Blog Mirror: The Wurst Article

An item by a German expatriate living in the UK on what Germans call what most Americans call "hot dogs"

The Wurst Article

Note the presentation.

I'm surprised that in Frankfurt, Wieners are regarded as a delicacy.  When I was a kid, we had them all the time, and I liked them.  I particularly liked "hot lunches" at school, which we rarely got, when we were served steamed hot dogs.

I still like the recollection of how those tasted.

Now days, I only eat hot dogs if I'm at a baseball game. That's about it.  Otherwise, I never do.  I probably had too many fried hot dogs as a kid. 

Yes, my mother fried them. But she was an awful cook.

Anyhow, my grandfather was a meat packer and this article caused me to think of what we called these sausages.  We called them "hot dogs" the American standard word, but my father would call them Wieners.  His father was of 100% Westphalian extraction and had grown up speaking German.  My father could speak it too, but sort of kept that to himself, like many other things in his very quiet personality.  Anyhow, maybe that's why my father used that term for the little mild sausages.

The packing house did make them.  Apparently they made a lot of them during World War Two, as the Army ordered them.  When the war ended the contract for them was suddenly canceled and it turned out to be a big problem for the packing house, as the Army wouldn't order them with the added red dye that is what actually causes them to be that color.  That was an unnecessary added expense, in the Army's view.  

But not for civilians.  The hot dogs turned out to be hard to sell to grocery stores as they weren't the expected pink.  Without it, they're white.

I love sausages, FWIW.  It's probably one of the things that will get me in the end, but then I don't have the American expectation of living perfectly fit until I'm 120 years old. But I'm not keen on Wieners.  Brots, yes, other sausages, you bet.  But these aren't my favorite.

Maybe they would be in Frankfurt.

Blog Mirror: Sunday, February 9, 1964: The Beatles On "The Ed Sullivan Show"

 From Uncle Mike's:

February 9, 1964: The Beatles On "The Ed Sullivan Show"

I wonder if my parents watched it?

My mother was more of a music fan than my father.  My father's record collection consisted a few albums he had bought after, I'm pretty sure, my parents bought a very large and heavy combination radio and stereo set.  It's a massively substantial piece of furniture.  The records he purchased were all of military marches.  Nothing else.

My mother had a pretty extensive set of 45 rpm records, or singles as they were called, which weren't really singles but which had one song each on each side.  I should commit more of them to digital.  They included a lot of Elvis Pressley, and some jazz, and some odds and ends.  She later bought some albums that were from the 60s, but they were people like Tom Jones.  

Musically, FWIW, I can recall The Lawrence Welk Show being a weekly staple in the house.  I can barely recall The Ed Sullivan Show playing from time to time, which must mean that my father watched it on rare occasion.  It ran until 1971.

The 1964 Winter Olympics closed in Innsbruck.

In Memoriam. Melanie Safka, 1947-2024

Best remembered for Brand New Key, she was, in some ways, a slightly earlier, and somewhat less known, version of the same sort of singer than Linda Ronstadt would become, even preforming some of the same songs.

She performed at Woodstock, still so young that her mother went with her.

What Have They Done to My Song Ma is one I recall from my childhood for some reason, dimly recalling that my mother liked it.

End of a Legend? Sports Illustrated lays off its entire staff.

That's correct.  Just months shy of its 70th Anniversary, SI laid off everyone after failing to pay its licensing fees to the magazine's parent company.

Where I learned of the sad news:

Friday, January 19, 2024

Sports Illustrated, 1954-2024

That's a shame.

Print magazines are rapidly becoming dinosaurs, as we all know.  Many of the greats, such as The New Republic, Time or Newsweek, aren't what they once were. For that matter, many don't print at all.  Newsweek, for instance, does not.

Sic transit glori mundi.

My father subscribed to it.  It came to the house, along with Time, Newsweek, People, Life and Look (when there was a Look).  After we perused them, they went down to his office.  I loved Time and Newsweek (People is trash) and I recall pretty vividly observing South Vietnam's fall as I read them, at 12 years old.

I always looked through Sports Illustrated when I was young, although I think the infamous swimsuit issue, which is and was soft pornography, didn't seem to make an appearance at the house, or the office either.  

It was, and is, a great magazine, covering every sport imaginable.

Wyoming teams appeared on the cover more than once.

