Chapter 951

This is compliments of J & B ... it is a Thought Piece

THE CHILDREN OF THE SILENT GENERATION...

(and for their children - so they will understand)

Born in the 1930s and early 40s, we exist as a very special age cohort. We are the Silent Generation.

We are the smallest number of children born since the early 1900s. We are the “last ones.”

We are the last generation, climbing out of the depression, that can remember the winds of war and the impact of a world at war which rattled the structure of our daily lives for years.

We are also the last to remember ration books for everything from gas to sugar to lard to shoes to stoves.

We saved tin foil and poured fat into tin cans for the war effort.

We collected scrap iron and old clothing to support the troops.

We hand mixed ‘white stuff’ with ‘yellow stuff’ to make fake butter.

We saw cars up on blocks because tires weren’t available.

We can remember milk being delivered to our house early in the morning and placed in the “milk box” on the porch. [A friend’s mother delivered milk in a horse drawn cart.]

We are the last to hear Roosevelt ‘s radio “fireside chat” assurances and to see gold stars in the front windows of our grieving neighbors.

We can also remember the parades on August 15, 1945; VJ Day.

We saw the ‘boys’ home from the war, build their Cape Cod style houses, some pouring their cellar, tar papering it over and living there ‘til they could afford the time and money to build it out.

We remember trying to buy a new car after the war. Some new cars were coming through with wooden bumpers.

We are the last generation who spent childhood without television; instead we imagined what we heard on the radio.

As we all like to brag, with no TV, we spent our childhood “playing outside ‘til the street lights came on.”

We did play outside and we did play on our own with neighbors.

There was no little league.

There was no city playground for kids.

To play in the water, we turned the fire hydrants on and ran through the spray--or swam in the nearby creeks and lakes.

The lack of television in our early years meant, for most of us, that we had little real understanding of what the world was really like.

Our Saturday afternoons though, if at the movies (which cost a dime), gave us newsreels of the war sandwiched in between cowboys and cartoons.

Telephones were one to a house, often shared and hung on the wall.

Computers were called calculators, they only added and were hand cranked; typewriters were driven by pounding fingers, throwing the carriage, and changing the ribbon.

The ‘internet’ and ‘GOOGLE’ were words that didn’t exist.

Newspapers and magazines were written for adults and news was broadcast on our table radio in the evening by H.V Kaltenborne and Gabriel Heatter.

We are the last group who had to find so much out for ourselves.