“No girl,” said Al Bartz, “is willing to be seen dead in a Nash Rambler.”
Turning sixteen caused us to break out in a rash of unwonted helpfulness. “I’ll go to the supermarket, Mom. We’re almost out of paprika.”
We drove around and around. The cars got bad mileage. But gas was 31 cents a gallon. We could get to where all the other kids were by looking under the couch cushions. Unspoken consensus made driving up and down certain streets obligatory and parking in certain places required. Sometimes when we parked we were “parking,” as the art of love was called, and sometimes when we parked we were parked. We got out of our cars to talk to each other. We’re a talkative generation, and only so much can be shouted from a car window.
We got out of our cars but not away from them. That would have been like separating the body from the soul. Or, not to overstate the case, it would have been like getting too far from a bathroom for the males among us fifty years later. We lounged against the fenders. We perched on the trunk lids. We stood in the open doors with one foot resting on the sill and an elbow cocked on the roof, looking cool. It wasn’t just Leo Luhan who thought he was cool. Now we all did. And the cars of those days didn’t ruin looking cool with nagging ding-dong noises if you left the car door open and the keys in the ignition.
It’s heavy lifting conducting light flirtations. Much effort goes into crafting an effortless guise. We worked up an appetite. Drive-in burger restaurants played a crucial role in cruising. They were parking lots with food.
We had plenty to talk to each other about and plenty of each other to talk to. The Baby Boom was discovering itself—and not in the tiresome way that we would keep doing for the rest of our lives until, by now, every rock in our psyche has been overturned and each wiggling thing we’ve found underneath has been squashed or made into a pet. Youth was discovering youth. Not only were there lots of us, there were lots more of us. Other kids went to other high schools. The boys were almost as cool. The girls were even cuter.
Driving around was our Facebook. We never thought to monetize it. Generational vice? Or generational virtue?
We drove around and around and we talked and talked. We talked about what’s cool and what’s uncool. No one listens when teenagers talk, including the teenagers themselves most of the time. But teenagers were (and still are in present-day text messages) having an ancient colloquy of deep significance.
What we discussed appears in the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, Proverbs 17:27, “he who has a cool spirit is a man of understanding.” Cool. The Oxford English Dictionary cites a line from a Chaucer poem, “thynkist in thyn wit that is ful cole.” Spelling bees are uncool. In 1938 Eric Partridge, the twentieth century’s preeminent lexicographer of slang, gave a cool definition of cool in A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English: “impertinent, impudent, audacious, especially if in a calm way.” This was in common use by the mid-1820s, standard English by the mid-1880s, and exactly what we were talking about by the mid-1960s. In 2010 Partridge’s lexicographic heir Jonathon Green, author of the 6,000-page Green’s Dictionary of Slang, devoted eighteen column inches to cool and said, “As with a number of slang’s (rare) abstract terms, it is less than simple to draw hard-and-fast lines between the senses.”
We’ve been out of our senses a lot. The Baby Boom was always less than simple. Forget the hard-and-fast lines. We are a fiery generation, heated in our affection, feverish in our action, blistering in our scorn—and obsessed with being cool. Later we’d be a fat generation—obsessed with being fit. We still think we’re cool. That isn’t all. We still think we’re hot.
Good thing we talked this out while we were driving around.
The music we listened to was cool. The power of our generation is our music. But, in the interest of speaking truth to power, I looked at the Billboard Top 100 for the year I went from junior to senior in high school. We liked “Everybody Loves Somebody” by Dean Martin (no. 6) better than we liked the Beatles’ “Can’t Buy Me Love” (no. 52). We liked “We’ll Sing in the Sunshine” by Gale Garnett (no. 8) better than we liked the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” (no. 78). The Rolling Stones didn’t make the chart. Leo Luhan had mentioned them. He said you could tell their music was influenced by the Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie.” Here are the actual lyrics to “Louie Louie” as posted on the Internet, a medium that does not spare our sensibilities.
Louie Louie, oh no
Me gotta go
Aye-yi-yi-yi, I said
Louie Louie, oh baby
Me gotta go
And more of the same. If it’s any comfort the previous year’s Billboard Top 100 was worse: “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah, Here I am at Camp Granada . . .” and “Blame It on the Bossa Nova” by Eydie Gorme.
There were three AM stations playing the same songs. This was good because when one station finished playing a song we could push the buttons on the car radio and find the same song being played on another station. We enjoyed hearing songs over and over. As with wearing clothes like everyone else’s and belonging to a clique and driving around to the same places at the same times, it forged individual identity.
A lot of identical individual identities were forged. We saw nothing ironic about this. So far the Baby Boom had only a mild, Playboy cartoon caption case of the ironic. Irony wouldn’t become chronic and severe until the 1970s when we ran out of cool things that we all agreed on and disco happened.
AM radio was the sound track of our life. That was a cool thing that we all agreed on. Leo Luhan considered himself a talented composer of the sound track of his life. He made suggestions to the manager of the drive-in burger restaurant about what should be on the jukebox.
