“THE LAST ONES”

[This little essay on the children of 1930s and 40s was sent by a RR reader and correspondent.  He shared it with a number of us who join in an ongoing dialogue about the times and events.  It is posted as received.  gjr]

By Denise Eyherabide

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.”

Comments

[jon smith]

James Fenimore Cooper penned something like this in 1757.

[George Rebane]

James Fenimore Cooper, 1811-1851.

[jon smith]

You are, of course, correct. JFC penned something like this in 1826. I am reading Hume's Natural History of Religion. 1757 on the brain.

[fish]

Posted by: George Rebane | 12 May 2017 at 03:48 PM

Clearly a man before his time......

[Account Deleted]

I just checked 2 different online sources and they both list his birth date as Sept 15th 1789.
Quite a lively lad -
"At age 13, Cooper was enrolled at Yale, but he incited a dangerous prank that involved blowing up another student's door — after having already locked a donkey in a recitation room.[7] Cooper was expelled in his third year without completing his degree."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Fenimore_Cooper
'The Last Ones' is historically correct no matter who actually penned it or what sort of literary cribbing went on.
The kids of today will write of the travails of 'hate facts' and micro aggressions by cultural oppressors.

[jon smith]

Scott - I am not suggesting that the letter was cribbed, simply that the lament is historical and persistent. JFC is an under rated author who lived life to the full.

[jon smith]

Scott- thank you for the Wiki link. "The Crater" was the book I was thinking of but couldn't recall the title. "The Crater" is about the rise and fall of America nearly two hundred years ago. The theme would be familiar to those existing in the "last great century of man."

As an aside, JFC's naval history accounts are fascinating.

[Bill Tozer]

When I was a kid, everybody left their bicycles in the front yard all day and night long and nobody's bike got stolen. And Mom could call out as loud as she could when it was time to come inaround dark. Everybody walked to school and afterwards went to the local market to buy candy cigarettes or something sweet for pennies. We had tree forts, rode bikes down steep ass hills that are now shopping malls and our roller skates had steel wheels. Rough ride and we rode them down steep ass hills as well. We also had rock fights and bottle rocket wars akin to the paint ballers of today.

My Dad was a depression baby. Dropped out of Jr. College and ran down to enlist when the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor. My Mom, a teenager turning adult had to go to the NCO Clubs to meet guys cause all the boys she knew enlisted to fight Hiltler or Toro, Toro, Toro.

The ones (pretty much all dead) that had fear in their eyes when talking about those days was the ones who grew up in the Depression. That impacted them more than the World War. Seeing lines of grown men with their heads down, shuffling their feet instead of a brisk walk because their spirit was broken. Broken people. A neighbor losses a job, a factory closes, we might be next. The men appearing at the back window asking for a bowl of soup affects children.

I asked 3 old timers why the Depression left a bigger image on their lives than fighting in the Phillipines jungle and being left behind by Gen Douglas MacCarther (1 of the 3) or getting a job in a dynamite factory as a new bride after the new husband got drafted (2 of 3) or being afraid of the unstoppable Nazi machine rolling across Europe like the juggernaut it was (3 of 3). All three different folks from different backgrounds and walks of life All said the same thing about the Depression and its impact forever etched in their mind, emotions, and will: "Because there was no enemy to fight in the Depression as there was in World War 2. The enemy during the Depression was invisible" and the destruction and ruin was all around, but nothing/nobody to fight back against.. They just had to take it in silence, hoping their family was not next to be put on the streets.
Then they grew older and fought to the death oversees and later came home and felt the World was their oyster.

[George Rebane]

re BillT 635pm - The invisible enemy during the Depression was FDR's socialism which kept the heavy (alphabet soup) hand of government in control of every aspect of America's civil life during the 1930s. It took WW2 and FDR's death to turn a new page that was abetted by Harry Truman who rejected the post-war advice of returning to the nostroms of the 30s as the country plunged into a short recession with the demobilization of millions from the military and the redirection of wartime production.

[Bill Tozer]

Agreed Dr. Rebane, but Depression babies did not think beyond what they saw and felt. Fear was and is as always 'the big one'. Suppose that is why FDR 's radio address to the nation struck the national chord and encapsulated the times like no other one-liner. "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." Those words hit the heart and soul of the national consciousness of those days. But, nothing new under the sun. It's the same today as being exhibited by the Censor Speech Movement and the mass hysteria and inconceivable irrational behavior on the Left. I call it hate, but it is really fear. They are running scared. Yep, fear is the big one.

But, back to the topic
https://www.facebook.com/RowdyConservatives/photos/a.217983685002343.55586.217926015008110/1094241884043181/?type=3&theater