THE SUMMER OF 1939 was probably the most pleasant interlude in the often grim decade of the thirties, and the upbeat mood included the nation’s children and adolescents. Parents and children lined up to see The Wizard of Oz, and more than a few viewers sat mesmerized as the rather bleak black-and-white landscape of Dorothy’s Kansas was transformed into the stunning color of the Emerald City. Children at municipal pools and local swimming holes congregated to listen to Little Orphan Annie on the radio and saw the latest installments of the Andy Hardy and Nancy Drew movies in theaters that promised an air-conditioned escape from the heat.
The single largest concentration of young people on any given day that summer was in Flushing Meadows, New York, where the most spectacular World’s Fair in history had grabbed the nation’s attention. The theme of the exposition was “The World of Tomorrow,” which explored visions of American life in the distant 1960s. To reach the fair, parents, teenagers, and children boarded special runs of the Broadway Limited or Southern Crescent trains, climbed into narrow berths, or fidgeted in day coaches as the world of the late 1930s sped by. Then, almost like Dorothy’s entry to Oz, the pavilions of the World’s Fair loomed on the skyline. Boys in shirts and ties with slicked-back hair and girls with stylish hats, gloves, and Mary Jane shoes gasped in excitement as they were offered a taste of a 1960s world of television, superhighways, and monorails. Then this brief escape from the still-grinding economic downturn ended as summer gave way to a sober autumn in which Europe plunged into war. As Hitler’s legions swept across the Continent, one by one the lights of foreign pavilions darkened forever, and Americans prepared for the grim possibility of war.
Three decades later the children of those excited young people who sampled the 1960s at Flushing Meadows would celebrate the last summer of the sixties in very different ways. Transistor radios and car speakers blasted out songs that would have shocked the kids of 1939. Two of the most frequently played songs, “Hair” and “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In,” were taken from the smash Broadway musical Hair, whose suggestive language and nudity would have landed the producers and actors in jail thirty years earlier.
The children of 1969 had access to the video entertainment world promised at Flushing Meadows, but on a much grander scale than those World’s Fair visitors could ever have imagined. Most children now had access to televisions double or triple the screen size imagined in 1939, with color sets largely replacing black-and-white, and new enterprises such as cable networks and the Public Broadcasting System offering a growing variety of attractions designed specifically for children.
The sleek superhighways envisioned in 1939 were now a reality, easing travel and vacations for Boomer children and their parents. The train experience was now largely the automobile experience as the rear seat of a car replaced the day coach as a child’s vantage point for viewing the American landscape.
If Flushing Meadows was the epicenter of a young person’s imagination in the summer of 1939, two locations transfixed attention three decades later. The first event, which began on Cape Kennedy, Florida, in a large sense fulfilled the promise of the World of Tomorrow. On July 20, 1969, the U.S. spacecraft Apollo XI landed on the moon, and Neil Armstrong turned the fantasy world of Buck Rogers into a reality when he became the first human to step onto an extraterrestrial world. John F. Kennedy had begun the sixties with a call for space travel; Neil Armstrong had ended the decade with the validation of that dream. For a moment, on that sultry summer evening, the generation gap briefly ended as small children, teenagers, college students, parents, and senior citizens huddled around flickering television sets sharing feelings of trepidation, relief, joy, and excitement for the long-awaited event.
Virtually everyone in America could understand and appreciate the accomplishments of the intrepid Apollo XI crew when Armstrong, followed by Buzz Aldrin, stepped down the ladder to the moon’s chalky surface in what he called “one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” If members of the Greatest Generation equated the event with the 1930s adventures of Flash Gordon, Boomers sensed it was almost like a moment from Star Trek. Both age groups could agree that this was a moment in their lives to be remembered long after the Apollo program had ended.
The location of the other defining, if more controversial, event of the summer of 1969 was a muddy farm owned by Max Yasgur near the little town of Bethel, New York. There a group of promoters planned an event that, on the surface, sounded like a miniature version of the Flushing Meadows event of three decades earlier. They advertised the Woodstock Music and Art Fair: An Aquarian Exposition, a festival that at first glance might attract visitors from a variety of age groups. Instead of offering stately pavilions for well-dressed visitors, however, the promoters hoped to attract fifty thousand young people at eighteen dollars per person to hear Janis Joplin; Jimi Hendrix; Joan Baez; The Who; The Grateful Dead; Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young; and numerous other groups that defined Boomer popular music at the end of the sixties.
