Posted on 04/03/2017 9:20:51 AM PDT by Oldpuppymax
Born in the 1930s and early 1940s, 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.
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 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 40s and early 50s 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 naïve 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 1950s and by mid-decade school children were ducking under desks. China became Red China. Eisenhower sent the first "advisors" 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 1940s and early 1950s. 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 did not have it easy. Our wages were low, we did without, we lived within our means, we worked hard to get a job, and harder still to keep it. Things that today are considered necessities, we considered unreachable luxuries. We made things last. We fixed, rather than replaced. We had values and did not take for granted that "somebody will take care of us." We cared for ourselves and we also cared for others.
We are the “LAST ONES.”
Isn't it interesting that Millennials are so interested in and support podcasts?
I remember them. They had a unique feature in the way the doors opened.
The doors opened from the front side ,the opposite of the way other cars of that era, and today open.
A friend had one called the Hudson Terra plane. -Tom
Two years behind you.
Five and dime stores filled with ‘Made in Occupied Japan’ trinkets and junk.
1935 here.
I can relate to the fact that rubber tires were just not available. My first bicycle had no tires, so I rode around on the rims. This was in So. Cal. where the streets were not paved....just dirt.
At the age of 9 I sold and delivered newspapers at the Birmingham military hospital in Van Nuys, Ca. On VJ day all newspapers were free and everybody celebrated with gusto.
Yes, things have changed, but I'm not going to bewail the changes. Many of them were for the better. Particularly better technology, including medical technology. I had an older cousin who had polio. I was among the first to get the anti-polio sugar cube. Polio is no longer the threat it once was.
In college I had a job as a transmitter operator at a radio station. One of my important duties was to listen for a CONELRAD alert, and turn off the transmitter if the alert ever came (thank God it never did). But I lived under the threat of The Bomb, and that duty made me conscious of it every time I went to work.
My life didn't turn out the way I imagined it would back when I was in high school. On net balance, I'd say it turned out better than I could have imagined.
Thanks for your post. I am 80 and my wife is 83, married 50 years and have many of the same memories. Just seems that many of the younger people today simply don’t have the same values.
I always loved hearing my mother who was born in 1935, talking about the war. She had a cousin that was a POW and her uncles were pilots. She played with everyone on her street and always had Sunday dinners (lunch) at the Harpers. The lifestyle was wonderful and simple and they paid attention to each other. Lots of cousins, aunts and uncles around all the time. One of her uncles later was a pilot for Pan Am and brought her a real French poodle puppy from France.
Born in 1933, WWII is a stark memory of neighbors disapearing and my Dad being drafted in 1942 for the Navy. Since he hated boats, he was allowed to choose the Marine Corps instead. Before the end of the year he was in the Pacific.
I remember sitting huddled on hallway floors in elementary school during air raid drills or when German subs were spotted off the coast of Boston.
I remember how hungry we (my brother and I) were by the time the meager $100 per month allotment check came. I remember one neighbor who was a defense worker who got to eat bacon, butter, and meat throughput the war.
OTOH, my grandfather bought me my first gun (.22) when I was 8 years old and a 410/.22 over and under when I was 10. I remember in 1945 getting my drivers license when I was 12.
I remember my grandparents ranting about the communist in the WH, particularly after the "temporary" implementation of having taxes deducted/stolen from a paycheck with the promise that it would be canceled when the war ended.
I remember the "psychotic" WWII Marines vets who were my drill instructors in the early 1950's.
Again, most of all I remember what it was like to enjoy the individual freedoms guaranteed by a Constitutional Republic.
My mom grew up in the Depression and had no electricity or indoor plumbing until she was in high school.
Going the bathroom in the middle of the night involved shoes and a flashlight and a coat for much of the year.
We never went camping when I was a kid because she had lived it.
Had a family friend growing up with a withered arm from polio.
Growing up in the 30’s and 40’s wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
The religious fervor of those "progressives" to "change" America from its foundations in individual freedom under a written Constitution which strictly limited powers granted to government has resulted in less freedom, less opportunity, and less reliance on "the Creator," "Divine Providence," "Nature's god," and "the Supreme Judge of the World."
I was born in 1951, my sister in 1948 and that’s how we grew up in a small, rural Midwestern town. How things have changed.
. we played after school and stayed out "until the street lights came on."
What about FHB’s?
(family hold backs)
When you have visitors and not a lot of food, FHB is when you silently allow the guest to eat as much as they want while the family “holds back” deferring to the guest.
Deferring to others is almost a myth today.
Silently doing a favor for others is almost as big a myth as well.
It used to be called normal during hard times.
It is just honor and class.
Brought tears. I was born in 1937. Remember well the WWII years. The shortages, the black outs and rationing of shoes, beef, candy and sugar, to name a few things. I once stood in line at our neighborhood grocery to get ten pieces of bubblegum. They were counted out carefully too.
I read this book a while back
Grandma’s wartime kitchen : World War II and the way we cooked / Joanne Lamb Hayes.
It was interesting to read why my grandmother made aspic (what the....?) and put rice in chili. They started it during the war and never quit doing it, despite living in an antebellum mansion.
Didn’t any of you people grow up in the country?
I read all these stories about playing until the streetlights came on. The nearest street lights to me were 3 miles away.
We played Kick the Can until one of the parents came out and yelled, Ollie Ollie Oxen Free. Then told their kids to come in, it was time for bed and told us, the neighbor kids, to “run along home, too.”
Correct. She and millions among her shaped and defined America through the good times and bad. Those eyes saw America through a lens that will never be duplicated. I wonder what trajectory this country is really going among us as the American people of our grand past pass on. There is gross difference of citizenry that we have today and for the future of America.
Inspirational article.
I was 1925 so I had a trifecta. I spent part as a depression kid, part at a Last One kid and let me coin one, part as a First One. A kid who was in WW II. Now let me relate what that meant to a lot of us.
I was a NYC kid. I took a commercial course in HS because I had no way of ever going to college. A commercial diploma meant a job in the NYC commercial district. But something Feepers who forever bash the Government is they passed the greatest piece of legislation for America’s future - the BI Bill. This made possible thousands of engineers, doctors, accountants and yes lawyers. Perhaps your Dad was among them. The country grew to the best in the world.
My mom was a Rosie the Riveter for real. Worked in an airplane factory in Detroit during WWII. She’s very remarkable.
Thanks for finding and posting this item!
I was born in ‘42, so can identify with all in the article.
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