Young in the 40s and 50s in Somerville and Boston

My generation was born in the middle of the 1930s and bloomed in the 1950s rooted in a cultural soil no more nourishing for our souls than ground in an abandoned city lot is for plants. We were 10 in 1945 when a madness inherent in humanity’s genes finally stopped killing millions of people worldwide. The Korean War in 1950 dulled our youthful dreaming but we had lived happily enough during the Second World War and a new one far away did not spoil our fun except for those of us who were nearly at draft age. We kissed one another in our teens in cars built in the 1930s and 40s in dark parking lots and listened to songs from jukeboxes on plastic-covered seats in new diners blazing with light. Even the mouths on television in black and white forming bullying words denouncing communism did not wake us up. We tried to keep dreaming and not open our eyes and discover that everything had already been done and there was nothing for us to do. Our society had been fitted together so harmoniously by the necessities of a war economy in the 1940s that, when the anticommunist hammers of the 40s and 50s tried to keep it in place by nailing it down crudely, few saw that it was a cockeyed attempt at unity rather than the real thing. The struggles of blacks for equality and justice taught some whites by 1965 that America needed to be realigned but it remained grossly out of whack until it exploded a few years later in riotous violence. In 1962 Vasili Arkhipov, the Russian naval commander of a fleet during the Cuban Missile Crisis, countermanded an order from his superiors for a submarine to launch a nuclear weapon and prevented the Cold War from becoming a nuclear disaster. President Kennedy was a man from the generation preceding ours. His generation sat on us like we were a horse and it a knight riding purposefully to some battle while we had no idea where we were heading. The Cold War knocked Kennedy off his horse and Khrushchev of Russia fell from power along with him. They had stood tall and manly  during the Cuban Missile Crisis and found a passage where enemies could walk together peacefully and lead the world safely away from planetary annihilation. For a few months, their courage blew up towards the heavens the merciless ideological hatreds of the Cold War founded like all ideologies on nothing but men with power pulled the hatreds back down to earth. We were in our late twenties in 1963 during John Kennedy’s funeral. Our thirties were just around the corner and we had not yet done anything historically that was uniquely ours. The Cold War went on for almost thirty more years and our lives bounced along with it like we were solid balls filled with air with no purpose except to be dribbled. Oh, it wasn’t so bad. We married and reproduced ourselves. We worked. We did what we had to do. We made money. By the 1970s we all had color television. Then in the 1980s we had remotes. Wow.

Read the whole autobiography, Young in the 40s and 50s in Somerville and Boston at: www.usoftheworld.com/autobiography