A turnout of fifty thousand for a concert on a rural thousand-acre farm would have been an impressive social event with substantial profits. As it turned out, the organizers received both more and less than they expected. Even before Jimi Hendrix played his spectacularly edgy version of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” a youth pilgrimage was under way. As roads clogged in the most massive traffic jam in the Empire State’s history, the first wave of arrivals was surging onto the grounds, knocking down fences and generally avoiding paying any admission charge. Three days of sultry heat punctuated by seemingly endless thunderstorms turned the venue into a sea of mud where a crowd nearly ten times the expected attendance banged on tambourines, sang, played songs, and shared food, drinks, and more than a few varieties of drugs.
Thirty years earlier Flushing Meadows had been filled with rather formally dressed young people sharing a vision of the future with their parents and grandparents. Now, in 1969, young people had created the third-largest city in New York virtually overnight, and, sometimes without any clothes at all, they were sharing a very different vision with one another in a community almost devoid of adults.
The “Aquarian Exposition” staged at Max Yasgur’s dairy farm attracted more than ten times as many participants as expected. In some respects Woodstock was a final celebration of sixties youth culture as the realities of career choices, parental responsibilities, and the economic downturn of the seventies emerged. (Henry Diltz/CORBIS)
Woodstock became the largest single gathering of Boomers that generation would ever experience, and there is little doubt that the postwar babies dominated the event. The oldest Boomers were now twenty-three and entering a transition between childhood and adulthood that was held in suspended animation for three days. The most visible contingent of pre-Boomer-era participants was made up of the members of the performing bands who had largely become the muses of the new generation. The performers, more than a few of whom would be dead before thirty, and their Boomer audience shared a vision of a future in which technological advances seemed relatively unimportant. As singer Joni Mitchell preached, “We are stardust, we are golden, and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.” Many of those soggy pilgrims sensed that at least for a brief period they were living in a world outside adult jurisdiction and rules, where sharing a sleeping bag could also mean sharing sexual partners, and the smoky haze drifting upward would not provoke adult sanctions. Even if most Boomers could not be physically present at Woodstock Nation, the turnout was so huge it seemed that “everyone” was there, especially to adults who tried to understand such a spontaneous event.
Beyond the mystique of Woodstock, the summer of 1969 represents a seminal moment in the Boomer childhood experience. At this point the largest percentage of the generation was composed of fully aware individuals who still occupied some form of dependent state required in any definition of childhood. The largest number of Boomers that would ever be enrolled in school was now getting ready to return to classrooms ranging from kindergarten to graduate school. Soon older Boomers would be leaving school faster than the youngest Boomers would replace them, and the 1970s would become an era of laid-off teachers, closed schools, and shrinking class size. In 1969 the large families of the Boomer era were still represented in the blended six-child family of The Brady Bunch, an enormously popular representation of the entire generation. If Woodstock was an iconic moment for Boomers who were about to become adults, the adventures of Greg and Marsha and their siblings showed a continuity of the childhood and family experience that dated to The Donna Reed Show and Leave It to Beaver, with the added attraction of six kids rather than two.
The autumn of 1969 also featured a series of domestic and foreign policy initiatives that, after a final flare-up of youth demonstrations, would gradually weaken the cultural and generational divide over the Vietnam War. Richard Nixon had run his successful 1968 presidential campaign on a promise of “peace with honor,” implying that the Vietnam conflict could be ended without American defeat. In the short term, the realization that the United States would not withdraw from Vietnam in the near future mobilized the most extensive and at times most violent youth opposition to the conflict. In the summer of 1969 the national convention of Students for a Democratic Society turned into a near brawl as the organization splintered into rival factions, each proclaiming itself the true believers of a national revolution. The most radical faction emerged as the Weathermen, who took their name from the lines of a Bob Dylan song, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” By October the Weathermen had assembled several hundred members in Chicago with the promise to “bring the war home” through vandalism, running battles with police, and domestic terrorism centered on a bombing campaign of schools and agencies that were accused of supporting the war. Weathermen leaders, such as Bernardine Dohrn and Mark Rudd, went underground as SDS itself devolved into ever smaller factions.
As SDS imploded, a new anti-war coalition, the Vietnam Moratorium Committee, formed around student government leaders, clergy, and Vietnam veterans who opposed the war. On October 15, 1969, the Committee sponsored a day of protests including demonstrations, vigils, and teach-ins in a great many communities, which included the participation of a number of children of senior Nixon administration officials. Four weeks later nearly a half-million demonstrators descended on Washington in the largest protest of the war. Yet just as this anti-war movement reached its greatest breadth of support and legitimacy, a series of administration initiatives and legislative priorities began to dampen the mood of protest. First, Nixon announced a plan of “Viet-namization,” in which South Vietnam troops would progressively replace American forces in combat. This allowed a series of ever larger troop withdrawals along with reduced American casualties. Second, the president and Congress largely agreed to replace conscription with volunteer armed forces and to reduce the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen. Finally, until the draft was fully ended a lottery system would be initiated in which young men would be subject to call for only a single year and virtually assured of exemption if their lottery number was higher than Selective Service estimates for the coming year.
