Decades: Can’t Live With Or Without Them

I’ve been writing about the Sixties again recently and have been finding that there’s always more to be said about that era that’s usually linked to sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, as well as protest in the streets. The challenge is to get beyond and behind the banner headlines and not to portray the era as the greatest ever. It wasn’t. Not in my book. When I write “The Sixties,” I mean a state of mind as well as a real time and place. Those Sixties began in 1955, with the civil rights movement, and reached a crescendo in 1975, with the end of the war in Vietnam, finally.

My own favorite decade is probably the 1940s, which often gets lost in the tug of war between the 1930s and the 1950s. I love 1940s film noir which I first watched on late night TV in the 1950s and that introduced me to what might be called the dark side of American life and to fictional characters who are devious and capable of betrayal at every turn in the plot. I also have 1940s nostalgia for existentialism which came from France and put down roots in the US.

Sixties euphoria was hard for me to swallow. To this day I have a hard time accepting or even tolerating the starry-eyed environmental activists who claim the human race can still get a handle on climate change and begin to cool down the planet. When was the last time they looked at global temperatures and melting glaciers? But don't give up the fight, even if it is too late to save Earth.

The whole decade thing can get tiresome; after all decades spill over and are rarely boxed-in. Still, I can’t do without the decade thing. My Forties break down into three unequal parts: one, from 1940 to 1942, which were largely a carry over from the 1930s; two, the years of WWII; and then 1946 through 1949, which began, I learned from books and from conversations with GIs, with a sense of elation and that ended with a sense of disillusionment. Fascism had been defeated. GIs came home hoping for peace and prosperity and then the Cold War began and soldiers went into combat again this time with communism, beginning in Korea and spreading around the world. That war has never ended, nor has the war against Reds, liberals and pinkos at home.

I was born in ‘42 and remember “the blackouts" —sitting in darkness to make it difficult for the Germans to bomb us—and I remember the factory where my father worked on a lathe making a small part for airplanes. For the first and the last time in his life, he was patriotic. I sat right there on the lathe. I remember a rally in ‘48—I sat on my father’s shoulders— for Henry Wallace, the so-called progressive candidate who was creamed by Truman. I have no memories of Roosevelt and no memories of the 1930s, though I experienced the Thirties vicariously through my parents who remembered going to sleep hungry at night and waking up hungry in the morning, even in the 1950s when they basked in affluence. 

The 1960s probably began for me with Kennedy’s inauguration, which I watched on TV and when I saw and heard Robert Frost read a poem. A new beginning I thought and then came the Cuban missile crisis and Kennedy’s assassination and the war in Vietnam.

I don’t expect my memories to be shared by AVA readers; memories are local as well as global, personal as well as political. Mendo memories of the Sixties are unlikely to be identical to San Francisco memories of the Sixties, though there are bound to be echoes and mirror images. Still, I do hope that my memories might stir up the memories of others and that those memories will be both comforting and troubling. I wouldn’t want anyone to be lulled into a false sense of security and the past.