We also abandoned petty vandalism—in favor of petty crime. We slipped a comic book inside another comic book and paid the cashier for one comic book instead of two. We pocketed Dad’s change from the top of the dresser. We swiped cigarettes from Mom’s purse. We rummaged around at the back of the liquor cabinet among the less frequented bottles of things such as Chartreuse and took a putrid sip. In these misdemeanors we were led by Joe Brody, one of those kids who are real trouble that we met playing sports. Joe would go so far as to take the family car when his parents were asleep. But he only took it around the block.
Come to think of it, we weren’t there and had nothing but Joe’s word to go on that he really did this. As a generation we were always more law defying than lawbreaking. Our parents, with their greater experience of callous authority, were law evading. Especially around April 15 and on the highway—“Help Daddy watch for speed traps.” When the Baby Boom was finally apprehended by the police, it happened at protests and demonstrations. We would be arrested as a matter of principle. And/or drugs.
Not that we completely gave up vandalism. (To judge by what I hear about the state of politics and the economy and marriage and the family and the flaming bag of dog poop that we left on the front porch of Iraq, we never did.) We’d just learned how to t.p. a house. The trick is to be tall and strong enough to throw an unraveling roll of toilet paper all the way over the roof.
Prank phone calls weren’t immature. Our parents and their friends made prank phone calls at parties, if everybody had had enough to drink.
“Let’s call the NAACP and tell them that knock-knock joke . . .”
“Who’s there?”
“Eisenhower.”
“Eisenhower who?”
“I’se in Howard Johnson’s, eatin’ lunch!”
The Greatest Generation was not at its best on racial issues. And a receding conscience seemed to us to be a normal part of growing up. Unlike a receding hairline. We’ve spent millions to stem that tide. Our conscience had been slipping away for a while. It was years since any of us had yelled, “I’m telling!” And it would slip further. The Baby Boom is a moral generation but not necessarily a conscientious one. A byword of our twenties and thirties was that nothing—not commercial white bread, not refined sugar—was as unhealthy as guilt. And we turned out to be a healthy bunch.
We’d started with a conscience. When I was just old enough to be allowed to go around the block on my tricycle, I pedaled up the driveway of Mrs. Furstein, who was arty. Behind her garden shed she had a pile of the kind of rocks, brought from the seashore, that were considered artistic when arranged in a garden. I climbed the chain-link fence around the shed, boosted a rock over the smooth folded ends of the fence top, put the rock on the back step of my tricycle, and pedaled up the driveway of Mr. Biedermeyer. Then, fulfilling some mission of the imagination that I can’t recall, I hid the rock in Mr. Biedermeyer’s two-car garage, behind the boat. I did this twice and was wracked by guilt.
Bitter self-reproach kept me awake whole halves of hours past my bedtime. One night I finally got up, went down to the kitchen in my pajamas, faced my mother, and told her everything.
Purloined Furstein rocks smuggled to the Biedermeyer garage makes no sense, and it must have made even less sense when recounted by a four-year-old. But Mom said the right thing, “I’m sure you didn’t mean to.” And I didn’t mean to do all the things I did in the 1960s and ’70s either.
Nonetheless we are, as I said, a moral generation. When the little qualms of guilt that we’d shooed off at the end of childhood and kept shooing away through youth and early adulthood came back to us at last, they’d grown huge. Mrs. Furstein’s artistic garden rock is as big as the planet and we will experience catastrophic species extinction if we don’t get it out of the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases in Mr. Biedermeyer’s garage. But my feelings about my first wife are still healthy.
Getting finished with childhood wasn’t wholly unpleasant. We were on probation from the Garden of Eden, not expelled. We’d eaten only a tiny bit of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and we’d spit out most of it. So our eyes were only half opened. For example, women were only half naked even with their clothes off, as we found out thanks to Joe Brody’s stepfather’s subscription to Playboy. The Baby Boom girls certainly weren’t in sorrow bringing forth children. Not at fourteen. Not in those days. None of us had gotten as far as under-the-sweater-over-the-bra or even Spin the Bottle. The ground wasn’t cursed for our sake except when we had yard work chores. We didn’t eat the herb of the field. Mom had given up trying to make us finish our vegetables. Nor did we, in the sweat of our face, eat bread. We spent our allowance on Peter Paul Mounds bars, Fizzies, and Pez candy in plastic novelty dispensers.
