Form: Mini Essay

SAW THIS SILENT GENERATION POST SOMEWHERE ELSE

Bothers me because I see them as the “naive and abused generation”. The generation like their parents that were the most and first affected by the Propaganda Generation. The first substantial victims of the Industrialization of Lying. And through that lens this set of statements reads somewhat differently from how the author intended.

—–BEGIN—-

Born in the 1930’s and 40’s, we exist as a very special age cohort. We are the Silent Generation.

We are the smallest number of children born since the early 1900’s. We are the “last ones.”

We are the last generation, climbing out of the depression, who can remember the winds of war and the impact of a world at war which rattled the structure of our daily lives for years.

We are the last to remember ration books for everything from gas to sugar to shoes to stoves.

We saved tin foil and poured fat into tin cans.

We hand mixed ’white stuff’ with ‘yellow stuff’ to make fake butter.

We saw cars up on blocks because tires weren’t available.

We can remember milk being delivered to our house early in the morning and placed in the “milk box” on the porch. [A friend’s mother delivered milk in a horse drawn cart.] We sometimes fed the horse, and our dog, Spot, a Fox Terrier, would greet the milkman when he made our delivery, then he would ride in Glenn’s truck till the end of his route, when Glenn would drive by the house and let Spot off the truck just in time to greet us coming home from elementary school.

Many of us are the last to hear Roosevelt ’s radio assurances and to see gold stars in the front windows of our grieving neighbors.

Many of us can also remember the parades on August 15, 1945; VJ Day.

We saw the ‘boys’ home from the war, build their little houses, pouring the cellar, tar papering it over and living there until they could afford the time and money to build it out.

We are the last generation who spent much of our childhood without television; instead we imagined 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.

We turned the hose or the fire hydrants on and ran through the spray to play in the water.

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 sandwiched in between westerns and cartoons.

Telephones were one to a house, often shared and hung on the wall.

Computers were called calculators, they only added and were hand cranked; typewriters were driven by pounding fingers, throwing the carriage, and changing the ribbon.

The ‘Internet’ and ‘GOOGLE’ were words that didn’t exist.

Newspapers and magazines were written for adults and the news was broadcast on our table radio in the evening by H.V Kaltenborne and Gabriel Heatter.

We are the last group 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 40’s and early 50’s the country seemed to lie in the embrace of brisk but quiet order as it gave birth to its new middle class (which became known as ‘Baby Boomers’).

…. it goes on …