Duck & cover! Memorization of all kinds of things! Hand me downs! Moms at home! Dads and working men working all kinds of hours because no living was ‘guaranteed’! Paper routes! Lemonade stands! No fast food! 10 or 12” B&W TVs! Party lines on telephones! The horror!
CB — You lined up the kiddie experiences. What set the tone was the Adult experiences. The so -called “Greatest Generation” left terrible examples as adults being adults.
For one example: In the early 1970s, a series of Supreme Court decisions abolished most, if not all, of the common-law disabilities of bastardy, as being violations of the equal-protection clause of the 14th.
The Warren (b. 1891) and the Burger Courts (b. 1907) of 1953-1986 unleashed many very socially destructive forces. 1965’s Griswold v Connecticut set the stage for 1973’s Roe v Wade.
The “Greatest Generation” just back from the war did just about NOTHING to stop the onrush of national secularism, libertine sexuality and indeed in the period most ruinous for training new accountants and accountants of accountants — the late 1970’s and early 19780’s did not stop the rise of the fast-talking, dream-pushing coke heads of young turks, instead the old guard of that era PROMOTED them.
Similarly the old guard in education of the late sixties and early seventies promoted the administrators, deans and presidents most likely to bring on cultural deconstructionism, in sexuality and moral philosophy.
Pick up any Life or Look from the 50s and 60s — what is the the cultural leading edge — the opinion makers — pushing? Hugh Hefner tapped into that Adult-life ethos of the 1950s and 1960s. Those were the adults of Greatest Generation.