I’m 39, not an old man by any standards, and I’ve known well people who were veterans of World War I (my grandfather told a few stories about it, one of them explicitly sexual and the rest about intoxication), and I was shocked when I was living in Georgia a few years ago and it was announced there were only 6 survivors of WW1 left in the state. I knew a lady whose change-of-life son (born when she was 40ish) was killed in WW2. While I never knew any Civil War veterans I grew up among people who knew them well (their grandparents or parents). I knew one former slave sort of and barely- he was the grandfather or great-grandfather of one of my father’s handy men, he was born around 1863 and he lived to be about 109, which means he died when I was about 5 or 6, but I do remember him (tiny and shrivelled and sleeping in the front of his grandson’s car, telling me to “watch out for that yella jacket”). Because of the worlds I was able to catch the tail ends of, I’ve thought about the OP many times before.
The people who were movers and shakers during WW2 pretty much all checked out by the 1990s. Jimmy Doolittle (1896-1993) was the last surviving WW2 general, though as of 2003 there was at least one WW2 colonel I knew who was left (he was a centenarian in Atlanta and he served in Ordnance). I know there is at least one person still alive who lost a child in WW2 (she lives in my mother’s hometown and is 99). I would imagine the highest rank of which there are any significant numbers of people left would be NCOs. The youngest American WW2 combat veterans left are in their late 70s and most of them privates. WW2 will probably be within living memory (as far as combat veterans) into the early 2020s and then the situation will be like WW1 veterans now.
When I visited the Holocaust Museum recently there were two tattooed survivors doing docent duty who would both have been young adults when it occurred. (One, an old man, proudly wore a long sleeved shirt with a rectangle removed from the sleeve to display his tattoo- just curious: has anybody else seen him?)
There will be people who remember the Holocaust until at least the 2040s (though they’ll be centenarians), though the ones who’ll remember it well will be mostly gone by 2030. By that time Vietnam veterans will be the same age as WW2 veterans today.
I know a woman in Montgomery who was a nurse at Pearl Harbor. She knew something was happening when she noticed the coffee cups all start rattling on the metal breakfast trays. I watched the video of her interviews by the producers of the Affleck/Beckinsale abortion and they were disgusting. She was trying, almost begging, to tell them some fascinating stories (the whores coming in to the hospital to act as nurses, the horrifying sounds of the men trapped in the sunken ships, seeing a Zero the next day that had hidden in a field after it was forced down the night before) but the producers, I kid you not, would interrupt her during these stories with a “Yeah, that’s interesting… so you said you weren’t allowed to date enlisted men. What sort of stuff did you do on dates with officers? How would it affect a nurse’s reputation if she was said to have gone all the way?” yadda yadda. (I wanted to scream at them through the video “YOU’RE NOT GOING TO GET A 90 YEAR OLD SOUTHERN LADY TO TELL YOU ABOUT HER SEX PREMARITAL SEX LIFE EVEN IF SHE HAD ONE!” [and knowing Anna B., she probably did].)
I have a copy of a copy of a copy of an audio cassette originally recorded ca. 1955 of my grandfather’s step-grandmother (who was also his half-aunt and great-great-half-aunt- long story that requires a family tree to explain) who lived from 1859 to 1957. In it she describes a really pitiful site that I’ve never read another description of- a slave auction held in Alabama ca. late 1863/early 1864, when all southerners with three functioning brain cells knew the war was lost, and some of the good Christians Bama was and is famous for were dumping their slaves for sides of bacon and barrels of flour to blockade runners who planned to take them to South America [this was shortly before Mobile fell to the Union]).
My mother was born during the Depression (and is a carrier), grew up in a completely segregated south, lived in Montgomery at the time of the Rosa Parks’ boycott, was a lady wrestler shortly after that time, and was a public schoolteacher during the height of integration. I really want to record her memories before she crosses the Shining River. When I’m with her it’s almost as if I’m interviewing her and I honestly can’t tell if she enjoys it or is annoyed by it. Her sister, 10 years older than she is, has lots of WW2 era memories (she was engaged to a RAF pilot stationed in Alabama who later (this sounds like a soap opera or bad romance novel, but it’s true) developed amnesia (he was mildly injured in a non-battle related car accident in France, but the military hospital in a small newly liberated town in France was bombed while he was being treated and he received head trauma). At his family’s request the engagement was broken while he recuperated. She married a Bama born career Air Force NCO instead who was stationed in England in the late 50s and while there she had a reunion with her RAF pilot; he still didn’t remember her, but he was married to an American woman who was exactly the same physical type as my aunt (tall, blue eyed fair skinned blonde with a large frame but surprisingly delicate features). When I lived with my aunt briefly in the early 1990s I came home once to find her crying while reading 50 year old love letters from the RAF man.
Anyway, I’ve interviewed her before and she’s more than willing to talk, but unfortunately her editorializing (“and back then the coloreds knew not to come in the front door, but today they won’t even say please or thank you at the store” or [actual quote]“we were ladies and if we had sex outside of marriage we sure wouldn’t have talked about it, but I reckon if Andy Griffith was on today Aunt Bea would be up there talking about her orgasms while the audience just hollered and cheered”).
