•  “THE LAST ONES”

    Born in the 1930s and early 1940s, we exist as a very special age
    cohort.  We are the “LAST ONES.”  We are the last, climbing out of the
    depression, who can remember the winds of war and the war itself with
    fathers and uncles going off.  We are the last to remember ration
    books for everything from sugar to shoes to stoves.  We saved tin foil
    and poured fat into tin cans  We saw cars up on blocks because tires
    weren’t available.
    We are the last to hear Roosevelt’s radio 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 are the last who spent childhood without television; instead
    imagining what we heard on the radio.  As we all like to brag, with no
    TV, we spent our childhood “playing outside until the street lights
    came on.”  We did play outside and we did play on our own.  There was
    no little league.
    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, if at the movies, gave us newsreels of the war
    and the holocaust sandwiched in between westerns and cartoons.
    Newspapers and magazines were written for adults.  We are the last who
    had to find out for ourselves.
    As we grew up, the country was exploding with growth.  The G.I Bill
    gave returning veterans the means to get an education and spurred
    colleges to grow.  VA loans fanned a housing boom.  Pent up demand
    coupled with new installment payment plans put factories to work.  New
    highways would bring jobs and mobility.  The veterans joined civic
    clubs and became active in politics.  In the late 40s and early 50s
    the country seemed to lie in the embrace of brisk but quiet order as
    it gave birth to its new middle class.  Our parents understandably
    became absorbed with their own new lives.  They were free from the
    confines of the depression and the war.  They threw themselves into
    exploring opportunities they had never imagined.
    We weren’t neglected but we weren’t today’s all-consuming family
    focus. They were glad we played by ourselves “until the street lights
    came on.”  They were busy discovering the post war world.
    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 went to find out.  We entered a world of overflowing plenty and
    opportunity; a world where we were welcomed.  Based on our naïve
    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 1950s and by mid-decade school
    children were ducking under desks.  China became Red China.
    Eisenhower sent the first "advisors" to Vietnam.  Castro set up camp
    in Cuba and Khrushchev came to power.
    We are the last to experience an interlude when there were no
    existential threats to our homeland. We came of age in the late 1940s
    and early 1950s.  The war was over and the cold war, terrorism,
    climate change, technological upheaval and perpetual economic
    insecurity had yet to haunt life with insistent unease.
    Only we can remember both a time of apocalyptic war and a time when
    our world was secure and full of bright promise and plenty.  We
    experienced both.
    We grew up at the best possible time, a time when the world was
    getting better . . . not worse!  We did not have it easy.  Our wages
    were low, we did without, we lived within our means, we worked hard to
    get a job, and harder still to keep it.  Things that today are
    considered necessities, we considered unreachable luxuries.  We made
    things last.  We fixed, rather than replaced.
    We had values and did not take for granted that "somebody will take
    care of us."  We cared for ourselves and we also cared for others.

    WE ARE THE “LAST ONES!!”