ChiTownScion
Call Me a Cab
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I think it started with my dad. He was born in 1924 and was a man of the '30s and '40s more than anything else. The Depression and WWII defined him, his value system, his approach to life. Growing up on the late '60s / '70s, I lived in two worlds - the cultural mishmash of the "outside" world and the very clear moral / ethical (I didn't say always right, but clear) world inside our house of the '30s / '40s. As a kid, I knew these two worlds were very different and parts of both appealed to me, but I also knew that most kids weren't experiencing this dichotomy.
The irony is that our dads were both born in the same year. My dad died in his 80th year, ironically from an on the job injury he suffered 5 days before his passing. He worked to the very end: it was how he was wired.
Aside from his work ethic, it's ironic but my dad actually hated it when I would wax too longingly for the "good old days" that I'd never seen. And he'd tell me that I was crazy to fixate on the past as if it were some long lost golden Eldorado. If, for example, I spoke about the great old trains that ran, he'd remind me that most of those trains were sooty, time worn, and that the open platform on the end that I thought was so cool was usually occupied by obnoxious drunks. I'd tell him about the Hiawatha clocking 112 miles per hour on its regular schedule to Milwaukee, and he'd remind me that most trains ran late and the conductors were crabby old bastards who hated the passengers.
I was constantly told that things are better when I was growing up than "the good old days" of his youth. I had a roof over my head, decent clothes, I ate well, and was sent to decent schools. His "golden era" consisted of an alcoholic father who abandoned him at an orphanage at age three after his mother died, arbitrary beatings, and hunger. If I spoke of being able to see a movie for a dime, he'd tell me that a dime was as good as ten dollars if you didn't have one. If Frank Sinatra or Bing Crosby came on the radio he'd gripe about "those old guys who should step aside and give a younger kid a chance." In short: no rosy past for him. "These are the good old days," he'd tell me.
And I have to say that in some ways he was right: I have led a much more fulfilling and rewarding life than any of my grandparents lived. I've seen parts of the world that they could only read about in a National Geographic, and enjoyed better food, better drink, a nicer home, etc., than they could even imagine. My grandmother lived to watch me receive my law degree and be sworn in as a member of the bar: she was the only one in her family to even get a high school diploma.
As far as their having at one time facing adversity and "fighting the bosses?" Most of my mother's family were outspoken New Deal Democrats and big supporters of organized labor, and as much as they took pride in the advances in workers rights in which they played a small part, not a one of them would ever want to fight those battles on the picket lines again. Buying a small tract house in a Levitttown type suburb was a hard won stability for them: I don't see it as selling out at all. Compared to what they grew up with, it was a vast improvement.
That doesn't mean that I don't appreciate my Art Fawcett fedoras, or my pin stripe suits, or even my A-2 flight jacket. There's a lot to be said for the clothes, the music, the entertainment back then. It was a culturally rich time, and it left a legacy that I very much love. I can laugh at recordings of the old Jack Benny program, but I have to be honest: I really do not want to go back to living in a one bedroom apartment with three other people like so many of my relatives did when they first listened to Rochester, Frank Nelson, and Phil Harris. We have the good fortune to be able to enjoy the good parts of the past and not suffer its destructive and even fatal downsides: methinks that's something that would make the vast majority back in the Era quite envious of us.