As an adult, I lost interest in the magazine, although remained a great one when I occasionally viewed it.  A college friend of mine took up giving me their swimsuit calendar every year for a while when I was a college student, with the great model of that era being Kathy Ireland, who had the Kate Upton role of her era.  Interestingly, both Ireland and Upton are devout Christians (Upton has a cross tattoo on her hand), which given their swimsuit issue role is a bit of a surprise, but perhaps no more than the fact that I had those calendars on my walls during those years, and certainly wouldn't now.

As noted, save for its annual descent into cheesecake, it was a great magazine.

Until now, it appears.

Super size it.

Lex Anteinternet: Tuesday, January 1, 1924. Receiving the New Year.:  

When I put this up on January 1, I also posted this calendar image on Reddit's 100 Years Ago sub.  Somebody came by and remarked on how tiny the glass the young woman is holding was.

And indeed it was.

Coca-Cola for years came in a 6.5 oz bottle, not 12.  It's interesting to reflect on as it really says something about proportions.

Coke's iconic bottle was a 6.5 oz bottle until 1955.  

Its competitor Pepsi started using 12 oz bottles in 1934.  In fact, that as one of its marketing devices, as it came in a 12 oz bottle, having a jingle that went

Pepsi-Cola hits the spot

Twelve full ounces, that's a lot!

Twice as much for a nickel, too

Pepsi-Cola is the drink for you.

It says something about the quality of Coke, or at least the original recipe of it, that people would in fact pay the same amount for half of what they'd get if they'd bought Pepsi instead.  It also says something about soda in general that it's so cheap to make, the added 6 oz of product really doesn't do anything to the economic bottom line.

In 1955, Coke switched to 10 oz bottles and 12 oz bottles and offered a  "Family" sized bottle of 26 oz.  The move was not without internal company controversy, however.  One company executive stated that  “bringing out another bottle was like being unfaithful to your wife.”

But that 55 10 or 12 oz bottle isn't gigantic.

When I was growing up in the 60s and 70s, when you went to a fast food restaurant and got a soda, large was a 12 oz serving with ice.  Starting in the 80s, somehow, that doubled, with stores, particularly convenience stores, advertising what was essentially double that.  

24 oz of Coke is a lot.

And it went on from there.

McDonald's, when it was first getting up and running, served Coke in 7 oz cups. After Coke switched, it started serving it in 16 oz cups.  In 1980, 7-11 introduced the "Big Gulp" which weighed in at an absurd 32 oz.  In 86, 7-11 introduced the 44 oz Super Big Gulp, and everyone went down that road thereafter.

Indeed, now, getting a small or medium soda draught is really what a person should do, and on the rare occasions when I get fast food, I try to get that.  But most people don't.  Even little kids get the 55 gallon size soda drink.

And that's really not good for you.

Saturday, December 29, 1923. The dawn of television.

Russian-born engineer Vladimir K. Zworykin filed for a patent on his Television System, which would evolve into television.  He was employed by Westinghouse at the time, having immigrated to the U.S. during the Russian Civil War.  He died in 1982, living to an undetermined age in his early 90s.

Television advertisement from 1939.

Zworykin wasn't the only individual working on televised images, and his system wasn't the only one that was around.  A system by a rival inventor,  John Logie Baird, would be the first one on the market, coming at an amazingly early 1928, with the first television station, WRGB, then W2XB, broadcasting from the General Electric facility in Schenectady, NY.  For various reason, however, television didn't really take off until after World War Two, with the 1950s really seeing an explosion in its use.  Even at that, however, many households did not have televisions until the 1960s.  I can recall the first television our family had, which must have been acquired in the mid 1960s.  My mother bought it as a gift for my father, but had as an additional motive the hope that he'd spend more evenings at home rather than stop by to visit his mother, who lived a couple of blocks away.  Indeed, my father took to television (my mother never did), and her hopes were realized.

Test pattern from when local television stations quit broadcasting at night, and reappeared in the morning, with this image.  I can recall this appearing on our television early in the morning when my father first turned it on.

That experience really shows one of the frankly negative aspects of what would prove to be a groundbreaking technology.  Prior to television, while radio had arrived, there was still a great deal of "make your own entertainment" and the visiting of friends and relatives in the evenings.  Television helped end all that, which proved to be a radical shift in long held societal patterns.  Interestingly, television itself has never portrayed that change, and continues to depict life in large part as it had been before its arrival.  You don't see television programs in which people sit around and watch television.

