Some are strange, such as the 1950 “bathtub” Hudson and the which-way-did-it-go 1950 Studebaker. Some are stranger, like the 1960 Plymouth Valiant, which looks as if its styling was done by four men who lacked a common language working together in a dark room.
Some are examples of industrial design perfected, with form following function and function chasing a beauty all its own—the 1953 through 1955 Studebakers and the Willys Jeep Station Wagon that stayed in production, almost without visible changes, from 1946 to 1965.
Some are works of art. You can tell by the way Baby Boomers, paying through the nose, fill our garages with these instead of with Rothkos. There’s the 1948 Chrysler Town and Country convertible, the 1955 Ford Thunderbird, the 1955 Chevrolet Nomad, the 1965 Ford Mustang, and all Corvettes until 1973 when they start to get too trial-separation-and-combover-looking.
And some of the Greatest Generation’s cars are an amazement. For example, the 1959 Chevrolet Biscayne. Here was Chevy’s least expensive model, a get-to-worker, mommy-shopper, kiddie-hauler budget conveyance. And—hydra headlamps, dagger-slit hood scoops, gridiron grill big enough for a cannibal roast with seven chrome nipples down the fifty-yard line, tail lights like the giant fangs of a basilisk, and two great hatchet-edged swoops of steel across the trunk lid—it makes the Batmobile look like a Scion xB.
I have digressed here, I know, like any good Baby Boom boy my age would. Give us a look at four square feet of the bodywork on any car built between World War II and the Arab oil embargo and we’ll tell you the make, model, and year with more accuracy than we get from our PSA tests. But it is worth noting that the Greatest Generation took all of its creativity, artistic feeling, and aesthetic sensibilities and put them on wheels. It’s as if they felt, “Okay, okay, we do have an imagination, but let’s make sure we can get it out of here!”
Their cars aside, the postwar life the Greatest Generation wanted for themselves and for us was a unique combination of the intensely dynamic and the adamantly prosaic. And this is the life they got. It was fantasy-free fantasy fulfillment and science fiction, hold the fiction.
Hence my house, built in 1951. It was not a pseudocolonial. Pseudo- derives from the Greek word meaning to deceive or counterfeit. No deception was made or intended. Somewhere in the aesthetic genome was a Massachusetts Bay Colony cape that had shed its dormers and shingles and grown clapboard and a second story after being mated to a Center Hall Federalist dwelling where the center hall had atrophied to a coat closet inside the front door. Only one hearth remained and that was vestigial except on special occasions when the firewood Dad brought home filled the house with smoke.
Le Corbusier, foremost of the midcentury architectural theorists who wrecked the world’s downtowns with glass tombstones and confined the poor in vertical concrete slums, had blandly called a house “a machine for living.” Our parents were the avant-garde of Le Corbusier in blandness. My house was “a box for wife and family.”
And a comfortable, cheerful, well-padded, and carefully placed box it was. The flaps were left open. As our generation is fond of saying, “We never locked the doors in the place where we grew up.” That’s not accurate. When night came and kids were in bed, moms and dads living in tediously safe locales went around turning deadbolts and fastening door chains. We think of them as unworried—smoking while pregnant, having one for the road before driving the family home, turning us loose in the backyard with lawn darts. But they did worry, in their generation’s careful, limited way. They had certain firm ideas of what to worry about. They’d never had the opportunity to develop contemporary diverse, inclusive, free-range worry. They were more specifically anxious than we are, without the general anxiety. In this, their smoking and drinking certainly helped.
What our parents were most anxious for was us—first for us to be born and then for us to be happy and good. This is why they put so much effort into making sure the non-pseudocolonial house was in a good and happy place, the place where we grew up.
Now that we want our kids to be brilliant and successful we’re free to move back to the city or out to Sedona or into mansion ghettos full of people with whom we are purposely strangers. Our parents hadn’t learned to outsource their children’s good and happy place.
They were ignorant of au pair supervision, the Suzuki method of early childhood stringed instrument instruction, math camp, and infant Pilates classes. They didn’t know how to get us into private schools that accept only the top zero percent of applicants or sports programs reserved for those who will one day podium at the Olympics. Our parents needed a public place for us.
So we grew up in the suburbs, though with an experience somewhat different from what “grew up in the suburbs” would come to mean. I thought “car pool” was another swell new idea from GM.
Dad had the car at work. Mom’s car was a used one, if it existed. If it didn’t Mom took the bus. Grandma never learned to drive. She called a taxi. We rode our bikes. None of us was headed far. Suburbia hadn’t yet expanded into a vast place where, our social critics tell us, there’s nowhere to go and it’s a long way to get there.
A great deal of thinking, mostly of the agonized kind, has been done about the effects of suburbanization on America. As if there were some hidden, cabalistic meaning in more nice homes and convenient places to work and shop. The meaning of the Baby Boom suburbs was that, because of depression and war, nobody had built any houses for a while and a lot of babies were being born.
Urban was still the meaningful part of the word suburban. People lived a driveway apart, back fence to back fence, with no lap pool enclosures or lap pools to be enclosed and no landscaping services trimming dense shrubbery screens. Streets retained their grid pattern. Each street was still called Such-and-Such Street rather than Suchand Drive or Andsuch Way. Dead ends had not yet gained the cachet of cul-de-sacs.
