The times when you were born: what's your current impression of them?

In My Humble Opinion
21

I was born in 1952 - my impression of the 50s from a child’s perspective was a good one. It wasn’t until later in life that I found out about the McCarthy hearings and the communist witch hunt. From 55-63, we lived in small towns in Michigan, then moved back east. President Kennedy’s assassination, I think, was the first time that I had an awareness of what was really going on - I also, as did many others, witnessed Ruby shooting Oswald. I remember painting a picture of Kennedy’s grave in art that year in fact.

So much has changed, and my perspective has changed as well. In many ways, I’m a liberal yet I’ve found myself growing conservative in other matters (and find that very astonishing!), although not so much in the social area (if that makes any sense :)). I can say that I try, sometimes with success sometimes without, to keep an open mind and to continue to learn. Probably the most astonishing thing is that, for me at least, I’ve never stopped learning - there’s always something more that I don’t know.

22

1977 was a very good year for Yankee Fans. :wink:
You might want to look at this Wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977
I was about 11 and the other good thing for me was the Voyager program.
The Blackout was a low point for NYC and Carter starting his term as one of the most ineffective Presidents ever was not good.
I also remeber the Bronx burning, not far from Yankee Stadium.
The popular music was very bad, but on the bright side Barney Miller, MASH and Taxi were on the air and SNL was funny, very hip and funny. My parents never knew I was watching it. Probably messed me up for life. :smiley:

Jim

23

Being as both of my parents’ families have/had been New Englanders since the early 1900s (many arriving at Ellis island before WWI), I’m not surprised this fact was never brought up. :stuck_out_tongue: Not that I’d of listened if it had, because baseball is my least favorite sport.

24

I was born in 1969. A lot of my impressions come from talking to my mother. My parents weren’t exactly hippies, but they believed that a “revolution” was coming and felt the world at that time was an exciting and dangerous at the same time and that bringing a child into the world was a brave thing to do.

They lived in Washington DC and the year before had watched the city burn after MLK jr was assasinated. One of my earliest memories is of having to pick up one of my best friends (age 3 or 4) after her parents had been arrested on some drug charge.

One of my first memories of reading anything (probably age 4 or 5, too lazy to figure out which) is a Washington Post headline NIXON RESIGNS. I didn’t know what it meant exactly but I knew it was important.

So my impression of the times I was born in…tumultuous and hopeful.

25

1955 was a time of big Plymouths, swingsets in the back yard, and general carefree times. It wasn’t until the Cuban Missle Crisis that the “real world” started to register with me. Then the Kennedy Assasination started the slide. My parents fought the 60s with every weapon at their disposal, but I still discovered the Beatles.

But one of my earliest memories is of being taken to some new amusement park that had just opened recently. Some dump called “Disneyland.” :smiley:

26

I meant a single 60 watt bulb as the lighting for a room. Like we use 100 watt bulbs now.

27

Y’know, I was born in 1984 in the boonies of Wisconsin, and we still had rotary phones and vinyl records until at least 1990. I can remember listening to Sesame Street records when I was in kindergarten. We even had a party line when I was little. I used to eavesdrop on my parents when they used the barn phone to make my doctor’s appointments. That way I could plan my escape and maybe avoid having my blood taken.

I guess my impression of the times I was born in are kind of like my dad’s of his own. He was born in 1961. For a history assignment my freshman year of college, we had to ask our parents what they remembered about their childhood years. So I asked my dad, “What were the '60s like, Daddy? Were there hippies everywhere?” And he told me that “the '60s didn’t happen here. It was 1958 until about 1972.” (I think those are the dates he used. It’s been a while.)

Of course, things started to change rapidly in the area with the advent of the internet and cell phones. While I wouldn’t put us at ten years behind the times now, I’m not sure if we’re in 2006.

28

I was born in Los Angeles, 1961, fourth generation of people who travelled there in covered wagons to find a better life. LA, circa then, was all bright and shiny new; Dad was an aerospace engineer, everything was peachy. Big extended family, grandparents well esconced in showbiz, largesse of that was nice house in tony area. My childhood was safe and dreamy, CA at the time was building the dream.

Everything changed with Divorce, such a bad word then…and a move to the East coast, NY, whole different set of values. Saw the Nixon years there, and , around my Stepdad’s college students alot, absorbed the twenty year-olds angst and activism about it.

