Children of the 20's & 30's “The Last Ones”
A Short Memoir
Born in the 1930's we exist as a very special
age cohort. We are the “last ones.” We are the last, climbing out
of the depression, who can remember the winds of war and the war itself with
fathers and uncles going off. We are the last to remember ration books
for everything from sugar to shoes to stoves. We saved tin foil and
poured fat into tin cans. We saw cars up on blocks because tires weren’t
available. My mother delivered milk in a horse drawn cart.
We are the last to hear Roosevelt’s radio
assurances and to see gold stars in the front windows of our grieving
neighbors. We can also remember the parades on August 15, 1945; VJ Day.
We saw the ‘boys’ home from the war build their
Cape Cod style houses, pouring the cellar, tar papering it over and living
there until they could afford the time and money to build it out.
We are the last who spent childhood without
television; instead imagining what we heard on the radio. As we all
like to brag, with no TV, we spent our childhood “playing outside until the
street lights came on.” We did play outside and we did play on our
own. There was no little league.
The lack of television in our early years
meant, for most of us, that we had little real understanding of what the world
was like. Our Saturday afternoons, if at the movies, gave us
newsreels of the war and the holocaust sandwiched in between westerns and
cartoons. Newspapers and magazines were written for adults.
We are the last who had to find out for ourselves.
As we grew up, the country was exploding with
growth. The G.I. Bill gave returning veterans the means to get an
education and spurred colleges to grow. VA loans fanned a housing boom.
Pent up demand coupled with new installment payment plans put factories to work.
New highways would bring jobs and mobility. The veterans joined civic
clubs and became active in politics. In the late 40's and early 50’s the
country seemed to lie in the embrace of brisk but quiet order as it gave birth
to its new middle class.
Our parents understandably became absorbed with
their own new lives. They were free from the confines of the depression
and the war. They threw themselves into exploring opportunities they had
never imagined. We weren’t neglected but we weren’t today’s all-consuming
family focus. They were glad we played by ourselves ‘until the street
lights came on.’ They were busy discovering the post war world.
Most of us had no life plan, but with the
unexpected virtue of ignorance and an economic rising tide we simply stepped
into the world and went to find out. We entered a world of overflowing
plenty and opportunity; a world where we were welcomed. Based on our naive belief that there was more where this came from, we shaped life as we
went.
We enjoyed a luxury; we felt secure in our
future. Of course, just as today, not all Americans shared in this
experience. Depression poverty was deep rooted. Polio was still a
crippler.
The Korean War was a dark presage in the early
50's and by mid-decade school children were ducking under desks.
China became Red China. Eisenhower sent the first ‘advisers’ to
Vietnam. Castro set up camp in Cuba and Khrushchev came to power.
We are the last to experience an interlude when
there were no existential threats to our homeland. We came of age in the
late 40's and early 50's. The war was over and the cold war, terrorism,
climate change, technological upheaval and perpetual economic insecurity had
yet to haunt life with insistent unease.
Only we can remember both a time of apocalyptic
war and a time when our world was secure and full of bright promise and
plenty. We experienced both.
We grew up at the best possible time, a time
when the world was getting better not worse.
We are the ‘last ones.’
