My father had just celebrated his 14th birthday and was sitting in a movie house in White Plains, New York watching “The Swiss Family Robinson.” The film stopped, the lights came on and a man walked down the aisle. Turning to face the audience, he said in a loud voice, “The war is over!”
It was August 1945 and the Empire of Japan had agreed to surrender to Allied forces. My father walked out to find people cheering and honking horns.
It was an era when wars had an end. That war was fought, on two sides of the globe, by people who are now sometimes called “The Greatest Generation.” My dad and his cohort were a half-step behind that group. He was a member of what might, in retrospect, be called “The Luckiest Generation.”
Of course, one man’s life does not a generation make and “lucky” has always been a relative term. My dad’s cohort had their war in Korea, a war that had no official end and one from which may never returned. Still, Korea was not the horror of World War II nor was it the long futile slog of Vietnam that waited for the generation a half-step behind my father’s.
My father, knowing draft was inevitable, enlisted in the Navy. He was particularly lucky. In my childhood, a red leatherette photo album full of snapshots of his service years sat on a shelf in our house. It was filled with black-and-white images of England, Italy and Greece, each captioned in my dad’s meticulous script. There are photos from Germany, where he went on leave to visit his parents’ brothers and sisters. In cities and villages not yet recovered from the bombs dropped by American warplanes, he posed in his U.S. Navy blues, a full head taller than the tante and onkel tucked under each arm.
Judging by his album, my father was a tourist in uniform. There are a few shots of shipboard life and a few of his vessel, the destroyer escort USS Holder, undergoing maintenance at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The Navy delivered on the promise it made; he learned a trade. He came home at war’s end to a healthy economy and his trade became a career as that economy continued to expand for the next twenty years, allowing him to build a life for his family and earn a place in America’s middle class.
When the economy began to show its seams in the 1970s, he began to see signs that things might not always be as good as he’d come to know them. Richard Nixon introduced programs called “Phase One” and “Phase Two,” freezing wages and prices. Mr. Nixon gave way to Gerald Ford and “Whip Inflation Now” buttons and still things seemed stalled.
It was around this time I remember my father pushing back his plate at the dinner table and passing a hand across his forehead. “I don’t envy you kids,” he’d say and gaze off. “The world you’re going to have to live in….”
It wasn’t so bad just yet. His sons went to college and when the rust-belt construction industry where he’d spent his working life slowed in the mid-1980s, he was senior enough to take an early retirement, avoiding the ignominy of a layoff. He and my mom moved to Florida and live there still.
A child of immigrants, my father in the late 20th century had been able to take the next step and help his sons take yet another. The American Dream. It wasn’t just a dream for the people, but also for the nation. Up until my parents’ generation, America kept getting better – more land, more states, more opportunity, more democracy.
My father’s generation was the luckiest because it had more of everything than the any generation that went before it – more freedom, more leisure, more individual control of one’s destiny.
My generation’s had it pretty good, too. We’ll stagger across the finish line still standing. We’ll certainly have it better than the generations that follow.
The Luckiest Generation
My father had just celebrated his 14th birthday and was sitting in a movie house in White Plains, New York watching “The Swiss Family Robinson.” The film stopped, the lights came on and a man walked down the aisle. Turning to face the audience, he said in a loud voice, “The war is over!”
It was August 1945 and the Empire of Japan had agreed to surrender to Allied forces. My father walked out to find people cheering and honking horns.
It was an era when wars had an end. That war was fought, on two sides of the globe, by people who are now sometimes called “The Greatest Generation.” My dad and his cohort were a half-step behind that group. He was a member of what might, in retrospect, be called “The Luckiest Generation.”
Of course, one man’s life does not a generation make and “lucky” has always been a relative term. My dad’s cohort had their war in Korea, a war that had no official end and one from which may never returned. Still, Korea was not the horror of World War II nor was it the long futile slog of Vietnam that waited for the generation a half-step behind my father’s.
My father, knowing draft was inevitable, enlisted in the Navy. He was particularly lucky. In my childhood, a red leatherette photo album full of snapshots of his service years sat on a shelf in our house. It was filled with black-and-white images of England, Italy and Greece, each captioned in my dad’s meticulous script. There are photos from Germany, where he went on leave to visit his parents’ brothers and sisters. In cities and villages not yet recovered from the bombs dropped by American warplanes, he posed in his U.S. Navy blues, a full head taller than the tante and onkel tucked under each arm.
Judging by his album, my father was a tourist in uniform. There are a few shots of shipboard life and a few of his vessel, the destroyer escort USS Holder, undergoing maintenance at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The Navy delivered on the promise it made; he learned a trade. He came home at war’s end to a healthy economy and his trade became a career as that economy continued to expand for the next twenty years, allowing him to build a life for his family and earn a place in America’s middle class.
When the economy began to show its seams in the 1970s, he began to see signs that things might not always be as good as he’d come to know them. Richard Nixon introduced programs called “Phase One” and “Phase Two,” freezing wages and prices. Mr. Nixon gave way to Gerald Ford and “Whip Inflation Now” buttons and still things seemed stalled.
It was around this time I remember my father pushing back his plate at the dinner table and passing a hand across his forehead. “I don’t envy you kids,” he’d say and gaze off. “The world you’re going to have to live in….”
It wasn’t so bad just yet. His sons went to college and when the rust-belt construction industry where he’d spent his working life slowed in the mid-1980s, he was senior enough to take an early retirement, avoiding the ignominy of a layoff. He and my mom moved to Florida and live there still.
A child of immigrants, my father in the late 20th century had been able to take the next step and help his sons take yet another. The American Dream. It wasn’t just a dream for the people, but also for the nation. Up until my parents’ generation, America kept getting better – more land, more states, more opportunity, more democracy.
My father’s generation was the luckiest because it had more of everything than the any generation that went before it – more freedom, more leisure, more individual control of one’s destiny.
My generation’s had it pretty good, too. We’ll stagger across the finish line still standing. We’ll certainly have it better than the generations that follow.
© Mark Floegel, 2008