In my case, I was born just before the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941. My dad was in the army and I was shuffled around from army base to army base until he went to Germany not long before the war in Europe would be over. By then I was 3 years old, but I have virtually no real memories of those days. Plenty of photographs, but no real memories.
Movies and music have helped me form opinions and even some notions about the flavor of the times. But it was well into my teens before I had any real sense of what was going on in the world when I was born. I didn’t know about the atrocities in Europe until the movie Judgment at Nuremberg and it was just last month before I saw The Best Years of Our Lives. Only through the lens of that movie did I feel I had a real view of the US in the early post-war period.
It was a bit of a shock. Before that movie I had a much more positive view of the state of the economy and the attitudes of the typical American. Maybe the movie isn’t as representative as it seems and my earlier impressions are more realistic. But it’s weird to try to come to grips with the difference in those impressions.
It may be that World War II was a more dramatic time than the days when you came along and that maybe there aren’t as many hooks into the past for you. But in many of your cases you have the advantage of TV programs that can add to the source material to help you get such impressions of those early days in your own life.
Whatever the case, how have you changed your views of the times when you were born, say from a year or two before to a year or two after?
I was born in 1967 (39 years ago today as a matter of fact), and I see that as a pretty formative year. The whole ‘summer of love’ thing was going on, and there was still a lot of people with a favorable opinion of Viet Nam. It seems that after I was born things really began to get dirty, druggy, and violent. Make whatever corelation you wish.
Born late in '61. Since I was born in Iowa, in a town pretty isolated from the Real World, I simply saw the world as normal. Big and wonderful and happy and full of corn. It wasn’t until maybe 10 years later that I came to know the 60s as colorful but tumultuous. It wasn’t until much much later that I learned of the relative optimism of the Kennedy years.
As for how I learned more about those years, I understand they were documented a little.
I was born in 1988. Whenever I think about the things from my early childhood (Vinyl records! Rotary dial telephones! Televisions with buttons and dials! Rabbit ears! 60 watt bulbs! 5-inch floppies! No internet! :eek: ) it is immediately followed by “Man, that was a long time ago.”
I think I should add that I was born in China, and the Chinese 80s were very different from the western 80s, but I don’t know a whole lot about Chinese history so I seriously don’t have any real impression of those times besides “Man, that was a long time ago.”
We are being whooshed I assume? If not what do you mean, Rotary phones were nearly gone, TV’s rarely had dials or rabbit ears. 60 Watt Bulbs?
To the OP: 1966, on the day that Star Trek Premier I believe.
The 60’s loom larger than any other decade in my life. Seems like everything was happening. The next 4 decades just seem relatively sedate by comparison even though those are the decades I grew up in and then got married and had kids.
The 60’s are almost a myth at this point. War, space, peace, musicians thought they could change the world, Kids thought they could change the world, Nixon, Woodstock, Summer of Love, The Mustang & Camaro & Goats were new. Pony Cars ruled. Riots in the street, everybody was protesting something.
A cray decade.
I was born in 1953. I remember my very earliest years as being happy and unconcerned, even though McCarthyism was in full flower and civil rights were “happening” in the South. I got a taste of excitement from the space race, followed by a shock of awareness from Kennedy’s assassination.
I think you have to be about 13-14 years old to really see the world enough to remember it in adult terms. For me that would be 1966-1967. Because of that, and because of my family and where I grew up, I am innately a social liberal.
What wasn’t I “aware” of? I suppose that I didn’t notice the air of mistrust and anti-Communist fear of the early 1950s. As a kid, I knew nothing of the “Cold War”, the Bay of Pigs, or even the Cuban Missile Crisis. The last is the most odd; I lived in suburban Washington, DC at the time!
I am fairly certain that I experienced a side-effect of that Crisis. I remember our school going through elaborate plans to send kids home as a defensive move. It was all called a “test”, but it was at the right time of the year and they never did the test. I do not remember being particularly scared of “duck and cover” drills. I guess the idea that it would be atom bombs never got to me.
If I’ve been whoosed by anything, it’s by modern attitudes towards the military. As a teenager, I remember that absolutely nobody wanted to be in the military or have anything to do with the military. I had friends whose fathers were on active duty when I was a kid; in the fourth grade I remember swearing with friends that we’d all meet at West Point! But by the time I was a teenager, we looked on the military with a mixture of fear and disdain. I find unsettling that anyone would volunteer. A real conflict between intellect and emotion.
I’ve been reading science fiction since the 4th grade. I don’t even blink at modern technology; it’s still not where I expected it to be “in the future.”
And a final note about whoosing and the future: in college, we used to dream of the day when students would come to school with their own terminals so they could dial into the school’s central computer. That dates me right there; prolly nobody under the age of 40 knows what a terminal is. The idea that someday students would own their own computers never occurred to me.
I’m under 40 (barely) I have repaired IBM 5250 Terminals.
I also volunteered for the Navy back in '85. We were still trying to win the Cold War you know. What is the conflict?
We weren’t fighting any unjust wars, America was rebounding from the embarrassments of Vietnam, Nixon & Carter.
It was better than flipping burgers and didn’t have the funds to complete college.
I damn proud of being part of the most powerful peacetime Navy ever assembled.
I was born in 1980, and somehow the arbitrariness of having been born in that decade completely colored my impression of the times in which I was born. I assumed that, techinically being the '80s, it had the same character as the late '80s that I remembered from my childhood – Mohawks and jean jackets, Reagan, Madonna, MTV, etc. My sister, born in 1978, seemed to have been born in a completely different era – I used to tease her about having been born in the era of flower power, disco, afros, et al.