As we've noted here before, early television was all locally broadcast, from locally owned stations.  Indeed, the FCC strictly regulated this latter aspect of television, which of course broadcast over the public airways.  Cable made major inroads, however, not television and a near deregulation of the industry has mean that it now broadcasts over multiple channels, in multiple ways, 24 hours a day, with local ownership often not existing.

Televisions ultimately became so common that by the early 2000s, most American households contained three of them.  The number is now down to 2.5, reflecting the advance of computers, which has cut into television use.  

All in all, while undoubtedly there are other opinions, television has been enormously corrosive and detrimental to society.

Germany agreed to pay France's and Belgium's expenses for occupying the Ruhr.  The UK objected to the French collecting taxes on a British owned mined in the region.

The SS Mutlah disappeared in the Mediterranean with all of its 40 hands lost.

The Mexican Federal Army was advancing towards Vera Cruz, the rebels having been routed. . . and industrial school girls were on the warpath.

The Saturday magazines were out.

Friday, November 22, 1963. The assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Today In Wyoming's History: November 22: 1963  President John F. Kennedy assassinated in Dallas, TX.

President Kennedy was a very popular President in a very difficult time.  A lot of my comments about his presidency here have not been terribly charitable, but he was a hero to many, and some of his calls here have unfairly not been noted.  For instance, he exercised restraint during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which almost resulted in a Third World War, and he likewise kept the separation of Berlin from escalating into the same, even though his comments caused that crisis to come about.

In spite of repeated speculation about it, it's clear that the assassination was carried out as a lone, bizarre act by Lee Harvey Oswald.  Indeed, the lone actor aspect of that has fueled the conspiracy theories surrounding the event, as people basically don't want to accept that a lone actor can have such a massive and unforeseen impact.

I was alive at the time, but of course I don't remember this as I was only a few months old.  In my father's effects, I'd note, was a Kennedy Mass Card that he'd kept. No doubt, Masses were said around the country for the first Catholic President.

Often unnoticed about this event, Oswald probably had made an earlier attempt on the life of former Army Gen. Edwin Walker, who ironically was a radical right wing opponent of Kennedy's.  That attempt had occured in April. And Oswald killed Texas law enforcement officer J. D. Tippit shortly after killing Kennedy.  Oswald's initial arrest was for his murder of Tippit.

It's fair to speculate on how different history might have been had Kennedy lived.  Kennedy's actions had taken the US up to the brink of war with the Soviet Union twice, but in both instances, when the crisis occured, he steered the country out of it, and indeed his thinking was often better in those instances than his advisers. Under Kennedy the US had become increasingly involved in the Vietnam War, but there's at least some reason to believe that he was approaching the point of backing off in Vietnam, and it seems unlikely that the US would have engaged in the war full scale as it did under Lyndon Johnson.  If that's correct, the corrosive effect the war had on US society, felt until this day, might have been avoided.

All of which is not to engage in the hagiography often engaged in considering Kennedy.  To the general public, the James Dean Effect seems to apply to Kennedy, as he died relatively young.  Catholics nearly worshiped him as one of their own.  In reality, Kennedy had a really icky personal life and was hardly a living saint.  His hawkishness in a time of real global strife, moreover, produced at least one tragic result, and nearly caused others.

Unwarranted nostalgia. Two instances, one which isn't.

The Arming and Departure of the Knights (of the Round Table), a tapestry.  I feared Uncle Mike was going into the Kennedy at Camelot point of view of things, but he didn't.  This tapestry, as idealized as it is, might serve as a pretty good reflection of the 60s and of the Arthurian legend, which features adultery, armed conflict, and defeat.  Not cheery.

1963: The Last Summer, Part I

I really like Uncle Mike's blog.  It's one of two I have up here by New Yorkers (the other being City Father), and on a website like this you're going to get some nostalgia, like it or not, but it can serve to really reflect how our recollections of the past are pretty messed up in some instances.

Uncle Mike's essay starts off:

The Summer of 1963 was a beginning for some, and an ending for many more. America would never quite be so young again as it was that year.

The essay goes on from there to note a bunch of stuff that happened in 1963, and does a really nice job of it.  I was prepared to condemn it, but I can't upon reading it.  The part I'd still object to is the opening line.  "Never quite be so young again"?