The restaurant had tables and booths inside, where we went when it was too cold to be cool outside. There was a sophomore we knew, driving around with us. He didn’t have his driver’s license. Leo convinced him to go into the burger restaurant and feed the jukebox so that the right sound track theme song would be playing when Leo walked through the door. Other kids had fed the jukebox. Twenty minutes passed before “Louie Louie” came on. We had to get up on our knees in the restaurant booth and frantically signal to Leo who was waiting in the car and had trouble seeing us through his sunglasses. By the time he got there the jukebox was playing “We’ll Sing in the Sunshine.”
Everything adults thought we were supposed to do was uncool. Especially if we were supposed to do it for fun. Adults had a peculiar sense of fun. My wife’s book club meets at our house tonight. They’re reading a self-help book called My Life Sucks, I Hate You. I intend to spend the evening in my basement workshop sorting a coffee can full of screws into small trays according to size and whether they are slotted or Phillips head. Adults retain a peculiar sense of fun.
Homecoming was all sorts of fun. The Homecoming Game was the West Side Cowboys versus their traditional rival the North Side Polar Bears.
“The West Side Cowboys,” said Al Bartz, “and the North Side Polar Bears and the East Side Yankees. The school system was really thinking that one through.”
At the Homecoming Dance, balloons (sunset orange and buffalo brown, the school colors) were put in the basketball nets. Rented tuxedos made sure the fun was special. No shoes allowed made sure the gym floor wasn’t damaged. The chaperones’ efforts to curtail lewd personal contact were conducted on principles opposite of today’s. Kids pressed together tightly with low lights in slow dances—this was considered sweet. Wild gyrations of the hully gully, the jerk, and the watusi performed four feet from a partner—these were glared at.
Joe Brody had the idea of using a hypodermic needle to inject vodka into a watermelon. Ideas, we were beginning to understand, were important for their own sake. That is, we didn’t know where to get a hypodermic needle. Even Joe’s parents would miss a whole bottle of vodka. It was November, there weren’t any water
melons. And why would anyone bring a watermelon to a homecoming dance? We were almost ready for ideas of peace and love.
The homecoming parade had a float. A flatbed trailer was borrowed from the local plant nursery. Two-by-fours were nailed together to make a framework on the trailer. Chicken wire was bent around the two-by-fours more or less in the shape of a giant, almost-four-foot-tall cowboy boot. “Boot the Bears” was the homecoming theme.
To get a Rose Bowl parade float effect, wads of Kleenex were stuffed into the chicken wire. Kleenex did not make brown or orange Kleenex. The local stationery store donated a roll of brown tissue paper and a roll of orange. BOOT THE BEARS was spelled out in brown and orange on the boot top although with some spacing difficulties so that what parade-goers saw was BOOTT HEB EARS.
I don’t remember why I was helping stuff Kleenex into chicken wire. I may have thought, wrongly, that Marsha Matthiessen would be helping stuff Kleenex into chicken wire. I do remember a sudden and strong feeling of being uncool. I am in my middle sixties. I have a teenage daughter. The feeling was stronger than that. The parade float looked like chicken wire with Kleenex stuffed into it.
Ana Klein, by dint of her many dance classes, had been chosen as one of the Tumbleweed Girls. They performed gymnastics on the sidelines at football games dressed alike in western outfits purchased at the local Western Wear store. Al Bartz asked Ana, “Is there a Midwestern Wear store?” She quit.
Tim Minsky ran for student council. His platform was based on a simple formula. Student council had no power. Therefore, if he was elected, he’d do nothing. He won. We’d soon loose our sense of humor about politics. It wouldn’t come back until Watergate. When the Baby Boom’s sense of humor about politics returned it acted like it had been sleeping in alleys and eating out of garbage cans.
We’d already lost our sense of humor about our parents. If we’d had one. Anything a parent said or did we took personally. (I don’t think our children have made this mistake. The lesson in the Baby Boom’s lifelong fascination with personhood, personality, and persons is that people shouldn’t be taken personally.)
Our parents were generally pathetic. When they were specifically pathetic the pain was intense. Dr. Klein told Ana, Tim Minsky, and me, “I like that Beatles group. Some of the songs those young men sing show that they have genuine musical talent.”
“I think they’re cute!” said Mrs. Klein.
There was nothing of the remote about our parents. Meaning remote as a noun. They couldn’t push our buttons from a distance. They had to come right up and try to switch to the channel we were on. They should have stuck with remote as an adjective.
We would have detested the twenty-first century’s remote-control connectivity—cell phones, texting, twitter. Parents everywhere, like God? (A god that couldn’t tell George from Ringo.) The horror is unimaginable to the mid-1960s teenage mind. Parents with a Facebook page. Like a newspaper page but never thrown away. Parents “posting” things, as in a poster, as in a billboard, as in a billboard on a busy street where we were cruising. With things about us on it. With things about our parents. And last summer’s snapshots. When I still had a crew cut and my sisters were teasing their hair.
Then we, the Baby Boom, invented electronic personal communication devices. We, of all people. TV that watches you. It’s as if we read Nineteen Eighty-Four, and said, “Good idea!”
