Boomers: The Cold-War Generation Grows Up Read Free Page B

topped off with a good smoke. In an era when the real hunger of the depression and the shortages of the battlefield were still fresh memories, the prosperity of the late 1940s offered the possibility of meals where cardiovascular concerns made little difference.
    The idea of a balanced diet was far from alien to the young women who would become the mothers of postwar babies. Yet this was a society in which frozen food was still a novelty, and for many families the term “icebox” continued to be a literal description of home refrigeration. Menus were still based on the seasonal availability of foods, and their ability to be “filling” continued to be emphasized. Shopping for many families was a daily excursion, and while early Boomer children would eventually be introduced to the world of gleaming supermarkets and shopping centers, a substantial part of selecting food, buying it, and preparing it was still clearly connected to earlier decades.
    Along with fashion and everyday culture, another aspect of early postwar life that was caught between past and future was popular entertainment. American families living in the time immediately after World War II essentially relied on the same two major entertainment media that had dominated the preceding two decades: motion pictures and radio. A movie ticket might cost 25 to 35 cents for an adult and 10 to 15 cents for children. The first full year of peace produced the highest movie attendance in history and the release of five hundred new films. Most of them were relatively similar to their counterparts in the “golden age” of the 1930s—primarily black-and-white features of comedy, drama, romance, Westerns, or war, and dominated by a “superstar” tier of Olympian actors and actresses. Cary Grant, Errol Flynn, Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart, and Clark Gable commanded the most attention and money among early postwar actors; Paulette Goddard, Betty Grable, Claudette Colbert, Barbara Stanwyck, and Jane Wyman were the queens of the silver screen. A few changes could be detected when compared to the movies of the mid-1930s: the number of color films was slowly increasing, the recently ended war was still being fought on screen, and the challenge of returning to civilian life was being explored in productions like
The Best Years of Our Lives
. Some Westerns dealt with more complex social issues and a more realistic and sympathetic portrayal of Native Americans, as in
Fort Apache
.
    On evenings when an excursion to the neighborhood movie theater was not planned, families gathered in their living rooms and tuned in to radio stations that supplied children’s programs, classical concerts, situation comedies, mysteries, and popular music, in roughly half-hour portions. Radio was free, was accessible, and allowed varied levels ofengagement, from intense concentration to background noise. It would continue to be an important if diminishing element in the awareness of the older portion of the Boomer cohort. Yet this generation was almost immediately labeled the “television generation,” and there are good reasons why this identification is largely accurate.
    The development of commercial television coincided almost perfectly with the beginning of the postwar surge in births. By late 1946 four television stations were on the air in the United States, with an audience of several thousand, but the possibility of geometric growth was already being discussed. A year later one magazine noted that “television is a commercial reality but not yet an art.” The author explained, “Today more people want to buy sets than there are sets to buy; the television audience has soared from 53,000 sets in 1940 to one million today. After a twenty-year infancy, television is beginning to grow up. Neither the movies, nor radio, nor theater, nor any of the arts has yet developed a technique suitable to this revolutionary new medium whose possibilities,