Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven, as William Wordsworth said when he got his driver’s license.
The Baby Boom’s first social movement was cruising. This is not to be confused with “Crusin’”—adolescence on wheels as it is poorly remembered in popular culture and badly reenacted in Plymouth Belvederes by old bald guys. I never saw a carhop wearing roller skates. The idea was as stupid then as it is now.
Nor did we cruise in the singles bar or Chistopher Street sense, loitering with sexual intent. We were full of sexual intentions. And we could loiter. But we had a broader agenda.
We drove around and around. Our parents didn’t understand cruising. They thought we were driving around to find a place to drink and make out. Not that we weren’t. But the Greatest Generation, with its dull powers of fancy, never suspected that our goal was to have no goal at all. Life is a journey, not a destination, as Ralph Waldo Emerson said when he got his driver’s license.
We had the perfect pointless joy of freedom. It wasn’t just our parents who didn’t understand; neither do we anymore. We as grown-ups tell ourselves as kids (and tell our own kids), “Freedom is a serious responsibility” or, “Freedom means making important choices” or, if we’ve had a couple of drinks and are listening to an oldies station, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” We as kids tell ourselves as grown-ups, “No, it’s not” and “No, it doesn’t.” And our kids tell us that Janis Joplin needed Auto-Tune. I leave it to others to decide whether, over the years, the Baby Boom has gained sophistication concerning the ontological question of free will.
We drove around and around. There were a few little red sports cars, hot rods, custom jobs, and bitching sets of wheels. Very few. Turning sixteen caused our parents to break out in a rash of vehicular insipidity. (Any good Baby Boom boy my age can testify that the oomph went out of American family car design in 1963.) Dad bought Mom a snappy convertible back about the time of the Nixon-Kennedy debates. When we got our driver’s license, he traded it in on a station wagon.
Only rich kids with indulgent parents and poor kids with after-school jobs had their own cars. And thus began the political trend of Angry Middle-Class Resentment. The middle class is furious, or at least as furious as middle-class proprieties allow. You’ve seen it in the firebrand—well, Weber grill charcoal lighter—demagoguery and the crass rabble-rousing (though we’re not rabble, so call it Babbitt-rousing) of recent elections and on Morning Joe.
Once the Baby Boom had gone through all its rudimentary phases of ideological development, from revolutionary pimples to Reaganite hip replacement, the true politics of our generation would be revealed. In America the reasonably well-off and moderately comfortable are the angry masses. It has to do with borrowing Mom’s car.
Jim Fisk tried to make the best of things. He showed everybody how one pull on a lever caused the whole front seat of his mother’s Nash Rambler to fold down into a bed.
Ana Klein said, “You’re going to pull the lever and some girl’s going to flip over backward and break her neck.”
“No girl,” said Al Bartz, “is willing to be seen dead in a Nash Rambler.”
Turning sixteen caused us to break out in a rash of unwonted helpfulness. “I’ll go to the supermarket, Mom. We’re almost out of paprika.”
We drove around and around. The cars got bad mileage. But gas was 31 cents a gallon. We could get to where all the other kids were by looking under the couch cushions. Unspoken consensus made driving up and down certain streets obligatory and parking in certain places required. Sometimes when we parked we were “parking,” as the art of love was called, and sometimes when we parked we were parked. We got out of our cars to talk to each other. We’re a talkative generation, and only so much can be shouted from a car window.
We got out of our cars but not away from them. That would have been like separating the body from the soul. Or, not to overstate the case, it would have been like getting too far from a bathroom for the males among us fifty years later. We lounged against the fenders. We perched on the trunk lids. We stood in the open doors with one foot resting on the sill and an elbow cocked on the roof, looking cool. It wasn’t just our cool friend Leo Luhan who thought he was cool. Now we all did. And the cars of those days didn’t ruin looking cool with nagging ding-dong noises if you left the car door open and the keys in the ignition.
It’s heavy lifting conducting light flirtations. Much effort goes into crafting an effortless guise. We worked up an appetite. Drive-in burger restaurants played a crucial role in cruising. They were parking lots with food.
We had plenty to talk to each other about and plenty of each other to talk to. The Baby Boom was discovering itself—and not in the tiresome way that we would keep doing for the rest of our lives until, by now, every rock in our psyche has been overturned and each wiggling thing we’ve found underneath has been squashed or made into a pet. Youth was discovering youth. Not only were there lots of us, there were lots more of us. Other kids went to other high schools. The boys were almost as cool. The girls were even cuter.
