As my kids are fond of reminding me, I was born in the first half of the last century. Truly, the world was a different place than it is today. The difference was not in materialism, although today, that is much more of a priority. The difference was in attitude. World War II was over and America had won. However, the victory dance was short lived. In the mid-fifties, Russia was on everyone’s mind. As six year old first graders, we had air raid drills and were taught to hide under our desks in case the Russians bombed us. Fear of another war was always there. Then came the 60’s during which, the kids born in the 40’s and 50’s said, to hell with it. If we are all going to die, lets have some fun, and the party was on.
My parents who were born in the 20’s didn’t see the party coming in the beginning. Although they were only 20 years older than me, they had been raised during the Great Depression and graduated High School during World War II. Doing without or “making due” was how they were raised. To a certain degree they had been raised to not dream. To accept the way things were, was the universally accepted way of existing. If their bicycle became broken or the tire on their old car wore out, they were parked. Replacement parts were not available or were being rationed. Clothes were homemade and worn until they could no longer be patched. Shoes were in short supply and going barefooted was an accepted practice.
As a youngster growing up in the fifties my life was very much the same although not as austere. I had two pairs of shoes, one for church and one for school. Tennis shoes as we called them were only available for the guys that played on the basketball team and were issued by the school. Therefore, they were kept in the gym closet under lock and key. Some of my clothes were home made but increasingly they were purchased at his new place called the department store.
The really big changes came in the way we ate. It was a common practice in our family, for my grandmother to kill a chicken from her back yard for our Sunday dinner. Almost everything on the table was home grown or baked from scratch in our kitchen. The vegetables came from our garden and the bread was baked every morning and set out to cool for the day. About the only thing we didn’t self process was our meat. It came from the butcher store that we visited daily. However, as the decade of the fifties came to a close we began to buy more and more from the grocery store. Pre-baked and sliced bread was first on Mom’s list. Although, it didn’t taste as good, it sure freed up a big part of her time in the morning. We did less home canning and bought more things like jelly or fruit in a tin can. As a kid this was a big deal. With less reliance on the garden, my “chores” burden was beginning to loosen up. Gardening is a lot of work and always seems to have something that needs attending. This freed me up for my favorite past time, day-dreaming.
For as long as I can remember, I have had trouble keeping my mind going in one direction. It seems to wonder off of it’s own free will. This is especially true if I have a lot of free time. My Dad had a favorite saying, “put that out of your mind, son. It’s not going to happen”. For him that kind of thinking was a reflection of the time in which he grew up. For me, it was impossible not to try to figure out how to make something better. I spent countless hours organizing and reorganizing in my mind some of the most senseless things. I had already worked out a much better route for the milk man or had a better place to put the hymnals at church. While riding my bicycle delivering papers in the morning, my mind was constantly working out a better way for the city buses to run or how to make the trash collectors more quiet.
Day dreaming was a luxury afforded to my generation by our parents who were working hard to make our life easier. They had never had the opportunity to hope, things just had to be accepted as they were. Not us, we had the audacity to dream of how things could be better. It was presumptuous of our generation but it was overdue. For things to change someone had to dream of a better way. To have time to dream, we needed less drudgery and more incentive. All of this came to fruition as the sixties came roaring to life. Our parents had higher disposable incomes as well as more leisure time due to the innovations largely invented during World War II. As a member of the sixties generation I stood to inherit more technology and greater free time than any generation before. Although I wasn’t aware of it then we were the first generation that had time to dream. Growing up in the sixties was going to be less work and more fun and I was standing right in the front of the line because I had already been given the luxury of time to dream, thanks to my parents.