Well, maybe, but in part because 1963 was on the cusp of the real 1960s.  1963, quite frankly, was in the late 1950s, era was.  The 1960s, as I've written here before, actually started in 1964 or 1965.  I guess that means I'm placing myself as being born in the cultural 50s, but I'd also note that the real 1950s featured the Korean War, the Cold War, conscription, and a host of other bad stuff.

A lot of which were going on in the early part of the calendar 60s, some of which Uncle Mike notes.

So the post wasn't nostalgic delusion.

This is political nostalgic delusion:

Nikki Haley

@NikkiHaley

·

Jun 24

Do you remember when you were growing up, do you remember how simple life was, how easy it felt? It was about faith, family, and country. We can have that again, but to do that, we must vote Joe Biden out. #RTM2023

Eh?

The view of the world that seemingly many people have about the past.  Even as this great Rockwell was being painted, the greatest war the world has ever fought was raging, which was part of Rockwell's "why we fight" point.  We'd win, but bring it to an end by using an atomic bomb, something that stained our morality in the cause and which has been a burden on the world every since.  And at the time that this was painted, there was no freedom to sit where you wanted, if you were black, in much of the US.  The "innocence" of our past is never as innocent as we might suppose.

I remember growing up that we were losing the Vietnam War and inflation was destroying my parent's savings. 

I don't like a lot of the way things are headed now, but we weren't living in a Normal Rockwell painting at any point in the past.

Nikki Haley was born in 1972, which means that she's a decade younger than me (thank goodness the GOP has some candidates that aren't 120 years old).  That means that she grew up in the 70s and 80s.

I can recall the 70s and 80s.  Indeed, I've done so here in a series of post on that topic, Growing up in the 1970s, Growing up in the 1980s .

I don't know if I have a more accurate recollection of being young than other people seemingly do, or if I lack a gene which causes us to romanticize the period of our youth.  Either way, the 1970s weren't exactly all skittles and beer, or whatever the proper analogy was.  Inflation was rampant, we lost the Vietnam War, Iran took our embassy staff hostage. . . you recall all that, Nikki?

Life wasn't actually all that simple if your parents were constantly worried about the price of absolutely everything.  The cost of gasoline was a weekly topic.  Watergate's investigations were on the news.

Do I remember how simple life was?

Yes, because I was a kid.  For most kids, life is a joy because you are a kid. Same with being a teenager, really.

I was in my late teens and early 20s in the early 80s.  For part of that time I lived at home, and I hunted and fished as I would.  Sure, life was simple, because I had no financial worries, being a single guy with no responsibilities whatsoever.

Even at that stage, however, your DNA will come in and pull the brakes and levers. Pretty soon you are worrying, or should be, about your future, including your economic future. And you'll start to look for what modern boneheaded lexiconites call "a partner", meaning a spouse.  It's the way of the world.

None of that is simple.

So was that time about faith, family, and country?  Maybe where Nikki lived, but where I lived, probably less so.  Everyone, pretty much, where I lived at the time, and where I still do, was a cultural Christian, and the mainline Protestant churches were still strong.  This was before the onset of Southern Populism brought about by that great Republican hero, Ronald Reagan.  I'm Catholic, of course, but the shift was notable.  To people just a little older than me there was disruption in the Catholic Church as reformers came in and took out the altar rails, etc., but I didn't hear much about that at home really, probably as I was a kid.  Now that I'm far past being a kid, I don't really appreciate a lot that was done to the Church in that period, by which I do not mean Vatican II.

Anyhow, people were at least culturally Christian here, and this is the least religious state in the United States.  People who weren't Christians were likely Mormons.  So I suppose she has a point there.

On family, I suppose, at that time, most families were intact.  Roe v. Wade and Hugh Hefner had started the march to Obergefell, so there were things occurring that were destructive going all the way back to the 1950s, if not before.  The 70s was the real heyday of the Sexual Revolution, and it permitted the entire atmosphere of the culture.  Playboy was sold at the grocery stores in the checkout lines, with the rack designed to camouflage most of the girl on the cover.  Moral decay hadn't set in, in the really perverse ways that would take off in the 1990s, but it had started.

What about "country".

Well, amongst the young, in the 70s, not so much, and yes.  I was in the National Guard for most of the 1980s, but frankly we didn't wear our uniforms off duty if we could avoid it, and we didn't bring it up in casual conversation. Part of that was to avoid getting a lecture from somebody our own age, a lingering aspect of the Vietnam War.  The military recovered under Reagan, but social attitudes weren't what they became later, where everyone was thanking you for your service.  More likely, somebody was going to ask "why?" if you were in the service, or maybe even give you a lecture.

