys are missing the big coronation on TV!"

What was so great about a carnation, even if it was on television?

"So what," I called back as the British people were crowning their new queen, "I'll catch the next one." Who knows? Maybe I will.

I remember what a hubbub there was when Josef Stalin died. We hardly even knew who the guy was, but all the grownups seemed pretty excited about it. On every radio station, all you could hear for several days was, "Moscow says this" and "Moscow says that." At some point, a kid who had not been paying attention the way I had asked me, "So who's in charge, now that this Stalin character is dead?"

"Some guy named Moscow," I confidently assured him.

Source

Own experience