Suburban neighborhoods began a block or two from the city’s shabby early-twentieth-century apartment buildings and paint-peeled Victorian piles now split into duplexes or rented by the room. Even where land was at no premium, out on the verge of town, a quarter-acre lot was a bit magnificent. And there were neighbors in the country too. Farms were smaller. Other farmhouses were within shouting distance.
Quite a few of our parents and most of our grandparents had grown up on such farms, either here or in some other country. This may be why the children of my neighborhood continued shouting. We seldom knocked on doors and never, except on Halloween, rang doorbells. When we wanted to contact a friend the accepted form was to stand outside his house and shout his name at the top of our lungs, “Oh, Billeeey!,” with the last syllable greatly prolonged and shrilly emphasized.
Children were forbidden independent use of the telephone. Any other form of personal communication technology, had it existed, would have been considered ridiculous. “Oh, Billeeey!” could be heard a block and a half away. If a kid lived more than a block and a half away we didn’t know him.
Adults themselves didn’t use the telephone any more than necessary. Party lines were still common. Two rings for the Andersons, one ring for us. To say something on a party line was to tell the world. That it would be wonderful to tell the world one’s every thought and feeling hadn’t occurred to people yet.
Our house had a single phone, in the dining room on a shelf in a nook specifically designed to accommodate it. A call after 9 p.m. meant, at best, that someone in the family had died. Either that or the call had been prearranged, by mail, with my mother’s sister in Chicago, to take advantage of lower nighttime long-distance rates. On long-distance calls Grandma shouted. It was, after all, a long distance.
People used to speak face to face. They did so in their own backyards over garden gates, as seen in ancient daily newspaper comic strips. Sometimes, in the background, there’d be a clothesline or a manually operated push lawn mower. People talked a lot, as an excuse
to quit wrestling with wet bedsheets or stop shoving machinery through crabgrass. Of course, people still talk a lot, although what they’re excusing themselves from now I don’t know.
Anyway, when people spoke face to face sixty years ago they weren’t also fiddling with their smartphones, facing other people’s faces on Facebook when they were supposed to be facing you. And you weren’t checking your e-mail and replying to your text messages when you were facing them. People had to speak directly to each other, paying attention to what they were saying and to what was being said. How they withstood the tedium I can’t imagine.
In topics of conversation our parents ranged from bedsheets to lawn mowers. Would an automatic dryer send the electric bill through the roof? Those new rotary-style power jobs could take your whole foot off. I would listen in. For a moment, at the most. Sometimes there was good gossip between the moms. But the malice of children, like the malice of politicians, is an entirely public thing. We were not mature enough to enjoy a refined taste for private character assassination. (Nor, social media evidence indicates, are we yet.) Sometimes there was good sports talk between the dads. But a dad who knew enough about sports to be worth listening to would be playing in the major leagues. It was all we could do to get ours to play catch.
People used to write to each other. Any holiday departure, even to visit relatives in Ashtabula, occasioned picture postcards to all. The messages were sometimes jocular but never a joke, not even “Weather is here, wish you were beautiful!” And the pictures on the postcards were not ironic.
Irony, as a mode of communication, was well understood by our parents. They called saying the opposite of what is meant lying or being sarcastic. They used irony often but as a way to tell the world to piss off, not as a way to regard life, and certainly not as a way to say “hi” to friends and relations.
An extended separation, particularly from family, demanded frequent and voluminous correspondence. These missives were chatty, discursive, and brimming with minutiae. My mother and her sister wrote to each other once or twice a week. I have a packet of their letters. “Sewed the girls the cutest pair of matching aprons with pockets in the shape of Valentine hearts.” “Tried Great Aunt Stella’s recipe for oatmeal cookies, used oleo instead of lard.”
These letters, more than half a century old, are remarkably like today’s mom blogs. It’s a subtle question what kind of progress has been made with human intercourse. In the bloggers’ favor, they do talk about intercourse, which is interesting. In my mother’s and aunt’s favor, they didn’t, which is a relief. To the credit of the bloggers, they make a desperate effort to entertain, however bitter and disappointed they may be. To the credit of Mom and Aunt Margie, they made a desperate effort to express no bitterness and disappointment, however entertaining that would have been.
Our parents lived in a world poised between intimacy and privacy, not one that paradoxically lacks both. My mother and my aunt were more boring than bloggers, but bloggers are boring everyone. My mother and my aunt bored only each other.
Even so, the Greatest Generation had tools of boredom that are little known these days. People used to “drop over”—unannounced, with children. Pretending not to mind was the neighborly thing to do. As was acknowledging the right of every neighbor who caught your eye to bend your ear. You had to have a good excuse to break off a conversation. Pretending that your barbecue grill was about to burn your house down might work, unless your neighbor sold home owner’s insurance for a living.
Pretending had a lot to do with neighborliness. The neighborhoods of the 1950s were as make-believe as the Walt Disney Company’s planned community, Celebration. But there was as yet no such job description as “imagineering.” Our parents had to pretend without professional assistance, in their own unimaginative ways.