None of which is to say that we don't have a moral dumpster fire going on in our society right now.  But what led us to that was long in coming and will take real work to address.  It isn't as if Joe Biden came in, and it was like electing Caligula.  Our prior President, after all, has a history of behavior that the late Hugh Hefner would have approved of.

The point?

Well, Haley brings up some valid things about the current reprehensible state of affairs.  But it would require a lot more work than voting Joe Biden out.  It's a pretty deep cultural operation, really.

The Work Truck Blog: What's this blog about?

The Work Truck Blog: What's this blog about?: 

What's this blog about?

Oh no, Yeoman, not another blog.

Well, yes.

This one is dedicated to trucks, more specifically work trucks.

I've always had a thing for trucks.  And by that I mean real trucks. Not the cards mascarading as trucks that are so common today.

I'm sure I picked this up as a kid.

My father always had a truck.  Indeed, he always had a truck when most men of his occupation had cars, and perhaps a truck at home (most did).  Most men who did what my father did, and at the time he did it they were all men, drove a car to work day by day.  Not my father.  He drove a truck.

One of my cousins with my father's 1956 Chevrolet pickup truck.

I don't think my father ever actually owned a car of his own, although he co-owned there with my mother after they were married.  Before my grandfather died in the late 1940s, and my father worked as a teenager at the company packing house, my father drove a packing house sedan that had been converted into a truck.  It was a 1949 Chevrolet Sedan that had the bonnet removed from the truck, and a box installed.

If that doesn't sound like a truck, rest assured it is. The suspensions on late 40s and early 50s sedans were pretty truck like.  I myself had a 1954 Chevrolet Sedan for many years, and I drove it fishing fairly routinely, just like you would a truck.  I've owned two other cars since then, and I'd certainly not do that with them.

He had the 1949 prior to going into the Air Force and when he came back out, he bought the truck depicted above, the only new one he ever owned.  He had that until some point in the 1960s.  I'm told that I cried when he traded it in.

At that time, he acquired a 1965 Chevrolet Camper Special, which oddly enough was a half ton.  I recall it well.  A stick shift, light green truck with a white tonneau tarp, he had it for many years.  I learned how to drive on it.  Indeed, when I was old enough to test for my license at age 16, he had only just recently replaced it with a 1972 GMC.  I can recall this as I had a hard time with the driving test as I took it on my parent's 1973 Mercury Comet, which I later owned.  It was an automatic and I kept going to shift during the test, something which was emphasized by the fact that I was nervous.

I already owned a type of truck at that time, that being what the Army called a 1/4 ton utility truck or vehicle. I.e., a Jeep.  Mine was a 1958 M38A1, my first vehicle.

In buying it, I acquired a 4x4, something my father had never owned.  Unfortunately for me, or maybe fortunately, the engine was shot when I got it, so like the first car in the ballad Our Town, it didn't go far.  It established a precedence, however.  I've never been without a 4x4 since, and I've owned two more Jeeps, one of which I currently drive almost every day.

The 58 M38A1 was ultimately replaced by a 1974 F100 4x4 pickup, a light half ton. It's amazing to think that the 74 was "old" when I got it, as couldn't have been more than six or so years old in reality.  It was well-used however, and I only drove it for a year or so before I traded it in, myself, for a Dodge D150, the first great truck I ever owned.

Also, a 1974, it was, as Dodge used to advertise, "job ready".  Suspended more like a modern 3/4 ton, it was rough riding and tough as nails.  I drove it well into college, even though by that time I already had a second truck, a 1962 Dodge W300.  Ultimately, I sold it to my father, it becoming the only 4x4 truck he ever owned.  He drove it until it died, and truth be known, he didn't live much longer after that.  It's odd to think that he was younger than I am now when he bought it from me, and used it until both he and it really could go no further.

As you can probably tell, I've owned a lot of trucks over the years.  If you stick to just pickup trucks, I've owned seven of them, of which four were half tons and the remainder one tons (or heavier).  All have been 4x4s.  If you include Jeeps as little trucks, which I think they are, I've owned an additional three.

I'm likely done buying them.  The last one I bought that I regularly drive I've had now almost twenty years.  Petroleum vehicles are coming to an end, and at age 60, I'm also coming to an end.

But I've never gotten over my love for real trucks, and hence this blog on them.

