THE SILENT GENERATION---
THE BEST OF TIMES
- We were born in the 1930s and 40s. We exist as a special age group. 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, who 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 the generation when men went to war and women for the first time went to work outside the homes to build war fighting equipment and war support items.
- We are the last to remember ration books for everything from gas to sugar to shoes to stoves.
- We saved tin foil and poured fat into tin cans.
- 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.
- Many of us are the last to hear Roosevelt 's radio assurances and to see gold stars in the front windows of our grieving neighbors and blue stars to show sons in the military.
- Many of us can remember the parades on August 15, 1945, to celebrate victory over Japan---VJ Day.
- We saw the 'boys’ home from the war, build their little houses, pour the cellar, tar paper it over, and live there until they could afford the time and money to build homes.
- We are the last generation who spent much of our childhood without television. Instead, we imagined what we heard on the radio.
- With no television, we spent our childhood playing outside until the streetlights came on or the country shades of darkness appeared. We played outside, we played on our own, and our parents were glad. Security was a fact of life.
- Our parents were suddenly free from the confines of the depression and the war, and they threw themselves into exploring opportunities they had never imagined.
- We weren't neglected but, we weren't today's all-consuming family focus.
- To play in the water, we turned the hose or the fire hydrants on and ran through the spray, and we drank out of the hose.
- The lack of television in our early years meant, for most of us, that we had little real understanding of what the world was like.
- Our Saturday afternoons at the movies gave us newsreels of the war sandwiched between westerns and cartoons.
- Telephones, one to a house, were often shared with neighbors with different ring code for each home on a ‘party line.’ Some telephones were attached to the wall.
- Computers existed in the form of calculators that only added, subtracted, and were hand cranked. Typewriters were manually driven by pounding fingers, throwing the carriage, and changing the ribbon. "The Internet, Google, Cellular Telephones;” who knew?
- Newspapers and magazines were written for adults. The 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 out things for ourselves.
- As we grew up the country was exploding with growth.
- The G.I. Bill gave returning veterans the means to an education and spurred college growth. VA loans fanned a housing boom.
- Pent up demand coupled with new installment payments put factories to work.
- New highways would bring jobs and mobility. Auto industry flourished and cars made exploring the country possible.
- The veterans joined civic clubs and became active in politics.
- In the late 40's and early 50's the country was in an embrace of a brisk, quiet evolution as it gave birth to a new generation, ‘The Baby Boomers.'
- The radio network expanded from 3 stations to thousands of stations.
- The telephone started to become a common method of communications and "Faxes" sent hard copy around the world.
- We were busy discovering the post war world. We had won ‘The War.’
- Most of us had no life plan, but with the unexpected virtue of ignorance and an economic rising tide we simply stepped into the world and started to find out what the world was about.
- We entered a world of overflowing plenty and opportunity; a world where we were welcomed.
- Based on our naive belief that there was more where this came from, we shaped life as we went.
- We enjoyed a luxury; we felt secure in our future. Of course, just as today, not all Americans shared in this experience.
- Depression poverty was deep rooted.
- Polio was still a crippler.
- The Korean War was a dark presage in the early 50s and by mid-decade school children were ducking under desks in training for nuclear attack.
- The Soviet Union built the "Iron Curtain" and China became “Red China.”
- President Truman first sent the first advisors to Vietnam in 1950. Years later, WE WENT TO WAR THERE.
- Fidel Castro set up camp in Cuba and Nikita Khrushchev came to power in the Soviet Union.
- We are the last generation to experience an interlude when there were no existential threats to our homeland.
- We came of age in the 40s and 50s. The war was over. The cold war, terrorism, technological upheaval, "global warming," and perpetual economic insecurity did not haunt life with a persistent discomfort.
- We experienced both a time of apocalyptic war and a time when our world was secure and full of bright promise and plenty. We have lived through both.
- We grew up at the best possible time, a time when the world was improving, not declining.
- We are the Silent Generation - "The Last Ones".
- More than 99.9% of us are either retired or deceased and feel privileged and proud to have lived in "The Best of Times!"