A Depression Baby Weighs His Generation
There I was sitting in front of the TV set, and whoosh! Another birthday came and went like a freight train rattling through Podunk.
This started a string of thought extending back to 1921, my birth year. I considered all those of my generation, the fellow journeyers who’ve accompanied me through life.
We were the Depression babies, the World War II generation, the GI Bill generation, the parents of the Baby Boomers.
I’d often thought of my father’s generation, a group that saw more tumultuous changes in a few decades than probably any other. My father and his contemporaries lived through invention and/or development of the telephone, the airplane, the railroads, the automobile, the light bulb, motion pictures, radio and television.
My generation--let’s define it as those born between 1915 and 1925--was born in relatively prosperous times, but when we were children the Great Depression arrived. Many of our fathers lost their jobs. Not all of us went hungry, but we lived austere lives until recovery began in the 1930s.
We were a generation on wheels, starting with bicycles and later advancing to autos. I bought my first car at age 14. We repaired Model T and Model A Fords and still are more at ease around vehicles than some later generations.
We grew under the guidance of lenient parents. They made us learn the value of a dollar and saw that we memorized the multiplication tables, but they gave us a lot of freedom. Nevertheless, the boys serviced paper routes and mowed lawns. The girls baby-sat.
Television didn’t exist in our youth, but we had movies and radio, then lively with melodrama. And we had phonograph records. We matured through the big band era. Soon we were in high school, studying Latin and listening to Glenn Miller records.
World War II ended our idyllic existence. Most of us loaned two to five years of our lives to Uncle Sam while we manned the ships, planes, machine guns and artillery pieces of combat.
We came marching home in 1945 and enrolled in college under the $65-a-month GI bill. Now we were two to five years older than fellow students who hadn’t entered the military. Later we married some of the co-eds who also were younger.
After college we entered the labor market. Soon we were contributing to American life and paying taxes. My generation played a significant role in building the America we have today.
We built the highways, the airports, the housing tracts, the high-rise buildings and the cars we drive. We wrote the novels, the movies and the songs. We also made some magnificent mistakes.
Many of us are retired now. The generation after ours now occupies our desks and our places at the work bench. A new team is now carrying the torch.
But most of us are still around. You’ll find us at home watching videocassette movies. Or you’ll see us on cruise ships visiting Acapulco or Barbados or Sitka. And you’ll spot us in cocktail lounges watching TV football and swapping war stories. Our hair is gray or white, we walk a little slower and we think a little slower.
But we are proud of belonging to our generation.