Gradually I realized that the character of decades aren’t so cut and dried, and that 1980 was probably a lot more like the '70s than I imagined. It was kind of a shock when I realized that Jimmy Carter, not Ronald Reagan, was president when I was born (even if he was soon to be a lame duck). The hostages were still being held in Iran. Madonna and MTV were still a couple years off. VCRs still (I think) weren’t very common. Woodstock, shockingly, was only 11 years before I was born – which is nothing (1995 seems like yesterday). So I guess things were a bit different than I imagined.
Not sure if you’re saying that this is necessarily a product of your age, but my dad’s exactly your age, and he volunteered for the Army and made a career of it – was in for almost 30 years.
I haven’t seen the movie; what did it tell you about the attitudes of the time that you weren’t aware of?
I was born in 1954, and my impression of that time is pretty much the cliched bland Eisenhower suburbia thing, which is what we were living when I was a very small kid.
I do remember once when I was coloring with my friend Johnny (his mom and my were LWV firebrands) and I started coloring one of the people brown. He said no, you can’t do that – and I said no, really, there’s people out there with brown skin.
The movie I meant to refer to was/is The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) which I had avoided all these years because the title sounded mushy and I assumed it was a comedy. Was I wrong!
Until that film, my impressions of the war years and the post-war period was that there was a general uplift to the mood of the country. Swing bands, jitterbug, Glenn Miller, Chattanooga Choo Choo, Dinah Shore, Bob Hope, Abbott and Costello, I could name hundreds of impressions I had for how relieved people were from having survived the Depression, having gotten the industrial might of the USA up and running and having been victorious in the “last just war.”
All the males in my dad’s family had been active in the war, each in a different branch, and their yarns around the dinner table made it sound really adventurous and even fun. My own memories of the time were of being happy and in a loving family environment. I was way more aware of the Old West of the Saturday matinee westerns than I was of the '40’s in real life. Radio dramas (we didn’t even have TV until I was 14 or so) all painted pictures of an effective justice system that always worked to bring the bad guys in. Yes, there was the nameless and faceless dread associated with the bad guys of the film noir underworld, but it was all fiction to me.
As I became aware of what really went on in Europe during the 30’s and 40’s, my ideas of a peaceful world (now that the US and the Allies had vanquished the evildoers) began do erode into a general pessimism. But still I had this notion that the times into which I was born had been the last of the really great period in history. I had no trouble relating to Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation myth.
But this movie shows a much darker picture of the flavor of the country in those early post-war years. Greed, waste, crowded and angry populace, bias against returning servicemen, difficulties adjusting to the home front. (I had seen these themes depicted in movies about Korea and Vietnam vets, but not the WWII guys.)
To make it as succinct as I can, the whole set of notions I had built up for over 50 years was suddenly reduced to a pile of dirt.
I haven’t seen “The best years of our lives” in years. Here’s a detailed description of the film: http://www.filmsite.org/besty.html
It would be interesting to see a remake about returnees from the Iraq war.
I was born in Jan. 1939, so I have some early memories of the war years (WWII). My childhood recollections are mostly very happy, despite some traumatic incidents.
We lived in a basement apartment of of my paternal grandparents house. The house was built on a hill, so the half of the basement containing the apartment was exposed and had windows and it’s own entrance. We had no electricity or indoor plumbing, well actually there was a pitcher pump next to the kitchen sink. I remember rationing and the red and green “points” needed to buy certain products. Gasoline was also strictly rationed, as well as tires. We had chickens and a vegatable garden. Gardens were almost a necessity, even if you lived in a city. There was the “black market”, but there was also a lot of propaganda about the unpatriotic aspect of buying things that were unauthorized and most people tried to avoid it as much as possible.
I don’t think my attitude has changed much over the years, except perhaps to have more appreciation of what my parents and others of the time had to deal with.
Very well said, A.R. Cane, and especially the part “I don’t think my attitude has changed much over the years, except perhaps to have more appreciation of what my parents and others of the time had to deal with.”
I’d like to make it clear that the movie didn’t really alter my feelings about my own living conditions or my family’s situation. We lived in a small town in Alabama near both sets of grandparents. We had running water, electricity, decent heat, a car, plenty to eat and enough of the creature comforts that I can’t remember feeling deprived. But I am aware that my parents’ generation had endured quite a rough time during the Depression and the war years.
When we would visit relatives who lived in more rural settings I remember feeling uncomfortable with their conditions and not at all jealous of how they were situated, but I was young enough not to attach much significance to it. I just figured that’s the way things were. The people seemed happy and comfortable enough so it was no big deal to me.
Being from a semi-rural Southern background may be part of what kept me as removed from the attitudes of more urban situations. Maybe the fact that so much of what’s depicted in that movie was well away from my own conditions and surroundings, made the impact that much stronger.
I guess it’s that I had romanticized the whole era and the realism of that movie came as a real awakening to me.
BTW, that’s a great review of the film.
I really didn’t mean this thread to be a commercial for that movie! Really!
I didn’t understand how a 60 watt bulb could be either new or Dated. I did not see his second post about growing up in China.
I was typing as he made the second post and if you read his first post and think he was raised in North America, it made no sense at all. Once I read his second post it made sense.
I was born in 1977. Nothing in the media has given me a favorable impression of that time. I don’t know if people were burned out on war, gas shortages, and maybe drugs, but in both tv shows and movies most people come off as being flaky and superficial; was the tail end of the of the decade really filled with bumblers acting giddy? Not to mention everyone was apparently color-blind, and they thought disco was a good thing… I do not regret having no more memories of the 70s than I can count on one hand.