We didn’t need connectivity. We were where all the other kids were, cruising West End Avenue, at the drive-in burger restaurant, watching submarine races by the pond in Pondside Park.
The Internet is a universally shared thought process. We had one already. On the first day of senior year Leo Luhan—with that deliberate flaunting of convention for which the Baby Boom is known—would come to school wearing penny loafers, white Levi’s, a madras long-sleeved shirt. And black socks. The rest of us had come to school the same day wearing penny loafers, white Levi’s, madras long-sleeved shirts. And black socks.
It wasn’t like we hated the grown-ups. Yet. We were capable of real feelings for adults, as long as they had nothing to do with our lives.
In the fall of my junior year John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas, and in American Literature class. The school PA system —not an electronic personal, or any other kind of, communication device—made the details incomprehensible but the situation clear. There was no mistaking the sober tone and poignant halts in the loudspeaker static for an Al Bartz prank.
Our parents and teachers were shocked because John Kennedy was one of them the way John Lennon was (although, born in 1940, he really wasn’t) one of us. That is, they were shocked because John Kennedy was one of them and then some, them more so, them to a greater—and not just presidential—power. Them richer than a king and admirably schooled in every grace.
We were shocked by all the emotion. Embarrassment, crushes, and embarrassment about crushes (and erections) were emotions as we knew them. Most of us had never lost a parent. Most of us had never even lost a parent to a woman younger than Mom. Not being allowed to borrow the car was our understanding of loss. Bereavement was Sonny Merton run over by a truck.
The emotions were so strong that we forgot to be cool. Not that there wasn’t something cool about the strength of the emotions and their uninhibited display.
Mr. Entwhistle the American Literature teacher knew a lot of poetry by heart. He began to recite “Richard Cory” by Edwin Arlington Robinson.
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored and imperially slim.
And he was rich—yes richer than a king—
And admirably schooled in every grace.
A wildly inappropriate poem, ending,
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
I think Mr. Entwhistle meant to recite “To an Athlete Dying Young” by A. E. Housman, because he did recite that the next time we were in American Literature class.
Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honors out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.
Which we did not exactly understand because West Side High had a trophy case, and everybody who’d won something had his name engraved on a cup or a bowl or the base of a statuette.
But we understood the Kennedy assassination was a significant event for our generation. The significance being that the Kennedy assassination was Pearl Harbor scaled down to the level of the Baby Boom’s understanding of actions having consequences.
The consequence of the assassination was only another president, more successful at pushing a legislative agenda—with which Kennedy is wrongly credited—and more effective at pressing a foreign policy—from which Kennedy is wrongly excused. Then myth took hold, in an early 1960s way. Camelot, starring Richard Burton and Julie Andrews, had recently closed on Broadway after 873 performances.
Don’t let it be forgot
That once there was a spot
Where the president was fun
And he’s remembered as having something to do with
a drunk actor and a singing nun.
A generational truth was discovered. How people feel about things is as important as things. Feelings are real. And now so were girls. You could feel them. Eventually. But you had to talk to them about feelings first. (For girls, boys got real too—until talking to us about feelings got unreal at the end of the first marriage.)
I talked about feelings to my high school girlfriend Karen. Although she wasn’t my girlfriend yet. She had to be talked into it. I don’t mean by me, I mean by the power of talk in general. “They talked themselves into
it” is the motto of the Baby Boom. Or maybe “They talked themselves out of it.” But we’re saving that for our epitaph.
Karen and I talked about feelings in a memorable way. I can’t remember any of it. The fragments of our chat that have stuck in my mind for half a century—Karen explaining tampons—can’t have been representative of our conversation. They sound more like intimate talk from toward the end of our being a couple, when we were promising to stay together while going to colleges far apart. We weren’t talking about tampons in our kiss-on-the-lips-but-no-tongue stage. Nor were we talking about feeling cool and uncool. A boy doesn’t speak to a girl about that. To mention being cool to the object of being cool is worse than uncool. It’s the quarterback leaving the huddle to join the Tumbleweed Girls. Karen and I just talked. Words are Baby Boom pheromones.
One school night, when I’d borrowed the car and was supposed to be at the library and actually was at the library, Karen and I were sitting across from each other not studying. It was a week or ten days since we’d started talking between classes, in the cafeteria, at the drive-in burger restaurant, on the phone for an hour at a time. I was smiling at her. She was smiling at me. And then I felt an ankle-socked toe just above the vamp of my penny loafer and moving toward the hem of my white Levi’s. The erotic shock was so intense that today I am at a loss to explain why I don’t have a fetish for toes, ankle socks, or my old left penny loafer.
For a couple of years the Baby Boom was blessed with sure and certain hope. What we hoped for was sex and drugs. Hopes that would come too true but, in our blessed state, not for a little while.
We’d heard about drugs. The marijuana scare preceded the marijuana. We were never able to find any. Leo Luhan and I went to a jazz club downtown and sat through a set by somebody who somebody said sounded something like Charles Mingus. I had no idea a bass fiddle could be as noisy as Susie Inwood’s violin. The drug pusher seemed to have had the night off.