On a cold, early-December night in 1969, millions of male Boomers gathered around transistor radios or watched television to learn the matchup of birthdates and lottery numbers. For perhaps a third of these young men, their low numbers were a signal to prepare for conscription, enter the National Guard, or find a career that provided exemption from the draft. The remaining two-thirds were essentially given permission to go on with their lives in a society where Vietnam was gradually receding as a focal point of the Boomer experience. These older Boomers now joined their younger counterparts in an environment in which the Vietnam War was primarily a television image rather than a personal reality.
The draft lottery represented one of the two last communal Boomer experiences of the sixties, and, as with many events of the decade, evoked varied emotions, depending upon whether an individual “won” or “lost.” A similar mix of emotions emerged at about the same time when a group of California promoters tried to stage a West Coast version of Woodstock. In an attempt to counter charges they had surrendered to commercialism, the Rolling Stones offered to give a free concert at Altamont Speedway. When top-tier groups such as the Grateful Dead, Santana, and Jefferson Airplane signed on for the show, nearly 300,000 fans descended on the Speedway, a site only one-sixth as large as Max Yasgur’s farm. As huge numbers of fans ringed the hillside above the stage and attempted to listen to the bands, the throng nearest the stage pushed and shoved against a security screen dominated by the dubious law enforcement of a phalanx of Hell’s Angels motorcyclists. When Mick Jagger began the first part of the controversial song “Sympathy for the Devil,” a small-time hoodlum pulled a gun and was immediately surrounded by Angels, one of whom stabbed him to death. Fans at a distance remembered Altamont primarily for the music while stage-side participants left with images of mayhem.
In the wake of disorders at the 1968 Democratic Convention, the trial of the Chicago 7 and the continuation of the Vietnam War into 1969 provided the catalyst for massive student protests, like the Weathermen’s “Days of Rage” in Chicago. (Getty Images)
As the lottery and Altamont put a period to a raucous decade, Boomers and their seniors wondered how the new decade might resemble the recent past. One national magazine suggested, “There is no spelled-out forecast for the new decade because the unpredictable 1960s cracked the crystal ball too badly and proved that all we can prophesy with certainty is change. The 1960s shook us all so deeply that few easy assumptions can still be made about our basic beliefs, about our opinions of ourselves, about our social divisions, fears or hopes.” No one could predict how many Boomers would keep the fifties and sixties of their childhood in their memories, if not on their calendars.
In the summer of 1973, as the Vietnam experience faded and the turmoil of Watergate appeared, a young producer named George Lucas released a film that chronicled the experiences of a small group of teenagers on one night in the Kennedy era. As posters filled movie theaters with the tantalizing question, “Where were you in ’62?” huge audiences followed largely unknown actors—Ron Howard, Cindy Williams, McKenzie Phillips, Harrison Ford, and Richard Dreyfus—as they negotiated the teen experience in small-town California. Lucas used most of his budget for the nonstop soundtrack that opens with a booming rendition of “Rock Around the Clock” outside a classic drive-in restaurant and closes with the Beach Boys’ “All Summer Long” as Dreyfus boards a plane to leave his family and friends behind on his way to an Eastern college. As the 1973 audience remarked to one another on the short hair of the boys and the conservative dresses worn by the girls in 1962, more than a few viewers sensed the nostalgia of the passing of an era. Soon the success of American Graffiti spawned the television hits Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley and the musical nostalgia of Billy Joel and other singers. “Fifties” and “sixties” theme parties and dances drew large crowds of high school and college students, now increasingly made up of younger Boomers anxious to feel vicariously the excitement of their older siblings at a time when young people seemed on their way to dominating American culture. These younger Boomers would have their own dreams and their own memories, and as the millennium approached, retro “disco” and “seventies” events would evoke the same laughter and nostalgia in this younger cohort who had never experienced Howdy Doody or the original Mousketeers but could name every character on The Brady Bunch. The generation of children who had known Sputnik, Camelot, and the Beatles were now becoming parents of their own children. Younger Boomers were about to make the dawning seventies their own time.