I find myself thinking more and more often about what we lose to living memory when entire generations age and die – information for which we can no longer just find someone and ask about the details. Maybe it’s because I listen to a lot of history podcasts. Maybe because my parents and grandparents are gone and not available to answer questions.
Or maybe it’s just because I’m on the youngish end of a generation that will still have some hardy folk available for questions for another 40 years or so, but then the progeny that exploded from the post-war baby boom will be, as they say – history.
It’s still a little weird to think of even my great-grandparents as being firmly out of reach. I mean, they’re right there in photos that include my young self, and they were always very much a part of my parents’ lives and their stories. But the youngest of them was born in 1885, so yeah – their lives are the stuff of history.
I had two great-grandmothers who were still alive when I was a teenager, and I wish I had had the sense to ask them so many questions about what their lives were like when they were young that they would get sick of it and encourage me to go read a book – which was what I was most likely doing instead of pestering them.
They would have been the last generation in the US to know a world before the emergence of cars, telephones and electricity – possibly wondering if those crazy new things would ever really catch on and be of practical use. By 1890, when my great-grandparents were young children, all of those modern conveniences had been invented, but in those days my family on both sides were farmers, so that expensive new-fangled stuff wouldn’t be part of their lives till around the time they were getting married and raising families.
Think about it – even in our post-apocalyptic stories like The Walking Dead, people still find ways to generate power and get cars going. Journals and handbooks from my great-grandparents’ generation would likely be great resources for how to survive disastrous events.
When I think of my grandparents – all born between 1903 and 1912 – I can’t help but hope that they will be the last US generation to ever have memories of two world wars, with a Great Depression sandwiched between them. Both of my grandfathers were too young for the first war and too old for the second, but they were farming during the depression years. And again, I didn’t take advantage of the ability to learn more about their experiences, thinking instead about how odd it was that my grandmother saved everything – things that I threw away without a second thought.
Both my parents were born in 1935, right in the middle of those Depression years. Born at home on the farms where their families lived and worked. Being so young at the time, my parents had no bleak stories to tell about the last years of the Great Depression – their memories were of loving parents and grandparents and fun times with nearby cousins. They did, however, make frequent references to radio programs that they listened to when they were young, and I figure their generation would have been among the last to have memories of those days when the radio was a major piece of furniture in the home, a key provider of news and entertainment. I remember thinking that some of the programs they mentioned sounded amusing and fun, but since I had television, it just seemed a bit quaint and quirky – obviously inferior to what I had for my own entertainment. But what a wonder radio must have been, especially in rural homes where in many cases, electricity and telephones must have still seemed like luxuries. But they never talked about those things like they were anything special – and again, I never asked. I also never asked about an event that my parents must have had some memory of – they were 6 years old when Pearl Harbor was attacked. I know those broadcasts took over the radio waves, and I’m sure my grandparents would have been listening. Were my young parents frightened? Confused? Annoyed that they couldn’t listen to their favorite programs? I’ll never know.
One reason I’m sure they would have had some reaction – I was 5 years old when President Kennedy was assassinated, and I remember it. Because of course, it interrupted my TV watching. Not that I particularly watched soap operas at that age, but my mother did, so the television would have been on when the black background of the news bulletin filled the TV screen. That was always enough to grab attention and make everyone nervous. My real memories are likely more related to the funeral and other coverage that would have cancelled my cartoon watching for the day. But I do remember it, and there can’t be anyone much younger than me who does.
A happier event that I remember seeing when I was 5 years old is the live performance by the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show. And I can tell you, I was so excited that I watched it from behind Highlights magazine because I didn’t want my parents or grandparents to see just how excited I was (I’m not sure why). I already loved the Beatles passionately, after listening to them on the radio during naptime. And I never lost the thrill of listening to them.
One more TV-related event that I must be among the youngest to remember is the switch from all programs being broadcast in black and white to all programs being broadcast in color – I was around 7 years old when that happened. We didn’t have a color TV at the time, but we had family and friends who did, so that definitely added to the fun of spending an evening with them.
While we Baby Boomers will be the last to remember those early years of television, the older Millennials, like my son, will be the last to remember life before the internet. Born in 1984, he was old enough to be using the computer, learning about dial-up access when the World Wide Web went public – those dark days when you still needed some kind of disk to do most things, before Wi-Fi, before streaming, before seemingly everything was available online. Really, before “online” was even a common term. My daughter, 15 years younger than her brother, has never known life without those things. She learned keyboard skills in kindergarten – something for which I took an entire year of typing class in high school.
Now I have a grandson, born in 2022. And I wonder what he will remember years from now, about things that were brand new, or became obsolete when he was young. Will he remember riding in cars as a child and wonder what it must have been like to actually drive one, rather than simply entering coordinates and pressing a start button? Maybe he’ll have fond memories of shopping in stores with his parents as he submits home-delivery orders for everything he needs.
Will he have only vague memories of a country once known as the United States of America? Will his high school textbooks report that it was a country that worked at being a democracy for a couple of centuries, until its citizens could not agree on just what that meant and it collapsed into chaos and war?
I’m hoping that none of his future memories resemble those comments made by a frustrated grandma. And I can’t help but wonder if, like me, too many folks – older and younger – have neglected to ask important questions of people with experiences and opinions that are now out of our reach. People who are gone who could have provided information and guidance that was never recorded in any way, but was always available for the asking.
Maybe the important thing is just taking the time to ask questions and listening to the answers.
OK Boomer 