Monday, November 14, 2016

Generational Differences

Last night I saw on Facebook a picture of my niece attending the Trump protest rally in Chicago. While she appears to be demonstrating peacefully (as much as I could ascertain from the picture), others from her generation were not. This started me thinking about the differences between generations, the life experiences that they have, and how that influences their perspectives on events. There are roughly 150 years difference between the oldest people who have been in my life to the youngest. So I’d like to reflect on some of their life experiences.

My Great-grandparents

While I never got to meet any of my great-grandparents, the last of them having passed away about two years before I was born, there was one person from this generation still around. When my father’s parents had divorced, his mother remarried a man 30 years older than she was. So while he was officially my grandfather, by age he was a generation older.

“Bampa” Rogers was born in 1865, just three weeks after the close of the Civil War and only six weeks after the assassination of President Lincoln. He died just before his 94th birthday in 1959, so I had the pleasure of knowing him for the first nearly eleven years of my life. And he was coherent until the very end, living in what we might today call an assisted living home – he had his own room which he took care of, but there was a shared dining room downstairs, a nurse on duty, etc.

As I interacted with him (he was the one who taught me how to play cribbage), I was thrilled to be able to interact with someone who was a link to the Civil War nearly a century before and all that he had experienced in his life. To imagine a life with no automobiles (1886), no electricity (1879), no telephones (1876), and likely no indoor plumbing (only the wealthy had it back then) was something I just could not wrap my head around. He grew up in a time when life was lived at a much slower pace and you could take the time to put things in perspective. I was never sure when interacting with him whether his slower pace was just because of his advanced age, or whether that was the way he learned to be. He had also been a watchmaker by trade, taking apart watches, repairing, and putting them back together (they were all mechanical devices, many/most of them pocket watches instead of wristwatches), so his slow and deliberate movements would also have been an asset in that type of work.

I suppose his slowness was a mix of all those reasons. But whatever the reason, he was a product of his age – and one far removed from my own. I was only a young boy back then, and one who was taught to be very respectful of my elders, so I didn’t question him about his past. But if I had a chance to go back and talk to him, knowing what I do now, I would relish that opportunity to learn how he grew up and what his perspective on life was. Also, I’d love to ask him how he felt as the various “new-fangled” things like automobiles and electricity came along.




My Grandparents

With the exception of Bampa Rogers, my other grandparents were born in the last decade or so of the 1800s (1885-1898). So while things like electricity and automobiles had been invented and they would have been aware of them, I suspect that they did not have such things in their families until they were a bit older. And even then, use of such technology was much more limited in scope. Electricity was only used for lighting. My grandparents’ house probably only had 40 amp service and the fuse box only had four fuses (circuit breakers for residential use were not available until after 1935). Those who had automobiles had to share the road with horse-drawn carriages/wagons, most roads were not paved until decades later (I know that the first road in my hometown to be paved was not until 1935).

Other things that we now take for granted were also many years off. Schools were very local and you walked to/from school (the first steel-bodied school bus was not produced until 1930). Education for most people stopped after 8th grade. All my grandparents attended one-room schools, and stopped going to school either after 8th grade or 9th grade. This meant that they were all either working or full-time help around the house by the age of 15-16.

The next major event in their lives would have been World War I, which began when they were teenagers. Although none of my grandparents served in that war, many of their friends did. And with communication technology being what it was, that meant that you might only hear from those overseas very seldom, so reading the headlines in the local paper would have been the primary way to keep up with that going on in Europe. My father’s parents married in June of 1914, one month before the war began. My mother’s parents married in March of 1919, four months after the war ended. So that war played a major role in their lives.

Following WWI, there was a brief respite. During these years my grandparents were having and raising their families. But not too long after the Great Depression (1929-1939) would have impacted them. I’ll refer to this more when I write about the next generation, but it obviously affected anyone living in the US at that time.

I would characterize my grandparents’ time as one of significant change. They experienced first-hand the impact of things like the introduction of electricity and the automobile, the more wide-spread availability of education, but also the devastation of a world war and the Great Depression.

I interacted with them all throughout my growing up years until their passing away (they all passed on in the period between 1963 and 1979). But they were still a product of their time. They lived in older houses that had electricity, but no air conditioning, and the heat was from a coal furnace in the basement and a grate in the floor to let the hot air rise into the house. They had a single car, but never drove very far or very often. They stayed with the same jobs for most of the lives (my mother’s father was a milkman for his cousin’s dairy farm, then in later years a clerk in a plumbing fixture store, my father’s father was a blue-collar worker, then in later years a night watchman).

My Parents and their Siblings

My father’s parents were a few years older than my mother’s parents. So my father’s sister and he were born in 1916 and 1920 respectively. My mother came from a larger family with children being born in 1920, 1922, 1924, 1926, and 1929 (she was the one in the middle). So, except for my father’s sister, they were all born in the “quiet period” after WWI but before the Great Depression. They grew up with automobiles, indoor plumbing, telephones, and other amenities. The elementary school they attended had multiple rooms, but was still just walking distance away. But they also all attended and graduated from high school – for most meaning a bus ride into the city center.

