Did they ever have to fight five o’clock traffic on a freeway when they were my age? Did they ever have to worry about getting herpes? Couldn’t they eat bacon and all those other foods that are supposed to give me everything from St. Vitus Dance to cancer without worrying?
Did they ever have to put up with calling somebody and getting a recorded message? Did they ever have to make their own salads in restaurants or pump their own gasoline at exorbitant prices in gasoline stations? Didn’t they get free glasses when they bought gas, and didn’t the attendant always wash their windshield and check their oil without being asked?
Did my parents’ generation go to movies and not understand them at all? Did they ever have to deal with women’s liberation, gay rights, the Moral Majority, the anti-nuke movement, a dozen kinds of racism, palimony, sex discrimination suits, and Phil Donahue making you wonder if you really have any business on this planet anymore?
Did they have to endure Valley Girls, punk rock, rock videos, the “moonwalk,” break dancing, ghetto blasters, and “The Catlins”?
So their kids worshipped Elvis. My generation’s children follow Michael Jackson, who wears one glove and his sunglasses at night, and sings songs with names like “Beat It.” It also is rumored that he takes female hormones to nullify his voice change. I cannot verify this, but there are rumors he recently was seen hanging his panty hose on a shower rod. My generation’s children also follow something called “Culture Club,” which features something called Boy George, who dresses like Zasu Pitts.
My parents’ generation had Roosevelt for a president. We had Nixon.
They won their war. We lost ours.
They knew exactly what their roles in family and society were. Most of us don’t have any idea what ours are anymore.
They had corns on their toes. We have identity crises.
They got married first and then lived together. We do it just the opposite today.
They fell in love. We fall, or try to, into meaningful relationships.
Did Lou Gehrig use cocaine? Did Jack Benny freebase? Did Barbara Stanwyck get naked on the silver screen? Did they have to put up with Jane Fonda?
I obviously can’t speak for all of us, but here is one Baby Boomer who liked it better when it was simpler. My parents sent me out into this world to make for myself a better life than they had and maybe I achieved that in some way. But the everlasting dilemma facing me is that although I live in a new world, I was reared to live in the old one.
I remain the patriot they taught me to be. I like music you can whistle to. If ever I marry again, it will have to be to a woman who will cook. She can be a lawyer or work construction in the daytime, and she can have her own bank account and wear a coat and tie for all I care, but I want a home-cooked meal occasionally where absolutely nothing has passed through a microwave.
I don’t understand the gay movement. I don’t care if you make love to Nash Ramblers, as long as you’re discreet about it.
I don’t use drugs, and I don’t understand why anybody else does as long as there’s cold beer around.
I think computers are dangerous, men who wear earrings are weird, the last thing that was any good on television was “The Andy Griffith Show,” and I never thought Phyllis George had any business talking about football with Brent Musberger on television.
In his classic song, “Are the Good Times Really Over for Good?”, Merle Haggard says it best:
“Wish Coke was still cola,
A joint, a bad place to be ...
It was back before Nixon lied to us all on TV ...
Before microwave ovens, when a girl could still cook and still would ...
Is the best of the free life behind us now,
Are the good times really over for good?”
My sentiments exactly. If I could have the good times back, I would bring back 1962. At least, most of it. I was sixteen then. I had my driver’s license, a blonde girlfriend, and my mother awakened me in the mornings and fed me at night.
Elvis was still singing, Kennedy was still president, Sandy Koufax was still pitching, John Wayne was still acting, Arnold Palmer was still winning golf tournaments, you could still get hand-cut french fries in restaurants, there was no such thing as acid rain or Three Mile Island, men got their hair cut in barber shops and women got theirs cut at beauty parlors, there was no such person as Calvin Klein, nobody used the word psychedelic, nobody had ever heard of Vietnam, and when nobody bombed anybody during the Cuban Missile Crisis, I was convinced that the world was probably safe from nuclear annihilation ... an idea I do not hold to with much force anymore.
1962. It was a beauty.
So what happened to the simple life the boys from Moreland knew? And when did all the change begin?
I think I can answer the second question. It was one morning in November, 1963, and I was changing classes in high school.
Let the word go forth from this time and place... that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans....”
John F. Kennedy, January 20, 1961
THERE WAS ONE family of Catholics in Moreland in 1960. They had to drive ten miles to the county seat to go to church. I didn’t think there was anything particularly different about them except that on Fridays, when the rest of us were attempting to force down what they said was meatloaf but tasted like Alpo looks, the kids from the Catholic family were eating what appeared to be a tasty serving of fried fish. Had it not been for the fact that it would have put the good Methodists and Baptists in my family into shock and running fits, I might have become a Catholic, too, just to avoid the Friday meatloaf.
The adults in town didn’t trust Catholics. One of the old men down at the store said he heard they stole babies. Somebody else said Catholics drank a lot, and half the time they didn’t even speak English when they were holding church services.
John Kennedy frightened the local voting bloc, perhaps a hundred-or-so strong. He was Catholic and his daddy was rich, and despite the fact we’re talking lifelong Democrats here, they were having a difficult time accepting the idea that a person with religious beliefs so foreign to their own might actually occupy the White House.
The old men around the stove:
“I ain’t sure we ought to elect no Cathlic.”
“I ain’t votin’ for him. He’d take all his orders from the Vaddican.”
“The what?”
“The Vaddican.”
“Where’s that?”
“Itly.”
“Reckon that’s so?”
“‘Course it’s so. Them Cathlics stick together like buttermilk sticks to your chin.”
“You ever know’d any Cathlics?”
“Naw, but I think one come in the truckstop a week or so ago.”
“How’d you know it was a Cathlic?”
“He’s wearing a white shirt. Who else ’round here wears white shirts?”
If Elvis was the first break between the Baby Boomers and their parents, then John Kennedy — at least in rural Georgia, which was my only horizon at the time — was a second. Kennedy never started the youthful