We had a day pass to get by the cherubims at Eden’s gate. And if we were nimble we could avoid the flaming sword of adult intervention in our new liberties, new interests, and new friends. I took the bus downtown to the main library. I needed to look up things for my report on “America’s Greatest Inventor,” who was Henry Ford. Or maybe Thomas Edison. Possibly it was Alexander Graham Bell. Those three guys and the Wright brothers had invented everything. I should have written down which one I was supposed to do the report on. I’d look it up in the main library’s huge encyclopedia. Should I pick the A volume for “America’s Greatest Inventor” or the G volume for “Greatest Inventor” or the I volume for “Inventor”? Or should I get off the bus one stop early and meet Joe Brody at the bowling alley?
Steve Penske got his ham radio license. Ham radio was invented by the Wright brothers, I informed him. It took Steve six months to learn Morse code. Johnny MacKay and I memorized a little for use in classroom desk tapping. You can guess what dit-dit-dah-dit dit-dit-dah dah-dit-dah-dit dah-dit-dah spells.
Steve kept his shortwave radio in the attic. The wire antenna was strung along the rafters. We’d watch while the radio tubes warmed up, then Steve would broadcast to the world.
“Calling any station. Calling any station. Calling any station. This is W8QRX.”
And sometimes, faintly, with a lot of crackling, someone in a distant place such as New Jersey would reply, “W8QRX this is W2EFZ.”
And a conversation would ensue.
“W2EFZ this is W8QRX. Do you read me? Over.”
“W8QRX this is W2EFZ. Roger. Do you read me? Over.”
And so on, in case you thought Twitter was newly moronic.
Johnny MacKay bred guinea pigs. They eat their young. This does not turn out to be a conversation starter with girls at YMCA dances.
I customized plastic model cars. Plastic model cars were not toys like plastic model airplanes. I cleared the plastic model airplanes out of my bedroom in case someday, eventually, I got a girl in there. Building plastic model cars was a design exercise. My design inspiration was Futurism. Future being when I turned sixteen. Then I’d have a car. Meanwhile, in 1:24 scale, I worked on the shape and form this car would take. (Although when I finally got a car of my own I did not, in fact, glue an airplane wing to its trunk lid.)
There was a fad for building model cars. It is claimed that the Baby Boom youth was a period of great faddishness due to the growing powers of savvy on Madison Avenue and television mass marketing—coonskin caps, Frisbees, hula hoops, Pez dispensers. And this faddishness, in turn, is claimed to signify something about the Baby Boom. Perhaps. Faddishness seems a constant in human affairs—phone booth stuffing, “Killroy Was Here,” flagpole sitting, muttonchop sideburns. The fad for dying of tuberculosis may have signified something about the Victorian Age. Ascribe significance to the hula hoop, you who can.
Billy and Bobby Stumf devoted themselves anew to sports. Both were stars of our junior high football team though Billy would be demoted to the second-string freshmen squad at the immense local high school and relegated
to playing loose end or way, way back. Billy and Bobby wore their football uniforms while carrying their football helmets under their arms more often than the demands of games or practices or the duration of football season required.
Jerry Harris collected rocks. All boys collect things, and most boys collect most things—baseball cards, birds’ nests, cigar bands, bottle caps, matchbook covers, arrowheads (or pointy stones that might be arrowheads). Once junior high school maturity strikes, a self-respecting boy may continue collecting but only if his collection is overorganized, obsessed upon, analyzed, and labeled. And he has to hold forth about his collection. That is, a boy who collects baseball cards must be able to make even other boys who collect baseball cards squirm in tedium with numbing details about why Washington Senators third baseman Harmon Killebrew’s card from 1959, when he returned to the majors and played in the All-Star game, is a real prize. Jerry Harris wasn’t good at holding forth. Nor was he much of a geologist. He labeled all the rocks in his rock collection “limestone.”
