LD Sledge posted in another place: From my friend Bobby Lyons: A reminder of the way it was.
\nUnfortunately, this comes at a time when there are few people left (alive) that I can forward this to who would know it\u2019s true relevance to now and then.
\nEventually, the life experiences of the 30s\u2019 40s\u2019 and 50s\u2019 will disappear along with the last one of us who lived during that time and can still remember it.
\nCHILDREN OF THE 1930s and 1940s \u2013 \u201cTHE LAST ONES\u201d
\nBorn in the 1930s and early 1940s, we exist as a very special age cohort. We are the \u201cLAST ONES.\u201d We are the last, climbing out of the depression, who can remember the winds of war and the war itself with fathers and uncles going off. We are the last to remember ration books for everything from sugar to shoes to stoves. We saved tin foil and poured fat into tin cans. We saw cars up on blocks because tires weren\u2019t available.
\nWe are the last to hear Roosevelt\u2019s radio assurances and to see gold stars in the front windows of our grieving neighbors. We can also remember the parades on August 15, 1945; VJ Day.
\nWe are the last who spent childhood without television; instead imagining what we heard on the radio. As we all like to brag, with no TV, we spent our childhood \u201cplaying outside until the street lights came on.\u201d We did play outside and we did play on our own. There was no little league.
\nThe 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 and the holocaust sandwiched in between westerns and cartoons. Newspapers and magazines were written for adults. We are the last who had to find out for ourselves.
\nAs 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 40s and early 50s the country seemed to lie in the embrace of brisk but quiet order as it gave birth to its new middle class. Our parents understandably became absorbed with their own new lives. They were free from the confines of the depression and the war. They threw themselves into exploring opportunities they had never imagined.
\nWe weren\u2019t neglected but we weren\u2019t today\u2019s all-consuming family focus. They were glad we played by ourselves \u201cuntil the street lights came on.\u201d They were busy discovering the post war world.
\nMost of us had no life plan, but with the unexpected virtue of ignorance and an economic rising tide we simply stepped into the world and went to find out. We entered a world of overflowing plenty and opportunity; a world where we were welcomed. Based on our na\u00efve belief that there was more where this came from, we shaped life as we went.
\nWe enjoyed a luxury; we felt secure in our future. Of course, just as today, not all Americans shared in this experience. Depression poverty was deep rooted. Polio was still a crippler. The Korean War was a dark presage in the early 1950s and by mid-decade school children were ducking under desks. China became Red China. Eisenhower sent the first “advisors” to Vietnam. Castro set up camp in Cuba and Khrushchev came to power.
\nWe are the last to experience an interlude when there were no existential threats to our homeland. We came of age in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The war was over and the cold war, terrorism, climate change, technological upheaval and perpetual economic insecurity had yet to haunt life with insistent unease.
\nOnly we can remember both a time of apocalyptic war and a time when our world was secure and full of bright promise and plenty. We experienced both.
\nWe grew up at the best possible time, a time when the world was getting better . . . not worse!
\nWe did not have it easy. Our wages were low, we did without, we lived within our means, we worked hard to get a job, and harder still to keep it. Things that today are considered necessities, we considered unreachable luxuries. We made things last. We fixed, rather than replaced. We had values and did not take for granted that “somebody will take care of us.” We cared for ourselves and we also cared for others.
\nWE ARE THE \u201cLAST ONES!!\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
LD Sledge posted in another place: From my friend Bobby Lyons: A reminder of the way it was. Unfortunately, this comes at a time when there are few people left (alive) that I can forward this to who would know it\u2019s true relevance to now and then. Eventually, the life experiences of the 30s\u2019 40s\u2019 … <\/p>\n