They came from farm villages, small towns, row houses, and tenements, all of which were snug and ethnic even when the ethnicity was an unspiced American mix of English, German, and Scots-Irish. Everybody was some kind of shirttail cousin or a friend of the family from way back or had jilted your dad’s sister. The old neighborhoods were close-knit in an itchy, scratchy way. When everyone moved out it was a relief to all concerned.
In the new neighborhoods you didn’t know the other people very well so you had the luxury of pretending to like them. Great store was put on neighborliness, meaning that you took a casserole next door if a neighbor had received a phone call after 9 p.m. And sometimes you dropped over unannounced, with children. People did indeed sit on the front porch and wave to other people sitting on other front porches. And they dutifully continued to do so until the minute a screened-in back porch was added to their house.
Children were the main victims of the neighborliness, one tenet of which was that every adult who lived in rough proximity to my house could give me the rough side of his or her tongue. Any childish transgression, actual or potential, was considered sufficient cause. Children were also the main perpetrators of the neighborliness, claiming all front yards and every backyard not occupied by a vicious dog as their commons. A garage with an unlocked door was likewise free space for kids, as were any tree branches, roofs, or porch decks that could be climbed onto.
We children were, of course, the whole cause of these neighborhoods. Houses were chosen strictly on the basis of price, price being determined by whether the neighborhood was a safe place to raise kids. Safety was measured by three standards. The first was the extent to which a given neighborhood’s adolescents with ducktail haircuts were said to carry switchblades.
Once our parents had stretched their budget to find a location with the fewest alleged switchblades, they picked a particular house by making a complex calculation based on the likelihood of children getting run over on busy streets factored into the walking distance to the local grade school. (Incidentally, what old-fashioned parents thought of as walking distance to school was much longer than it is now, almost as long as what modern parents think of as a healthy morning run.) Then they checked to make sure the basement was dry. Wet basements gave children a cough. You could show our parents Buckingham Palace and all they’d say is “It’s on a busy street” and “Does it have a dry basement?”
So we grew up in a good and happy place. And we were good. Or we were as good as kids were expected to be. We didn’t suffer from childhood obesity, dyslexia, lactose intolerance, or behavioral disorders. We were husky, a little slow at reading, farted a lot, and were pains in the neck. Anyway, we were happy.
When I am grown to man’s estate
I shall be very proud and great,
And tell the other girls and boys
Not to meddle with my toys.
—Robert Louis Stevenson,
A Child’s Garden of Verses
3
LIFE AS WE IMAGINED IT
Of course all childhoods are happy from a worry-burdened, regret-nagged, past-fifty, skinless-chicken-breast-for-dinner perspective. Or after three drinks. Then being a kid is a beautifully drawn scene suffused with bright primary colors and drenched in cheer, and I’ve gotten childhood mixed up with the illustrations in my old Dick and Jane reader.
But we in the Baby Boom were lucky. Children had once been put to work, if not in factories and farmyards then in the kitchens, cellars, and sculleries of their own homes. We were expected to clear our plates. And this could be finessed by carefully dawdling over our lima beans until Kukla, Fran and Ollie came on TV.
Now children have been put to work again. Homework started coming home with my children in kindergarten. Weekend assignment: learn to read. They work at private lessons in every sort of thing while I drive them around in a confusion of picking up kung fu and delivering “Kumbaya.” After the work they do at the lesson, they practice the work they’ll do at the next lesson. Recreation is organized according to the time management principles of workplace efficiency. Punch in,
punch out. In the dread word playdate none of the pleasures of playing or dating are evoked. The kids work hard at sports, as well they should. Sports are an important part of the job of getting into exclusive schools. And while they’re working on the essays that accompany the applications to those exclusive schools, the kids need to be well rounded. So they are drafted into volunteering for community service work. This begins at about age eight when the children are dragged to the local old age home to annoy the doddering elders with “Kumbaya” sing-alongs and demonstrations of kung fu technique. And it ends, if it ever does, with a postdoctoral unpaid internship at Save the Snakes.
How today’s kids must yearn for the textile mills and milking stools of yore where they were occasionally left alone and could play tops with the spindles or have fun yanking the cow’s tail.
Baby Boomers were excused from both the antique and the contemporary forms of youthful travail. Kukla, Fran and Ollie was on TV. Mom and Dad liked the show too.
For a few blissful years, between the time the Enola Gay landed and the time the helicopter parents took off, children were in control of childhood.
There were some rules. Everybody outdoors on nice days, no crossing busy streets, no hitting girls, no firecrackers in your mouth, come when you’re called for dinner, and everybody indoors when the streetlights go on. These rules, like the definition of a “nice day,” were broadly construed. They were enforced by the general committee of grown-ups with the inefficiency for which committees are famous. All eyes were upon us in the neighborhood but not looking too closely. And so we ran wild—in a rather tame manner.
What we did with our plentiful aggregation of playmates, our copious free time, and our minimal oversight was what right-minded kids have always done with freedom and opportunity. We wasted it. We did—according to the adult conception of doing something—nothing. We played.