I collected comic books, not all of them pilfered. I inherited Susie Inwood’s collection when she began dating. The superhero comics were frankly dull. Their authors and artists ran afoul of the same problem Billy, Bobby, Johnny, Steve, Jerry, and I had had trying to play Superman. The superheroes were so more powerful than a locomotive, so faster than a speeding bullet, so busy pulling gizmos out of Robin’s tights that they made short work of ordinary miscreants. Preposterous villains had to be created to give the heroes a fair chance to not win.
There was a censorious fuss about comic books, started by the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham’s 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent, which maintained that horrible, gory, and violent comic books were bad for us kids. A thoroughly incompetent shrink, Dr. Wertham had not delved into the horrible, gory, violent minds of kids. But he had a point about comic books being bad for us. From Lex Luthor, Mister Mxyzptlk, Bizarro, the Joker, the Riddler, and the Penguin, the Baby Boom got the idea that evil is weird and alien. Hannah Arendt’s idea that evil is banal is almost as bad, but more banal.
Human sins of greed, pride, envy, sloth, and wildly sputtering wrath were better elucidated by Donald Duck in the comic books written and drawn by Carl Barks. At the age I was, I wouldn’t have dared to be seen with a Donald Duck comic book, but hidden in my closet I probably had the complete works—Huey, Dewey, Louie, Gyro Gearloose, Gladstone Gander, and Scrooge McDuck, in mint condition. If Mom hadn’t cleaned out my room after I went to college I’d be too rich to be writing.
Grown men had collections. President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously collected stamps. I, with a stamp collection of my own, thought he’d had an unfair advantage. The White House probably gets a lot of mail. My godfather went through his pocket change every evening, looking for buffalo nickels, Indian head pennies, and the steel one-cent pieces that were minted during World War II. Uncle Timmy had a collection of miniature liquor bottles that were, amazingly, considering Uncle Timmy, still sealed and full.
It was the age of hobbies. Mr. Stumf was still working on his train layout. This was beginning to cause conflict with his sons. He kept trying to sneak down the basement to install flashing lights at Lionel grade crossings when he was supposed to be drying the dishes. Meanwhile Billy and Bobby kept trying to sneak down the basement and extract swiped copies of Joe Brody’s stepfather’s Playboys from concealment under the train layout when they were supposed to be doing their homework.
Mr. Harris raised fancy guppies—English Lace, Spanish Dancer, Blue-Tailed Tuxedo. They eat their young too. But since Mr. Harris was not, presumably, in need of conversation starters with Mrs. Harris, it wasn’t as shocking.
Most dads and granddads had home workshops where they . . . where they preferred to be left alone. Periodically a bulbous table lamp turned on a wood lathe would emerge or a fretwork knickknack shelf fresh from the jigsaw. Mom would hang the shelf or place the lamp and there the item remained for a certain length of time. Afterward it could be found in the attic. My paternal grandfather made things out of pipe and pipe fittings—a banister, a railing around his yard, the legs for a card table. Grandma was dead so these stayed put.
Hobbies are less common now. Or, like our little guilts, they’ve grown huge. We turn our hobbies into passions. You start with an ordinary five-thousand-bottle collection of Grand Crus in the custom-built walk-in wine cellar and the next thing you know you own a vineyard. Follow your passion. And not just any vineyard but a vineyard in a place where no one has ever thought to make wine such as the Amazon rain forest.
Hobbies are private things. Passions demand to be conveyed. We are not a private generation. Our hobbies make great TV—“Rain of Terroir.” Mr. Harris’s guppies would not make great TV. Or maybe I’m wrong. “Tomorrow on Mr. Harris, Fish Hoarder, ‘They Eat Their Young.’”
