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History has shown that society makes large leaps from one generation to the next. Has that trend line been severed?
In Googling the phrase “the rapid pace of change,” I came away with 481,000 hits. This phrase, however, has little meaning for the male 70-year-old Ingram’s reader born into a middle-class Kansas City family. Chances are 9 in 10 that this Baby Boomer is living a life all but indistinguishable from that of his old man.
As a thought experiment, I imagine this Boomer coming of age in my 100-year-old house south of the Country Club Plaza. Happily, for this little fellow, the major creature comforts were all in place when he arrived home from the hospital, still something of a novel place to be born at that time. In 1950, his family had indoor plumbing, electricity, a telephone, and central heating. They bought a television set shortly before his arrival so that they too could watch Uncle Milty on the Texaco Star Theater, along with 60 percent of their neighbors.
Our Boomer kid would never see an “ice man” other than in an O’Neill play. His nicely bourgeois family had a refrigerator with an automatic defroster, an electric range, an electric pop-up toaster, and an electric sewing machine. At General Electric in the 1950s, “progress” was the “most important product.” Seeing her neighbor’s fully automated, top-loading washing machine, our Boomer’s mom leaned on hubby to buy her one of her own. Always uneasy about the sight of his wife’s undies on a clothesline, dad bought a front-loading dryer as well.
The family’s most valued appliance arrived shortly before the Boomer baby. As adolescents his parents sweated through the pre-climate-
change summers of 1934, the hottest in American history, and 1936, the hottest in Kansas City history. In 1936, Kansas City experienced an incredible 53 days with temperatures above 100 degrees. The huge clouds of black dust sweeping off the plains did not improve anyone’s mood. Air conditioning was a Godsend.
The home’s radiator-based heating system made central air unfeasible, but the window units allowed the family to sleep indoors even on the hottest nights. No more family sleep-outs, including those in Swope Park. Like most of the neighbors, the Boomer’s family had one car and a one-car garage in which to park it. Each morning the Boomer’s mom drove dad to his office on the Country Club Plaza and kept the car to run errands.
Somehow, a great many kids managed to survive the trips without rear-facing car seats or any seat belts at all. Although the streetcar still ran through the neighborhood, almost no one took it. The last of the city’s 25 streetcar routes shut down in 1957.
Developer J.C. Nichols, who created the Plaza as well as the neighborhoods south of it, helped make the streetcar obsolete. Citizens loved his developments. The homes were everything today’s city planners hate—spacious and set part with room enough for a family car. Anyone paying attention could see that Nichols and company were putting a fatal squeeze on shopping in the auto-unfriendly Downtown. To deny Nichols his due, critics have taken to attacking his neighborhoods for their restrictive covenants. This argument would carry at least a little moral force if the existing order were more enlightened.
For countless generations, middle-class men of all creeds and colors have been setting traps for their sons. They know that kids who grow up in heated caves won’t want to spend their lives in unheated ones.
It wasn’t. Missouri schools were still officially segregated 30 years after Nichols built the Plaza, as were many of the city’s hotels and restaurants. “The past is a foreign country,” British author L.P Hartley astutely observed, “they do things differently there.” This is wisdom
the editors of the local newspaper would do well to absorb. I prefer not to remind them that when J.C. Nichols was founding the Plaza, their
parent company’s McClatchy brothers, Charles and Valentine, were founding the Japanese Exclusion League. For all of today’s self-congratulation about adaptability, the 70 years prior to 1950 witnessed much more profound change than the 70 years since, especially for women.
In the 1880s, families with six or more children were commonplace, and the babies were born at home. The fact that no woman in America had electricity back then, and few had indoor plumbing, made raising these little buggers something of a challenge. The phrase “Baby Boom” suggests that families in the 1950s were as large as those in the past, but they weren’t. By the 1950s, families with more than three children were rare, and two had become the norm.
Seventy years ago, women married younger than today—the median age in 1950 being just 20 as opposed to 28 in 2020—but on average they ceased having children by the age of 27. In 1880, they were still having children at 40. In 1880, for all but “spinsters” and the wealthy, the idea of a career for a woman was as unthinkable as a girls’ weekend in Las Vegas. Men weren’t keeping women in their place. Life was.
By 1950, technology had begun to liberate middle- and even working-class women from that foreign country called “the past.” The unsung heroes of this liberation had names like Edison, Singer, Carrier, Ford, and Westinghouse. In 1950, women made up about one-third of the total work force. Today that figure is close to half. More women go to college today than do men, and they have achieved parity in many
professional schools. That said, many Boomer women chose to live as their mothers did. Many Millennial women choose to live as their grandmothers did. (No one wants to live as great-granny did).
These are choices largely denied to men. For most men, being a stay-at-home dad is as charmless an option as downward mobility. Middle-class men emulate their fathers because they feel they have to; their grandsons will emulate them for the same reason. Truth be told, ever since that first cave man invented fire, middle-class men of all creeds and colors have been setting traps for their sons.
They know that kids who grow up in heated caves won’t want to spend their lives in unheated ones. They won’t find mates who do, either. It’s that simple.
OK Boomer. Life expectancy in the U.S. is trending down for yet another year, a little different than your parents experience. Likewise more than half the animals on the planet since you matriculated at the university are now absent. Lazy ideations about reality and callousness smug pollyanna pronouncements are delusional indications of either the onset of dementia or the refusal to accept personal responsibility, both hallmarks of the boomer generation.