To condense a great bit, then moved twice, to rural Maine, so sheltered, then to Wilmington , NC, 1976, shortly after main integration there, so eyes opened to many things not seen before.

Headed to college in Chapel Hill, NC, and expanded my views then greatly, beyond my So Cal upbringing, adding to that. I’ve been blessed with an open-minded upbringing.

Moved to Mississippi for 13 years, learned alot there, from Black people, and what life is like like that.

All that travelling opened my mind so much; glad I got out of my lalaland birthplace , and have experienced many other realities. As a result, I see the world as a place to adapt in, welcome differences, and like to see other points of view.

Say, right now: I am listening to a internet music broadcast from an excellent station in Talkeetna,Alaska; posting here, and safe and warm at home. Amazing blessing, that.

29

I was born in 1986, and I have a hard time conceptualizing what it must have been like. The technology present then was (to my mind) completely comical: dot-matrix printers and cassette tapes and VHS tapes. The Berlin wall was still standing and, presumably, all the rhetoric thrown around today about terrorism was present then, only substitute ‘communist’ for ‘terrorist’. Gas was incredibly cheap, AIDS wasn’t anything like common knowledge, and pop music was incredibly, horribly awful. People were a lot more racist then (this comes from my mother’s stories: she was teaching in the late 70’s-early 80’s at a public school that was just then being integrated. This just outside of DC, not some deep-south backwater town!) The average car got about five miles to the gallon, and emissions testing was a foreign concept. Social activism wasn’t really a big thing: all the ‘big movements’ had died out by then.

30

I was born in 1978. It seemed to be a world of rust oranges, mustard yellows, puke greens, and dark browns. It was a world of plastic, garish colours. It was a world freshly wounded with the loss of Elvis, and a world only two years from losing John Lennon. Disco was frowned upon. B-52’s were Rocking some Lobster. Punk was getting ever cooler. My dad had long hair, my mom had big, goofy glasses. People dressed badly.

I was primed for the 80s and New Wave. Things seemed more or less pretty peaceful.

31

I only have a concept of what 1958 must have been like from photos. No wonder I see it as a time when everything was black and white, and a bit scratchy. I’m sure that life as it was portrayed in the American household in the late 1950s never, ever reached our little town in the middle of nowhere, Ontario. Like someone else said, it was 195x until 197x, and the sixties never happened.

I remember seeing a grocery list in a box from around then, and it cost my parents $12 a week for groceries, cigarettes and Coke. I think my old man made $35 a week. I don’t know about any of that nifty '50s furniture that is so popular now - where I come from they were still using furniture and appliances from the 1940s and earlier, up into the 1980s. When I was born, to make a phone call, you picked it up and the local operator (“Gert”) plugged your jack into another socket. When we moved to the other little town (1960), phone numbers had five digits. A vast number of the things we use every day now hadn’t even been thought of yet, or were in primitive stages of their evolution.

I’ve always thought that people from that era looked much older in photos than they actually were. They may have been in their twenties, but looked some indeterminate age between 35 and 55. They also seemed as though they never had much fun or whimsy in their lives, and were resentful of those who did. Maybe it was just the people I come from.

32

This thing about youngish people looking old has bothered me a great deal about still earlier (1930’s and '40’s) movies and photos. Maybe it was that the notion of “looking young” had to wait until the notion of “teenager” had taken over the zeitgeist, which wouldn’t even start until the ‘50’s. I’ve often wondered what the origin of the term was, when it happened, and what would have been the first movie to use the term. I do know that James Dean’s Rebel Without A Cause did a great deal to popularize the notion – in CinemaScope and color – but Blackboard Jungle which featured Rock Around The Clock did come a bit earlier and it has been cited as the beginnings of movies’ awareness of Rock ‘n’ Roll.

As one who was seeing High School years when you were born, fishbicycle, I can attest to the fascination with hair (ducktails and flat tops), jeans and T-shirts, fast cars with tail fins and loud motorcycles, early Elvis, early “folk” music, and many other trappings made famous later on Happy Days. But I wouldn’t choose “happy” as an adequate adjective for that period – at least where I was growing up.

