The Past: The Times, They are a Changin'

When researching “the past” I had very little to learn, but a great deal to remember. Boomers are a cohort, sociologists tell us, because of our “shared formative experiences.” This regardless of the fact that the youngest Boomers (the ones I call the baby Baby Boomers) not only cannot remember the Kennedy assassination, but they weren’t even born yet! But, as a “leading edge Boomer,” I remember them all.

Emmy-award winning producer Joel Westbrook calls early television “our communal gathering place. Our new fangled tribal campfire.” Whether a Boomer grew up in Lumpkin, Georgia (as Westbrook did), or Chicago, Illinois, we all had the same childhood friends – with Jerry Mathers as the Beaver. One of the first things we learned together was that what we watched on television was a pack of lies. We loved the Andersons and the Ricardos and the Cleavers, but they had little in common with the Smiths, the Jones’ and the Johnsons.

We would also learn that we lived under what President Kennedy would call “a nuclear sword
of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness.”

Duck and Cover
Boys and Girls!

Then there were the “Oh, my God” moments of our youth which, for many of us, began when JFK went on TV to tell us…

It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.
President John F. Kennedy October 22,1962

Oh, my God!

Tragically, four little girls became the very first of our generation to make national headlines when a bomb planted by members of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan exploded in Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley were Boomers who still had some time to wait before reaching the legal driving age. Denise was 11 and the others were 14.

Oh, my God!

Of course the ultimate “Oh, my God moment” for leading edge Boomers was still almost a year away, when shots were fired in Dallas, Texas, and many of us grieved, perhaps for the very first time.

Thanks to television, we attended the Kennedy funeral. We saw the flag-draped casket and heard the muffled drums and felt agonizing grief, when we witnessed, as it happened, that heart-rending moment when John John, saluted is father good bye.
John John was a Boomer too.

But then we went off to college, bound and determined to change the world, and the Civil Rights movement, the Anti-War movement, and the Feminist movement did just that.

The Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and Title IX sought to set right hundreds of years of second class citizenship, but then a rifle fired in Memphis, and a pistol in LA gave us two more Oh, my God moments that none of us has forgotten.

And then there was a photograph. A single frame of film that filled us all with awe…

And the Environmental movement was born.

Those things listed above are a sample of the “shared formative experiences” of our generation. Our panel of experts also talk about the Beatles, Laugh-In, Woodstock, Kent State, Watergate and more. Erica Jong tells us about the sexual revolution, and Julian Bond about the successes and failures of the Civil Rights movement. Historian Joshua Zeita reminds us that the iconic images of pot-smoking, anti-war hippies is probably true of less than 20 percent of us, but remains our image in history nonetheless.

But alas, our adolescence finally came to an end, and it was time, at last, God forbid, to…

Get a Job!