Driving around was our Facebook. We never thought to monetize it. Generational vice? Or generational virtue?
We drove around and around and we talked and talked. We talked about what’s cool and what’s uncool. No one listens when teenagers talk, including the teenagers themselves most of the time. But teenagers were (and still are in present-day text messages) having an ancient colloquy of deep significance.
What we discussed appears in the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, Proverbs 17:27, “he who has a cool spirit is a man of understanding.” Cool. The Oxford English Dictionary cites a line from a Chaucer poem, “thynkist in thyn wit that is ful cole.” Spelling bees are uncool. In 1938 Eric Partridge, the twentieth century’s preeminent lexicographer of slang, gave a cool definition of cool in A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English: “impertinent, impudent, audacious, especially if in a calm way.” This was in common use by the mid-1820s, standard English by the mid-1880s, and exactly what we were talking about by the mid-1960s. In 2010 Partridge’s lexicographic heir Jonathon Green, author of the 6,000-page Green’s Dictionary of Slang, devoted eighteen column inches to cool and said, “As with a number of slang’s (rare) abstract terms, it is less than simple to draw hard-and-fast lines between the senses.”
We’ve been out of our senses a lot. The Baby Boom was always less than simple. Forget the hard-and-fast lines. We are a fiery generation, heated in our affection, feverish in our action, blistering in our scorn—and obsessed with being cool. Later we’d be a fat generation—obsessed with being fit. We still think we’re cool. That isn’t all. We still think we’re hot.
Good thing we talked this out while we were driving around.
The music we listened to was cool. The power of our generation is our music. But, in the interest of speaking truth to power, I looked at the Billboard Top 100 for the year I went from junior to senior in high school. We liked “Everybody Loves Somebody” by Dean Martin (no. 6) better than we liked the Beatles’ “Can’t Buy Me Love” (no. 52). We liked “We’ll Sing in the Sunshine” by Gale Garnett (no. 8) better than we liked the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” (no. 78). The Rolling Stones didn’t make the chart. Leo Luhan had mentioned them. He said you could tell their music was influenced by the Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie.” Here are the actual lyrics to “Louie Louie” as posted on the Internet, a medium that does not spare our sensibilities.
And more of the same. If it’s any comfort the previous year’s Billboard Top 100 was worse: “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah, Here I am at Camp Granada …” and “Blame It on the Bossa Nova” by Eydie Gorme.
There were three AM stations playing the same songs. This was good because when one station finished playing a song we could push the buttons on the car radio and find the same song being played on another station. We enjoyed hearing songs over and over. As with wearing clothes like everyone else’s and belonging to a clique and driving around to the same places at the same times, it forged individual identity.
A lot of identical individual identities were forged. We saw nothing ironic about this. So far the Baby Boom had only a mild, Playboy cartoon caption case of the ironic. Irony wouldn’t become chronic and severe until the 1970s when we ran out of cool things that we all agreed on and disco happened.
AM radio was the sound track of our life. That was a cool thing that we all agreed on. Leo Luhan considered himself a talented composer of the sound track of his life. He made suggestions to the manager of the drive-in burger restaurant about what should be on the jukebox.
The restaurant had tables and booths inside, where we went when it was too cold to be cool outside. There was a sophomore we knew, driving around with us. He didn’t have his driver’s license. Leo convinced him to go into the burger restaurant and feed the jukebox so that the right sound track theme song would be playing when Leo walked through the door. Other kids had fed the jukebox. Twenty minutes passed before “Louie Louie” came on. We had to get up on our knees in the restaurant booth and frantically signal to Leo who was waiting in the car and had trouble seeing us through his sunglasses. By the time he got there the jukebox was playing “We’ll Sing in the Sunshine.”
Everything adults thought we were supposed to do was uncool. Especially if we were supposed to do it for fun. Adults had a peculiar sense of fun. My wife’s book club meets at our house tonight. They’re reading a self-help book called My Life Sucks, I Hate You. I intend to spend the evening in my basement workshop sorting a coffee can full of screws into small trays according to size and whether they are slotted or Phillips head. Adults retain a peculiar sense of fun.
