Life As a Baby Boomer

Chapter 6 Life as a Baby Boomer

Red Diaper Baby

At the outset of the classic 60’s film Yellow Submarine, a cartoon Ringo Starr, heads down, hands in his pockets, walking across the screen muttering over and over to himself in a sad resigned voice nothing ever happens to me … nothing ever happens to me… That was me. At least it was a part of me that I was conscious of and I distinctly remember it even now, many years since. It was before the Beatles, including Ringo, the 1950’s had ended and the sixties had literally begun, 1960, 1961,1962, and I and was getting impatient to get on with it, go to high school. The huge fins growing out of ever-longer and longer automobiles were becoming passé, and the custom of buying a brand-new car every single year, trading in of course the old one, was being replaced by an exodus to the suburbs where cars properly belonged. A decade before, the automobile had already pushed out the trolleys in Newark, where I grew up, so that I only knew their obsolete tracks, the way our 1952 green Desoto skidded when we drove on Clinton Avenue. I was born in 1949 the quintessential early baby boomer, now entering the early years of the baby boomers’ grand entry into Medicare and Social Security. It will go on for the next several decades until there are no more to enter, no one left alive born before 1965. One of my first memories is sitting in front of a TV at a neighbor’s house, the one on my block among the first to buy a TV set, it being heavily marketed immediately in the New York area. Not that I knew anything about that. The next memory of mine is getting up early in the morning, the rest of the family asleep, a pioneer in growing up watching TV. I remember absorbing in wonder and confusion, at the age of 3 or 4, an odd stew of shows, though I didn’t realize it at the time. Most of those shows are virtually unknown to anyone else now so I’ll name a number of them: the elegant New York sit coms, My Little Margie, Topper and Private Secretary (The Anne Southern Show); the creepy Andy Devine Show, incongruously containing within it a film-like series of adventures of a boy and his elephant in the jungle; Flash Gordon, an adumbration of Star Trek, which for some reason I found very disturbing; and the heart-warming I

Remember Mamma. These were my first experiences of television. And it was an experience that not just new to me—of course, little more than a baby— but a new experience really to everybody around me. What is especially of interest to me of these days, and those to follow, is that the life of the baby boom generation has continued in that way, to contain within it the life of the world. And as it grows older, to me—for what it’s worth—it is hard not to see that we are dying of cancer. In most respects, my family life and friendships as a child fitted the norms of the 1950s (A film that creates an uncannily accurate feeling of life in the 50’s I think is Terrence Malik’s Tree of Life). In one respect, however I was a member of an extremely tiny subset of baby boomers, apart from the rest, in the way our parents looked at the world. We were known—as I was only to find out many years later—as “red-diaper babies,” an affectionate term mostly used within the tribe. My father had been in the American Communist Party during the 30s leading up to the War. Like many others who had been in the Party, he severed ties with it when the Hitler- Stalin Pact was signed in 1939. He had a tight circle of friends, primarily, like him, high school teachers in the Newark public school system, his closest ones having been in the Party like him. And they loved to talk politics. Oh, they loved to talk. They would gather at each other’s houses for Saturday night dinner parties, with their spouses, and there would be a lot of arguing, but never in real anger. And all along it was the things they didn’t argue about that really mattered. A few in the circle and many that they knew in the Newark School systems at large had lost their jobs due to the red-scare led by Joseph McCarthy. One of my father’s closest friends, Bob Lowenstein, a French teacher who taught at Weequahic high school was fired and did not teach all during my childhood. Later a court ruled that due to tenure his firing was unwarranted and he received back pay for all those years. I soaked it all up. I have memories of sitting on the carpeted staircase leading up to my bedroom dead tired but unable to break away from their arguments. Often as I got older I took sides in my mind, not always siding with my father, but most of the time. And by the age of around 10 or 11 I would use what I heard from my father and others to make unusual pronouncements, and get into long arguments with my elementary school classmates: challenging unquestioned matters such as the threat of the Soviet Union, the Cuban revolution, and supposed freedom in America. I still remember how I told my class-mates Khrushchev wasn’t crazy for taking off a shoe and pounding it on his desk because he was so mad. It’s just the way Russians clap, a cultural thing I said. I had heard it somewhere.