It's not cold in here.

So Long Suffering Spouse tells me.

Feels pretty darned cold to me.  And I'm not the only one.

I've been married now for almost 30 years, and for most of that time, I've been cold at home.  During the winter, the thermostat is kept low, not for economic reasons, but because "it's not cold in here".  The heat doesn't even tend to really come on here, on a permanent basis, until the snow starts flying.

As soon as spring hits, most years, the swamp cooler comes on.  I hate air conditioning anyway, but its set at freeze, or something.  

This year I got a bit of a break on that as for some reason my wife didn't turn it on very often.  It did come on, but not like it has in most years.  So summer wasn't brutally cold, indoors.

In contrast, the air conditioning was on at work after it got fixed.  I was hoping it wasn't going to get fixed, as I hate it.  But it was. There are only a couple of occupants of my quarter of the building, and one of them is one of the people who thinks it's hot in the building, so on it came.

Oddly, while its intermittent now, it's still on, and somebody thinks they have to have the blower on even if the air conditioning is not on.

We didn't have air conditioning in the house when I was a kid.

Mid Week At Work. Working at the refinery.

I've never done it.

But it sure was a staple of employment around here for a long time, including when I was young, although the handwriting was already on the wall then.

Casper got its start as a railhead.  That is, it was the penetration of the railroad into central Wyoming, not the oil industry, that brought the town about.  Nonetheless, even from its earliest days dreams of petroleum riches dominated the economic thought of the town, overshadowing the actual industries that were here at first.

Starting as early as the 1890s, however, local oil exploration brought refining to Casper.  And World War One caused it to explode.  We've written about that here:

1917 The Year that made Casper what it is. Or maybe it didn't. Or maybe it did.

As we've already addressed this topic, to a large degree, I'll forgo doing that again in depth. But I will note that for decades here, indeed most of the 20th Century, petroleum refining provided good, blue collar, industrial jobs at good wages for local people.  

And that's exactly how it went.  People graduated from high school, or perhaps attended junior college for a while, and then found work at one of the three refineries. They were trained there and worked their way up in classic blue collar occupations, like being a machinist, for example.

The loss of those jobs, for the most part, has made a permanent change in the economics of the town, and in its culture as well.  Refining, save for the remaining Sinclair refinery, has been decoupled from production.  Jobs that offered stable careers. . . they keep refining even during a recession, have gone away, with many of the remaining blue collar jobs centered in oil and gas exploration, which is very much subject to the fluctuations in the petroleum economy.  

The Voice of Generation Jones

There are times when perhaps we should retitle our blog just that.

Members of Generation Jones, including myself, in about 1965.

I hadn't realized that what I've been calling "the Gap Generation" has actually been defined as "Generation Jones" and that it's actually pretty well-defined.  Indeed, according to Wikipedia:

Generation Jones is the social cohort^[ of the latter half of the Baby Boomer Generation to the first years of Generation X.  The term Generation Jones was first coined by the cultural commentator Jonathan Pontell, who identified the cohort as those born from 1954 to 1965 in the U.S. who were children during Watergate, the oil crisis, and stagflation rather than during the 1960s, but slightly before Gen X.

Yup, that's about right.

And so is this:

While charismatic leaders like John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. inspired millions of older Boomers to work for — and witness — positive social change, younger Boomers were in preschool or not yet born. Woodstock was a defining moment for older Boomers; younger Boomers have no memories before the Watergate scandal and the cultural cynicism it begat.

Many came of age during the 70s and early 80s. They shared similar pop culture and MTV with Gen X'ers. They were young adults navigating the workforce in the 80s and 90s, but still felt the 2008 economic crisis. This hit them hard because they had to help and advise their older Millennial children while also providing for their younger Gen Z kids.

* * * 

Key characteristics assigned to members are pessimism, distrust of government, and general cynicism.

Yup, again.

And of potential interest: 

Though there are few studies on voting behavior with respect to Gen Jonesers during the 2016 and 2020 election cycles in the U.S., a general distrust of the government and cynical voting behavior tracks well with this cohort's majority support for Donald Trump, who was seen as a boisterous political outsider, in 2016. However, the cohort shifted left 2020: (Mr. Pontell says) Mr. Trump’s fumbling response to the Covid-19 crisis ... hurt him with Jonesers, who are part of the demographic most at risk from the disease ... And ... Mr. Trump’s cruel mocking of Joe Biden’s senior moments (offended them). “There are lots of seniors out there that also have senior moments,” Mr. Pontell says. “They don’t really like the president mocking those one bit.”