Homecoming was all sorts of fun. The Homecoming Game was the West Side Cowboys versus their traditional rival the North Side Polar Bears.
“The West Side Cowboys,” said Al Bartz, “and the North Side Polar Bears and the East Side Yankees. The school system was really thinking it through.”
At the Homecoming Dance, balloons (sunset orange and buffalo brown, the school colors) were put in the basketball nets. Rented tuxedos made sure the fun was special. No shoes allowed made sure the gym floor wasn’t damaged. The chaperones’ efforts to curtail lewd personal contact were conducted on principles opposite of today’s. Kids pressed together tightly with low lights in slow dances—this was considered sweet. Wild gyrations of the hully gully, the jerk, and the watusi performed four feet from a partner—these were glared at.
Joe Brody had the idea of using a hypodermic needle to inject vodka into a watermelon. Ideas, we were beginning to understand, were important for their own sake. That is, we didn’t know where to get a hypodermic needle. Even Joe’s parents would miss a whole bottle of vodka. It was November, there weren’t any watermelons. And why would anyone bring a watermelon to a homecoming dance? We were almost ready for ideas of peace and love.
The homecoming parade had a float. A flatbed trailer was borrowed from the local plant nursery. Two-by-fours were nailed together to make a framework on the trailer. Chicken wire was bent around the two-by-fours more or less in the shape of a giant, almost-four-foot-tall cowboy boot. “Boot the Bears” was the homecoming theme.
To get a Rose Bowl parade float effect, wads of Kleenex were stuffed into the chicken wire. Kleenex did not make brown or orange Kleenex. The local stationery store donated a roll of brown tissue paper and a roll of orange. BOOT THE BEARS was spelled out in brown and orange on the boot top although with some spacing difficulties so that what paradegoers saw was BOOTT HEB EARS.
I don’t remember why I was helping stuff Kleenex into chicken wire. I may have thought, wrongly, that Marsha Matthiessen would be helping stuff Kleenex into chicken wire. I do remember a sudden and strong feeling of being uncool. I am in my middle sixties. I have a teenage daughter. The feeling was stronger than that. The parade float looked like chicken wire with Kleenex stuffed into it.
Ana Klein, by dint of her many dance classes, had been chosen as one of the Tumbleweed Girls. They performed gymnastics on the sidelines at football games dressed alike in western outfits purchased at the local Western Wear store. Al Bartz asked Ana, “Is there a Midwestern Wear store?” She quit.
Tim Minsky ran for student council. His platform was based on a simple formula. Student council had no power. Therefore, if he was elected, he’d do nothing. He won. We’d soon loose our sense of humor about politics. It wouldn’t come back until Watergate. When the Baby Boom’s sense of humor about politics returned it acted like it had been sleeping in alleys and eating out of garbage cans.
We’d already lost our sense of humor about our parents. If we’d had one. Anything a parent said or did we took personally. (I don’t think our children have made this mistake. The lesson in the Baby Boom’s lifelong fascination with personhood, personality, and persons is that people shouldn’t be taken personally.)
Our parents were generally pathetic. When they were specifically pathetic the pain was intense. Dr. Klein told Ana, Tim Minsky, and me, “I like that Beatles group. Some of the songs those young men sing show that they have genuine musical talent.”
“I think they’re cute!” said Mrs. Klein.
There was nothing of the remote about our parents. Meaning remote as a noun. They couldn’t push our buttons from a distance. They had to come right up and try to switch to the channel we were on. They should have stuck with remote as an adjective.
We would have detested the twenty-first century’s remote-control connectivity—cell phones, texting, Twitter. Parents everywhere, like God? (A god that couldn’t tell George from Ringo.) The horror is unimaginable to the mid-1960s teenage mind. Parents with a Facebook page. Like a newspaper page but never thrown away. Parents “posting” things, as in a poster, as in a billboard, as in a billboard on a busy street where we were cruising. With things about us on it. With things about our parents. And last summer’s snapshots. When I still had a crew cut and my sisters were teasing their hair.
Then we, the Baby Boom, invented electronic personal communication devices. We, of all people. TV that watches you. It’s as if we read Nineteen Eighty-Four, and said, “Good idea!”
We didn’t need connectivity. We were where all the other kids were, cruising West End Avenue, at the drive-in burger restaurant, watching submarine races by the pond in Pondside Park.
