Memoir Writing Prompt: What’s Special about Your Generation?

This is a longer post today because I wanted to share “Our Special Group” with you that my cousin passed on to me via facebook. I googled it and the original author is unknown; that’s a shame, because it’s a well-written listing of legacy.

The Silent Generation was born in the 1930s and 40s. I was born in December of 1949: a Baby Boomer. However, I can remember many of the happenings recorded here. My mother was eight years old in the year of the stock market crash, so I reaped the habit from her of pinching pennies. In first grade, I practiced cowering under my school desk in the chance that Russia would drop an atomic bomb on us. My first sight of the NBC peacock in full color held me entranced. In this list below, I find so many opportunities to write for those who come after us.

Memoir Writing Prompt: Choose one or two of these events below and write your memories of that time. How did you feel when you saw dads coming home from war? What radio show did you listen to? Describe your excitement at seeing shows on television for the first time.

Today’s Writing Prompt: How is the “play” of your children or grandchildren today different from the “play” that you and your friends experienced as children?

Have fun writing of your experiences for your generations to come.

Subject: Our Special Group

Born in the 1930s and early 40s, we exist as a very special age group.

We are the smallest group of children born since the early 1900s.

We are the last generation, climbing out of the depression, who can remember the winds of war and the impact of a world at war, which rattled the structure of our daily lives for years.

We are the last to remember ration books for everything from gas to 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 can remember milk being delivered to our house early in the morning and placed in the “milk box” on the porch.

We are the last to see the gold stars in the front windows of our grieving neighbors whose sons died in the War.

We saw the ‘boys’ home from the war, build their little houses.

We are the last generation who spent childhood without television; instead, we imagined what we heard on the radio.

As we all like to brag, with no TV, we spent our childhood “playing outside”.

There was no little league.

There was no city playground for kids.

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.

On Saturday afternoons, the movies, gave us newsreels sandwiched in between westerns and cartoons.

Telephones were one to a house, often shared (party Lines) and hung on the wall in the kitchen (no cares about privacy).

Computers were called calculators, they were hand cranked; typewriters were driven by pounding fingers, throwing the carriage, and changing the ribbon.

The ‘INTERNET’ and ‘GOOGLE’ were words that did not exist.

Newspapers and magazines were written for adults and the news was broadcast on our radio in the evening by Gabriel Heatter and later Paul Harvey.

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 opened many factories for work.

New highways would bring jobs and mobility.

The veterans joined civic clubs and became active in politics.

The radio network expanded from 3 stations to thousands.

Our parents were suddenly free from the confines of the depression and the war, and 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.

We entered a world of overflowing plenty and opportunity; a world where we were welcomed, enjoyed ourselves and felt secure in our future.

Although depression poverty was deeply remembered.

Polio was still a crippler.

We came of age in the 50s and 60s.

The Korean War was a dark passage in the early 50s and by mid-decade school children were ducking under desks for Air-Raid training.

Russia built the “Iron Curtain” and China became Red China.

Eisenhower sent the first ‘Army Advisers’ to Vietnam.

Castro took over in Cuba and Khrushchev came to power.

We are the last generation to experience an interlude when there were no threats to our homeland. The war was over and the cold war, terrorism, “global warming”, and perpetual economic insecurity had yet to haunt life with unease.

Only our generation can remember both a time of great war, and a time when our world was secure and full of bright promise and plenty. and lived through both.

We grew up at the best possible time, a time when the world was getting better. not worse.

We are “The Last”

More than 99 % of us are either retired or are deceased, and we feel privileged to have “lived in the best of times”!