If I were to quibble, and indeed I'm inclined to do so, I'd not put the floor in 54, as those folks came of age in 72, when the Vietnam War was still on.  Indeed, I'd put the floor in 56.

Having said that, it's interesting to read this short synopsis, and frankly it has a lot of merit to it.  Taking a look deeper, I'd add a few things, and then I'll expand on that.  Indeed, I think it explains a lot why those of us in this generational cohort bristle at the thought that we're part of the Boomers.

Let's look again.

While charismatic leaders like John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. inspired millions of older Boomers to work for — and witness — positive social change, younger Boomers were in preschool or not yet born. Woodstock was a defining moment for older Boomers; younger Boomers have no memories before the Watergate scandal and the cultural cynicism it begat.

John F. Kennedy was assassinated when I was a few months old. I have no personal memory, rather obviously, of him at all, and the phrase "everyone remembers where they were when Kennedy was shot" might as well be stated about James A. Garfield in so far as my personal memory goes.  And, while it might surprise people who are old enough to remember him, for those of us in my generation he supplies no sort of inspiration at all.  

My mother, I'll note, really admired Kennedy, and continued to admire Jacqueline Kennedy, whom she followed.  My father, however, was never particularly impressed with Kennedy, although a Mass card was among the collection of things in his dresser drawer.  If I heard about a President that my parents both admired at home, it was most likely to be Truman.  What I was left with, regarding Kennedy, is that he was Catholic like us (which my mother would bring up), that he came from a family that my father regarded as a bit dicey in some ways, that he had questionable personal morals, and that he was responsible for the Bay of Pigs invasion, which was stupid.  Lyndon Johnson got better overall marks.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was another matter.  Everyone admired him, but he seemed like a character from the distant past.  Even with King, however, I'm pretty sure all my memories about King came from learning about him in the 1970s, probably starting with junior high or high school, and from the cultural background after he'd been killed.  When he was living, I didn't know of his existence.  Dr. King was assassinated in 1968, at which time I was five, and I have no recollection of it whatsoever, other than that I can remember riots being on television from 67 or 68, and these may have been the 68 riots that followed the assassination of Dr. King.

Indeed, the Civil Right Era, which was in full swing when I was born, seemed like something that had happened within recent American history, but far enough back it was very removed from our modern lives.  That I recall that shows my very early recollections of the times, times that "Baby Boomers" were supposedly living.  The civil rights movement wasn't something I participated in, in any fashion.  Nor was the "Camelot" atmosphere of the Kennedy Administration.

The same thing could be said about the Vietnam War, sort of, modified by the fact that it was really long.  I have some very early recollections of the war, including that a son of the couple who lived across the street was a paratrooper who was serving in Vietnam.  I mostly recall that as he had been dating, literally, the girl next door, and when he went on leave during the war he went to Hawaii, and she flew out to visit him, which was a topic of conversation in my parents home.  I also recall a sign on a door that stated "War is harmful to children and other living things", which I recall as it was such an odd thing to see in a place where nobody outwardly opposed the war.  I was in school at the time, so that may have been actually observed in the 1970s, however.  By the early 70s, and maybe even the late 60s, the background of the war was constant and so even the young were fully aware it was going on.  But it was the defeat of South Vietnam in 1975 that I really recall, although POWs returning in 1973 or so is pretty vivid as well.

The earliest thing of the "60s" I really directly participated in was the July 20, 1969, moon landing, which we watched on television.  Kids were fascinated with space at the time, and we all participated in that.  For me, personally, the next thing I really recall was the televised scenes of Jimi Hendrix playing at Woodstock.  But you really have to get into the 1970s, with the US invasion of Cambodia, that I was old enough to be aware of what was going on in the world and the culture.

That in turn means that it was really all the way into the 1970s before people like me were aware of what was up, and had a feeling about it, and that came with the backdrop of the 1970s.  Indeed, the experience is depicted really well in the television series The Wonder Years, which is specifically set from 1968 to 1973.  That means that it involved children who were older than I was, but the setting was pretty accurate.  And keep in mind, that I'd place the high school graduating class of Generation Jones as starting at 1976, whereas The Wonder Years is dealing with the class of 1974.   I debated where to put that line, but 74, the year after the active participation in the Vietnam War for the US ended, would be another good place to put it.  All in all, it has the feeling right, and the characters would have a little more of the late stages of the Vietnam War whereas folks in my line would have a little more of the rampant inflation of the 70s.