The Internet is a universally shared thought process. We had one already. When we were juniors the accepted, indeed required, dress for boys was penny loafers, white Levi’s, a madras long-sleeved shirt, and white wool socks. On the first day of senior year Leo Luhan—with that deliberate flaunting of convention for which the Baby Boom is known—would come to school wearing penny loafers, white Levi’s, a madras long-sleeved shirt. And black dress socks. The rest of us had come to school the same day wearing penny loafers, white Levi’s, madras long-sleeved shirts. And black dress socks.
It wasn’t like we hated the grown-ups. Yet. We were capable of real feelings for adults, as long as they had nothing to do with our lives.
In the fall of my junior year John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas, and in American literature class. The school PA system—not an electronic personal, or any other kind of, communication device—made the details incomprehensible but the situation clear. There was no mistaking the sober tone and poignant halts in the loudspeaker static for an Al Bartz prank.
Our parents and teachers were shocked because John Kennedy was one of them the way John Lennon was (although, born in 1940, he really wasn’t) one of us. That is, they were shocked because John Kennedy was one of them and then some, them more so, them to a greater—and not just presidential—power. Them richer than a king and admirably schooled in every grace.
We were shocked by all the emotion. Embarrassment, crushes, and embarrassment about crushes (and erections) were emotions as we knew them. Most of us had never lost a parent. Most of us had never even lost a parent to a woman younger than Mom. Not being allowed to borrow the car was our understanding of loss. Bereavement was annoying fellow grade school student Sonny Merton run over by a truck.
The emotions were so strong that we forgot to be cool. Not that there wasn’t something cool about the strength of the emotions and their uninhibited display.
Mr. Entwhistle the American literature teacher knew a lot of poetry by heart. He began to recite “Richard Cory” by Edwin Arlington Robinson.
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored and imperially slim.
And he was rich—yes richer than a king—
And admirably schooled in every grace.
A wildly inappropriate poem, ending,
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
I think Mr. Entwhistle meant to recite “To an Athlete Dying Young” by A. E. Housman, because he did recite that the next time we were in American literature class (even though it wasn’t American literature).
Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honors out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.
Which we did not exactly understand because West Side High had a trophy case, and everybody who’d won something had his name engraved on a cup or a bowl or the base of a statuette.
But we understood the Kennedy assassination was a significant event for our generation. The significance being that the Kennedy assassination was Pearl Harbor scaled down to the level of the Baby Boom’s understanding of actions having consequences.
The consequence of the assassination was only another president, more successful at pushing a legislative agenda—with which Kennedy is wrongly credited—and more effective at pressing a foreign policy—from which Kennedy is wrongly excused. Then myth took hold, in an early 1960s way. Camelot, starring Richard Burton and Julie Andrews, had recently closed on Broadway after 873 performances.
Don’t let it be forgot
That once there was a spot
Where the president was fun
And he’s remembered as having something to do with a drunk actor and a singing nun.
A generational truth was discovered. How people feel about things is as important as things. Feelings are real. And now so were girls. You could feel them. Eventually. But you had to talk to them about feelings first. (For girls, boys got real too—until talking to us about feelings got unreal at the end of the first marriage.)
I talked about feelings to my high school girlfriend Karen. Although she wasn’t my girlfriend yet. She had to be talked into it. I don’t mean by me, I mean by the power of talk in general. “They talked themselves into it” is the motto of the Baby Boom. Or maybe “They talked themselves out of it.” But we’re saving that for our epitaph.
Karen and I talked about feelings in a memorable way. I can’t remember any of it. The fragments of our chat that have stuck in my mind for half a century—Karen explaining tampons—can’t have been representative of our conversation. They sound more like intimate talk from toward the end of our being a couple, when we were promising to stay together while going to colleges far apart. We weren’t talking about tampons in our kiss-on-the-lips-but-no-tongue stage. Nor were we talking about feeling cool and uncool. A boy doesn’t speak to a girl about that. To mention being cool to the object of being cool is worse than uncool. It’s the quarterback leaving the huddle to join the Tumbleweed Girls. Karen and I just talked. Words are Baby Boom pheromones.