But Mr. Harris was too self-conscious to be on television. And we’re too self-conscious not to be. Self-consciousness is our salient trait. This would be on full display in a few years, when we were raising consciousness—of ourselves—and achieving a higher level of consciousness—of ourselves. In the meantime we self-consciously quit riding our bicycles.
We’d just gotten new bikes. We’d saved every grandparental birthday and Christmas five-dollar bill (and Dad’s change from the top of the dresser), pushed lawn mowers for crabby old people, done odd jobs like tearing down the MacKay garage, and pedaled around paper routes on our antique balloon-tire Schwinns with big, dumb wire baskets attached to their cow horn handlebars. Or, doing even harder work, we’d wheedled our moms and dads. Finally we got what we called an “English racing bicycle” (nowadays called “a bicycle”) with cool skinny tires, neat drop-down handlebars, no basket, nifty hand brakes, and three gears.
But when the summer after eighth grade was over we put our English racing bicycles in the garage. And we left them there. A high school student couldn’t ride a bicycle, any more than a high school student could be dropped off by his mother right in front of the place where he was going. She had to stop and let him out blocks away. We’d walk. (Joe Brody hitchhiked.)
That summer I was on another scenic picnic with my family at the state park with the limestone outcroppings. The park also had broad fields of mown grass like a golf course but without Dad yelling, “Watch the hell what you’re doing, you’ll get hit by a golf ball!” I was running across one of these fields, just running for the heck of it, utterly thoughtless. Or not quite utterly. Because I remember thinking was this maybe the last time I would ever just run for the heck of it?
And, sure enough, when I started high school there was President Kennedy’s President’s Council on Youth Fitness, taking the fun out of running.
Not all that tempts your wandering eyes
And heedless hearts, is lawful prize.
—Thomas Gray,
“Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes”
7
ALL THAT GLISTERS
Mr. Biedermeyer, who took a walk around the block every evening before dinner, began wearing Bermuda shorts and knee socks. It was a new era. Things were changing.
For a long time nothing had happened in the world. At least, nothing much that the Baby Boom noticed. The launching of Sputnik had caught our attention and caused a brief flurry of interest in science and math until we discovered this meant more dividing fractions. Billy Stumf’s dog’s name on an artillery shell was my strongest impression of the Korean War.
Nothing may explain a lot about the Baby Boom. Ike was the president. Khrushchev was the dictator. Pius was the pope. In December 1959 Life produced a special edition, “The Fabulous Fifties,” and I thought, “What?”
We’d been living in a steady state universe. Meanwhile grown-ups had been experiencing—at the speed of light—big bangs, red shifts, black holes, and general theories of relativity. Old people had gone
from a world with the noise of horses’ hooves in the street to a world where the noise was Elvis.
Only we, who had been born after 1945, knew that life was stable, fixed, reliable, safe. And boring. So the Baby Boom has always believed passionately in change. What’s the harm in it?
So far, being a freshman in high school didn’t seem like real change except, JFK or no JFK, I was on my own fifty-mile hike because I was too self-conscious to ride my bicycle. The nation may have entered upon the sunlit uplands of the American century, but a fourteen-year-old doesn’t have an age d’or, especially if they’ve got you taking French.
School had become a little more confusing. High school teachers couldn’t seem to leave it at teaching. They talked a lot. Miss Benton the French teacher talked about the significance of French nuclear weapons in Charles de Gaulle’s Force de Frappe. (She’d been to France, the summer after she got out of college.) “Power of milk shake”? The Beginning with French textbook didn’t have much in the way of a glossary.
Mr. Keeble the History teacher said, “America has a vigorous young president.” The president was in his forties. His wife gave a televised tour of the White House full of all the old furniture you could shake a stick at.
Miss Benton dressed like Jackie Kennedy and tried to talk like her, to the extent that a strong midwestern accent allowed. (What did that sound like in French?) Miss Benton wore pillbox hats, oversized sunglasses, pointy shoes, and skirts that ended a little closer than skirts usually did to teacher knees. She had a huge rear end.