Boomers . . . and How They Got That Way

Epistle 2 – The 50’s

Prototype Boomers were gangly kids in the 50’s, and we learned current events from Movietone News at the Saturday afternoon serials of Lash LaRue, Roy Rogers and the Durango Kid (my favorite). How current could the Movietone News be, I wonder?

By the time it got produced and distributed, it was downright historic by today’s real time standards. Nevertheless, from that media I learned that Joseph Stalin had died. When I told my mother, she refused to believe me, and she bought a newspaper everyday for a nickel from the neighborhood drug store. I guess by 50’s standards, Movietone was about as current as it got. Or my mother bought really old newspapers at a discount.

The 50’s have always been remembered with disgusting nostalgia, at least by pre-Boomers. But I know the truth because my brother was a leather-jacketed, motorcycle-booted, high school greaser who firmly believed along with his peers that there was no place in civilized society for anyone with good grades. Today, those people wouldn’t miss a class reunion to save their lives. Curious. The 60’s generation of kids can’t even remember where they went to school.

Anyway, back to the 50’s where us grade schoolers were taught to survive a nuclear attack by sitting under our desks. Can you believe it? Granted, desks back then were more substantial pieces of furniture than those plastic tray contraptions kids have today. They were made of steel and you could actually store things in them, everything from Crayolas to Lucky Strike cigarettes, depending on how warped you had become between the second and eighth grades.

The desk tops were made of real wood with ink wells (pits full of black stuff sucked up into pens to make them write) that featured years of carved graffiti, a Rosetta Stone that enlightened our path with the accumulated wisdom of all those who had gone before.

But as marvelous as those desks were, could they really protect us when the Russians dropped an atomic bomb on our school? C’mon, I was born at night but it wasn’t last night. On second thought, maybe they could. The military used to have soldiers observe an atomic blast shielded only by their shirtsleeves and sunglasses. They didn’t even have desks with tops that could tilt up and down. (I liked mine in the middle setting.)

Nobody in our neighborhood could afford an honest-to-God bomb shelter, but I remember someone who buried cases of liquor in a dirt cellar to ride out the holocaust. clearly a brilliant chap who, unfortunately, died before he could prove the wisdom of his plan. Fortunately, another kid and I discovered this treasure during our Saturday part-time jobs to expand the cellar. Thus began my training for staying stoned throughout the 60’s, a daunting responsibility, let me tell you.

God moves in mysterious ways. Real mysterious.

We Will Win

All rights reserved

Possibly related posts