In any event, The Wonder Years does a really good job of showing how the "60s Generation", the real Boomers, were observed from Generation Jones from the outside.  We didn't participate in the events of the 60s, but they were background.  I've touched on this in a way, in a long thread regarding my early years, Growing up in the 1960s.  Indeed, in that I noted:

The Cuban Missile Crisis, the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the (American portion of the) Vietnam War, the Prague Spring, Woodstock, the Stonewall Riots, two Kennedy assassinations, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. . . all of these are things that remain fresh in the nation's memory and as long as there is a member of the Baby Boom generation still with us, they will continue to.  Youth rebellion in the United States and Europe, particularly in Germany and France, combined with a rejection of conventional morality by some of that demographic combined with the introduction of "the pill" also reach back as long influential developments.  Finally, in our list, the Second Vatican Council concluded making changes of debated nature to the practices of the Catholic Church, impacting the 2,000 year old foundational Christian religion in ways that are still being sorted out and which are still hotly debated as to their merits.

So that all must have really been something growing up, right?

Well, that's another topic, isn't it?

We're all impacted by the years in which we grow up. It cannot be denied. I've often noted here that a person's personality is basically fixed by the time they're five, and they're going back to that personality, one way or another, sooner or later.  And part of what influences that personality is the era in which we are young.

But only part, and perhaps not in the way we might imagine.

In really real ways, the central events for the Baby Boom Generation, that defined that generation and its view of the world, were like a hand grenade thrown by that generation and its events into a room we were in.  It blew up on us.

We didn't fight in Vietnam, but might have known somebody who had a family member who did.  The impact of the war on us wasn't the lost cause in Vietnam, but an ineptitude and uncertainty about the American place in the world that followed it.  If it was more direct, it was the Laotian kids at school who showed up and kept to themselves, strangers in a very strange land, guest of the nation that had helped wreck their nation.  Experimentation with drugs wasn't something cool and enlightening, but a cancer that had crept into society and was wiping out the minds of the young, including kids who were hauled out of junior high and high school as they were them.  The revolution of the 60s had torn things down, but it didn't build up anything in its place.  We hadn't participated in the counter culture, but by our early teens we were aware of it, and it had its remnants in the girls who still wore elephant bells after their time had passed.

And we didn't participate in an American economy that was the strongest in the world as the world was still recovering from World War Two. By the time we were young enough to be aware of the economy, it was suffering from inflation 

And all of that gets back to something noted above.  General skepticism.

Like the entry noted, we have memories of Watergate, the Nixon resignation, the failed Carter Administration, the fall of Vietnam, the withdrawal from Saigon, boat people, the Iranian hostage crisis, and rampant inflation.

We're not looking back on that with nostalgia.

We also have memories of lives wrecked with drugs and a drug culture that never went away.  We watched the 60s promise of a "counter culture" kill its members and then continue on to the present day and keep on killing.  We heard of the "sexual revolution" and then grew up to watch it continue to corrode society and carry on to the modern era in which all that some think about is their glands.

And we graduated into an economy with no jobs.  Unlike our older Baby Boomer predecessors, we never enjoyed an economy in which simply holding a college degree meant that a "good job".  We had to scramble to find work, and going to college, in our era, involved none of the revelry that the college experience supposedly had come to mean in the 1960s and 1970s, but a landing approach on an economic carrier in stormy seas . . . maybe you were going to make it, or maybe you were going to wreck.

Indeed, we ended up resembling The Silent Generation more than any other.  That generation came after the "Greatest" Generation that fought World War Two, and experienced that horror, and the Great Depression, as background to their childhood, like we experienced Vietnam, the Counterculture, and the like.  And we were focused, like they were, on getting by.

Also, like the Silent Generation, we didn't have a sense of rebellion against anything. We'd seen that, and it didn't work out, and we bore the brunt of its failures.  The Silent Generation hadn't rebelled against the Greatest Generation or the Lost Generation, the two generations that its parents were drawn from. Generation Jones didn't rebel against the Silent Generation or the Greatest Generation, which its parents were drawn from.  We mostly hoped just to get by, and were very much aware of what had been lost.

We still are.

Prior Threads:

Growing up in the 1960s