One school night, when I’d borrowed the car and was supposed to be at the library and actually was at the library, Karen and I were sitting across from each other not studying. It was a week or ten days since we’d started talking between classes, in the cafeteria, at the drive-in burger restaurant, on the phone for an hour at a time. I was smiling at her. She was smiling at me. And then I felt an ankle-socked toe just above the vamp of my penny loafer and moving toward the hem of my white Levi’s. The erotic shock was so intense that today I am at a loss to explain why I don’t have a fetish for toes, ankle socks, or my old left penny loafer.
For a couple of years the Baby Boom was blessed with sure and certain hope. What we hoped for was sex and drugs. Hopes that would come too true but, in our blessed state, not for a little while.
We’d heard about drugs. The marijuana scare preceded the marijuana. We were never able to find any. Leo Luhan and I went to a jazz club downtown and sat through a set by somebody who somebody said sounded something like Charles Mingus. I had no idea a bass fiddle could be that noisy. The drug pusher seemed to have had the night off.
However, the fat girl Joe Brody was dating (fat by the ethereal standards of the era and, come to that, we were entering an era where all standards were ethereal) shared her diet pills. Joe stayed up all night writing a paper on The Scarlet Letter and the next day, still going, he insisted on reading it aloud in American literature class, taking up most of the period describing the ways Nathaniel Hawthorne’s plot and character development would be transformed if Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale committed the six other deadly sins, starting with gluttony.
Sex, too, was had in occasional and limited doses. Fumbling anticipation generated a kind of prolonged bliss that fumbled completion has rarely matched. We were tantric when Buddha was still a porker on a shelf over the bar in Phillip Woo’s parents’ restaurant. No one’s life was left in a mess by sex. Although some of our clothing was. What ever happened to the hand job?
It was an existence upon which no improvement could be made except, of course, for elimination of prejudice, poverty, war, and injustice and Dad buying us an Austin-Healey.
We were aware of, if not the nature, the prevalence of evil. “Black humor” was in vogue. There was Lenny Bruce, Paul Krassner’s The Realist, ice-nine in Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, and Al Bartz saying, “How do you unload a truck full of dead babies?”
We were sensitive to grim realities. “With a pitchfork.” In our college application essays we pointed out that prejudice, poverty, war, and injustice should be eliminated.
Meanwhile it would also be nice to have a place of our own, a “pad.” But who’d iron our madras shirts? (And not our white Levi’s. “Mom, they aren’t supposed to have a crease!”)
And it would be great if there was no school. But we skipped a lot. Grades don’t count after the first semester of senior year. Ana Klein did a good mom voice. “Pat’s not feeling too well.” We were going to state colleges anyway. Except for Tim Minsky who would be studying math at Yale, to the mystification of most of our parents. “It’s so far away,” my mother said. “If he went to Ohio State he could come home on weekends.”
Perhaps there were as many troubled adolescents then as there are now. But young people are sensitive to fashion trends, and being troubled wasn’t in style. Girls weighed ninety pounds and barfed after eating a whole half gallon of butter pecan ice cream. Boys drove cars into phone poles at seventy miles an hour. But anorexia, bulimia, and teenage suicide were unheard of.
We were having fun. The stories we could tell—and do tell and will tell and have told and keep telling in movies, songs, TV shows, memoirs, blogs (though not much in poems and novels—literature is the enemy of fun), and to spouses, children, each other, and to ourself now that we’ve started talking to that person. There was the time Jim Fisk and I drove overnight to Hell, Michigan, a 422-mile round-trip, so we could say that we’d “been to hell and back.” We left right after school on a Wednesday and … Oh shut up.
There’s proof that it was a wonderful moment for our generation in the very fact of how boring our stories are. Every description of paradise is boring. According to the Bible, Adam and Eve didn’t even notice they were naked and spent all day naming animals. It’s a shame how the Baby Boom has never learned to appreciate boredom. It would make this current part of our lives more interesting.
Teenage 1960s middle-class America was a shining suburb on a hill. Almost twenty years would go by before we realized that. We’ve been trying to walk or fly or bum a ride back there since the first John Hughes movie came out.
It wasn’t just fun. It was a state of grace. We wanted to bestow our state of grace upon the world. Youth was a virtue. We pitied the moral lapse of those who lacked it. Life was good. We were living. Therefore we were good. Since we were good, and we were mankind, then mankind was good. We’d make mankind as good as itself and living as fun as life. We’d change everything. And we’d write in each other’s high school yearbooks, “Don’t ever change!”