33

Another report for 1957 with some special circumstances. Grew up in one of the suburbs of L.A. that was heavily segregated. That is, grew up thinking that segregation was perfectly ‘natural.’ Boy, the times, they have changed.

I remember one or two Bomb drills in grade school that didn’t make much sense then - and in retrospect, were absolutely senseless. “Get under your desk and wait for the teacher to tell you when it’s safe to come out.”

I remember an attempt by my second grade teacher to tell us why communism was evil. Everyone else in the class “got it,” but not me, and the memory is still slightly painful. It wasn’t until later that I figured out that national economies just don’t do well with much “planning”, which tends to be political planning, at that.

As for technology - I remember when being a geek was social death. Probably still not a socially great thing, but at least there’s more appreciation now, I think, that today’s geek could be tomorrow’s bazillionaire.

Fewer people then, more empty spaces. The country was bigger then, harder just to get from one coast to the other. And us not knowing any better, that’s just the way it was.

The times weren’t all that good, weren’t all that bad. I prefer now, but I could get by then as well.

34

War baby here - born in 1942. My impression of that time hasn’t changed much over the years. It was early in the war and the gung-ho spirit was riding pretty high.

What did change radically was my impression of the pre-war years. After growing up seeing the horrors of Hitler’s reign, I was surprised to read an early 1939 issue of Time magazine in which there was debate about whether he was a bad guy or a good guy. GOOD GUY??? Of course my opinion had been formed in retrospect and Herr Hitler viewed through the lens of late 1930’s US and European politics didn’t necessarily appear as the devil incarnate.

It is always sobering to read history. If we’d known then what we know now…

35

I was born in 1940. Looking back at what I remember, I have to say that A.R. Cane pretty much nailed it, except that I was raised in a small Texas town. I think people were more concerned with one another then. One thing I remember pretty vividly was the day my Father announced that the war was over. Another thing that stands out was using a telephone that involved turning a crank while holding a receiver to one’s ear, speaking into a mouthpiece and telling Central to whom you wished to speak.

36

Reading over my previous post, I had some more thoughts. When I was born (1958), there was much less social paranoia. Of course crime existed, but where I lived, people did not lock their doors until the late 1970s. The kind of crime that exists now, a good portion of it tied to drugs, did just not happen back then, to the average person. You were likely to know all your neighbors, including some on adjacent streets. Everybody’s kids played together, and there were barbecues and house parties where people had drinks and danced in their living rooms to the hi-fi, and all of that. They got dressed up.

Kids didn’t need constant adult supervision, because there was little or no fear that anything out of the ordinary was going to happen to them. You’d play all morning, come home for lunch, then go back out to play until suppertime, then again until bedtime. That we live in such a climate of fear now is really pretty scary itself.

Considering how much access we have to information now, and how little they had back then - the radio and TV - I think people were generally more naive and sheltered. There must have been a lingering satisfaction from having defeated the Nazis, and there was a great deal of growth after all the soldiers came home. But the dream they pursued then was an entirely different kind of dream than you can have now. The late forties, fifties and early sixties were, in my opinion, a time of innocence, the likes of which we will never see again.

37

I was born in '82, but for whatever reason I didn’t pay much attention to popular culture for the rest of the decade. I feel better for it - all of the recycled 80s stuff that’s become hip again makes me ill. [Why oh why can’t this decade develop its own style?] I’ve got clear memories of a lot of the technological differences, though, and I think people my age are among the last who can appreciate that. I remember messing around with a Commodore computer in school, having rotary phones with cords, getting a dialup Internet connection (this was around 1995) and thinking we were on the cutting edge for getting a second phone line for AOL so we wouldn’t get kicked off whenever a call came in.

I don’t have any clear memories of Reagan’s Presidency, although I remember the '88 election [I conducted a poll in my house, including pets, that had Bush beating Dukakis]. I also recall a Scholastic magazine from around the same time that proposed Reagan be honored with a new $.15 coin. I do remember the end of the Soviet Union, although I doubt I had any understanding of why it was a big deal.

38

I was born during the cescendo of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

When I visualize those days now, everything is black and white, like the small, tense television footage I’ve seen.

I grew up obsessed with the Cold War, and I still think about it more often than most people probably do.

Sailboat

39

“crescendo” of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The exciting part.

:rolleyes:

Sailboat