Boomers: The Cold-War Generation Grows Up Read Free

Confederate commander to surrender to the future Union commanding general. Older men and women still regaled wide-eyed children with stories of glimpses of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis, or even early memories of life as a slave.
    Yet if America was still tethered to links with the Civil War era and nostalgic aspects of nineteenth-century life, an equally powerful attraction was the world of the twenty-first century that lay just over the horizon. The January 1946 issue of a national news magazine followed an article on Civil War veterans with a feature on the “Great Electro Mechanical Brain,” describing MIT’s follow-up to the University of Pennsylvania’s breakthrough ENIAC “differential analyzer,” with its computing machine that “advances science by freeing it from the pick and shovel work of mathematics.” The new mechanical brain in Cambridge, Massachusetts, used two thousand vacuum tubes and two hundred miles of electrical wire in one hundred tons of hardware and metal that could solve in thirty minutes a problem that would take human scientists more than ten hours to complete. The four members of ENIAC ’s technical crew fed data to the machine that “could advance the frontiers of knowledge by liberating scientists from everyday equations for more creative work.”
    The exciting world of the “Atomic Age” future was a feature of current advertising. An early 1946 ad for the Hotel Pennsylvania illustrates the New York City of the twenty-first century with futuristic helicopters landing businessmen onthe hotel roof. The copy insists that “many things are sure to change our lives in the new era of a new century. However, whether you come by helicopter or jet car, the Hotel Pennsylvania will never serve concentrated food pills as even in the future, we will still have full and robust meals.”
    Somewhere between the quaintness of the gaslight era and the excitement of the looming 21st century stood a real world into which 76 million babies would be born over the next 18 years. This America held tantalizing glimpses of the society we know today yet had been shaped substantially by the war and the depression decade of the 1930s. Compared to the fashion standards of twenty-first-century society, for example, most midcentury men, women, and to some extent children dressed much more formally, with propriety often trumping comfort.
    The young men who would become the fathers of Boomer children included a large percentage for whom dress shirts, dress shoes, neckties, coats, and even dress hats were required wear—from work to PTA meetings to religious worship and even to summer promenades on resort boardwalks and piers. Men who worked in strenuous jobs, on assembly lines and loading docks, might be seen wearing neckties under their coveralls; and for individuals employed in corporate offices, banks, and department stores, removing a coat on a hot summer day was an act of major informality. When most male white-collar workers ventured outside, they usually wore a wide-brimmed fedora that looked very much like the headwear of most other men, with the exception of a few seniors who refused to relinquish their old-fashioned derbies or straw skimmers. Men’s hairstyles were almost as standardized as their clothes, the main variation being a choice between maintaining the close-cropped “combat cut”that had been required in the military service or returning to the longer prewar slicked-back hair held in place by large amounts of hair tonic or cream.
    These young men were now pairing off with young women who in some ways looked dramatically different from their mothers and were entering a period where comfort and formality were locked in conflict. Relatively recent women’s fashions had undergone far more seismic changes than men’s styles. In relatively rapid succession, the piled-up hair and long dresses of the
Titanic
era had given way to