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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