They all lived through the depression, although several of them have said that when everyone around you is also poor, you don’t really notice it. But then the event that finally caused the depression to end after ten years was WWII. My father’s sister, being the oldest of this group, had married toward the end of 1938, less than a year before the war broke out in Europe. All the others, either just ending their high school times or younger, were delayed in their marriages. All the men served in the armed forces, most in the army, but my father in the navy.

The war ended in 1945, but it was several month before they all came home – either from Europe or from the South Pacific. There were two marriages in 1946, one in 1948, and one in 1949 (only my aunt Alie remained unmarried until she finally tied the knot in 1958 to a man in Arizona who had three children from a prior marriage). My aunt who married in 1938 had had her two children during the war (1942 and 1944), the rest had their children during the official Baby Boomer years of 1946-1964. The total number of children of the six families eventually numbered 20. Of the six children in this generation, the five who had married all settled in small towns within a few miles of their parents (and of each other). All the men worked in various manufacturing or other blue-collar jobs.

Their lives were shaped by the depression and by WWII – although they, like many others who had served, did not talk about it much. They surrounded themselves with family, had stable marriages that lasted 50-60 years (with the exception of the one who married later in life), and raised their children in loving homes in the quiet suburbs. Although they had started their married life with little, in time they had televisions (eventually in color), a piano (two of my aunts were piano teachers), and while not extravagant the other amenities that slowly became available over the years. They avoided debt, even when “plastic” credit cards where you could not pay off the balance each month became available (1966). They each started out with a single car, but as their families grew and it became necessary for the wives to go shopping during the day, they each added a second car.




My Generation

I, and all my siblings and the cousins who lived near us, grew up in similar circumstances. We had newer houses in small towns, a good school system, and loving parents in a very stable relationship – the latter being probably the most important. In the booming economic times of post WWII, while none of us were in “rich” families, we had all that we needed.

Our families had multiple automobiles and we all learned to drive within a year or so of turning 16. Where our grandparents had only an 8th/9th grade education, and our parents had only completed high school, the majority of us went on to college and a few through graduate school as well (two of us earned doctorate degrees). The negative things like the depression and WWII that had played such a significant part in our parents’ lives were only things in their past, not in ours. The Korean conflict (1950-1953) happened either before we were born or when we were too young to appreciate it. The only similar event to our parents’ lives was the US involvement in the Vietnam War. Although the US had first sent troops there in 1965, it was not until the reinstatement of the draft in 1969 that it really became part of our collective conscious.

While I “escaped” from mandatory service due to a series of incidents, one of my brothers and two of my cousins served in the military during the Vietnam War. But the protests that took place on college campuses and the unpopularity of the entire effort gave a very different feeling than our parents experienced during WWII.

There was much that was different between our lives and those of our parents. Our involvement in higher education meant that many of us went to other states for that education. Having gotten that “wanderlust,” we also married people from other places and then lived hundreds of miles from our parents. We had ready access to automobiles, credit cards, and other modern amenities. Although computers were not widely used for those like myself who were on the leading edge of the Baby Boomer generation (I didn’t know what they were until I went to college), as time went on they became even more available. Without the nearby influence of our parents and extended families we fell prey to other influences. Where divorce had been rare (the only one I knew of in the older generation was my father’s parents), it became more prevalent in our generation (although still not in the numbers that others from our generation have experienced). Our minds had been “expanded”, the limits of our geography were also widened, but there was still that stable background of our parents and grandparents that kept us relatively grounded.




My Children and Grandchildren

I was one of the ones who left home for college. I spent five years in Michigan (where I met the woman who became my wife), lived in Connecticut for a few years, then for the last 40+ years have lived in Pennsylvania. So my children have grown up apart from the influence of my or my wife’s extended family (200 and 800 miles away respectively).

Our son has three children and our daughter has four children. Our son went to college in Indiana, married a girl from Indiana, lived briefly in Indiana, then in Pennsylvania for a short time, spent over a decade in New Jersey, and now lives in Florida. He is even more mobile than his parents. He has also been in the military, having served for fifteen years as an officer and soon to be promoted to Major in the Army Reserves. Out daughter went to college for a while in Ohio, then came back to Pennsylvania. She married someone local and currently the entire family live with us.

They have both been influenced by increasing technology – first standalone PCs then the Internet, computer games, cell phones and then smart phones, online shopping, etc. The speed of change has greatly increased. The world around them has gotten increasingly liberal with issues like same-sex marriage, gender identity, and constitutional revisionism being very evident. Divorce or living together without being married is not even questioned any more. It’s difficult to know how these influences will make an effect on them.

For our grandchildren, now ages 2-12, it’s too early to tell what will have the most influence on their lives. Advanced technology is something that they take for granted. Globalism and multi-culturalism are also a part of their world. While they remain grounded for now (my son and daughter-in-law home school their children, my daughter and son-in-law and their four boys live with us), we don’t know how they will turn out yet. But we remain hopeful.

Conclusion

The things that have influenced each of these generations has been quite different. From the slow pace of life before phones, electricity, and automobiles, to the ever increasing pace of today’s technology. From one room schools and eighth-grade education to online classes and virtual universities. From stable families who remained rooted in the places they grew up to being global citizens, able and willing to move to other parts of the country and perhaps even to other countries.

I’m happy to have lived at this time in history – one where I have been able to communicate with family members who were born 150 years ago to our grandchildren who will likely still be living 80-90 years from now. It’s a wild ride!


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