• Welcome to the new SAOCA website. Already a member? Simply click Log In/Sign Up up and to the right and use your same username and password from the old site. If you've forgotten your password, please send an email to membership@sunbeamalpine.org for assistance.

    If you're new here, click Log In/Sign Up and enter your information. We'll approve your account as quickly as possible, typically in about 24 hours. If it takes longer, you were probably caught in our spam/scam filter.

    Enjoy.

My Generation

DanR

Diamond Level Sponsor
A Special Group / Born Between 1930 - 1946. Today, we range in ages from 75 to 90.
32.png

This is for their children, and grand- children!

Interesting Facts for you:

You are the smallest group of children born since the early 1900s.

You are the last generation, climbing out of the depression, who can remember the winds of war and the impact of a world at war which rattled the structure of our daily lives for years.

You are the last to remember ration books for everything from gas to sugar to shoes to stoves.

You saved tin foil and poured fat into tin cans.

You saw cars up on blocks because tires weren't available.

You can remember milk being delivered to your house early in the morning and placed in the "milk box" on the porch.

You are the last to see the gold stars in the front windows of grieving neighbors whose sons died in the War.

You saw the 'boys' home from the war, build their little houses.

You are the last generation who spent childhood without television; instead, you imagined what you heard on the radio.

With no TV until the 50's, you spent your childhood "playing outside".

There was no little league. There was no city playground for kids.

The lack of television in your early years meant, that you had little real understanding of what the world was like.

On Saturday afternoons, the movies gave you newsreels sandwiched in between westerns and cartoons.

Telephones were one to a house, often shared (party lines) and hung on the wall in the kitchen (no cares about privacy).

Computers were called calculators; they were hand cranked.

Typewriters were driven by pounding fingers, throwing the carriage and changing the ribbon.

INTERNET' and 'GOOGLE' were words that did not exist.

Newspapers and magazines were written for adults and the news was broadcast on your radio in the evening.

As you grew up, the country was exploding with growth.

The Government gave returning Veterans the means to get an education and spurred colleges to grow. Loans fanned a housing boom. Pent up demand coupled with new installment payment plans opened many factories for work.

New highways would bring jobs and mobility.

The Veterans joined civic clubs and became active in politics.

The radio network expanded from 3 stations to thousands.

Your parents were suddenly free from the confines of the depression and the war, and they threw themselves into exploring opportunities they had never imagined.

You weren't neglected, but you weren't today's all-consuming family focus. They were glad you played by yourselves until the street lights came on. They were busy discovering the post war world.

You entered a world of overflowing plenty and opportunity; a world where you were welcomed, enjoyed yourselves and felt secure in your future though depression poverty was deeply remembered.

Polio was still a crippler.

You came of age in the 50s and 60s. You are the last generation to experience an interlude when there were no threats to our homeland. The second world war was over and the cold war, terrorism, global warming, and perpetual economic insecurity had yet to haunt life with unease.

Only your generation can remember both a time of great war, and a time when our world was secure and full of bright promise and plenty. You grew up at the best possible time, a time when the world was getting better...

If you are in this group, you are "The Last Ones." More than 99 % of ‘this group’ are either retired or deceased, and you should feel privileged to have "lived in the best of times!"
 

mikephillips

Donation Time
My folks, now both gone, were 1930s babies. And having grown up in rural small town Ohio, some of the above was still true into the early 60s, We had one phone and a party line as well as milk delivery to the house when I was little. Dad's law office had a couple "adding" machines and I'd spend much of my summers running around the neighborhood. And unlike today, We walked to school, a distance of about 3/4 mile each way, good weather or bad, starting when I was first grade. Those were the days when there weren't the worries and distractions of today.
 

MikeH

Diamond Level Sponsor
My folks were also born in the 30’s. I remember milk and bread delivery. There was even a diaper service that picked up and delivered diapers. We had a party line and a black & white TV. I remember getting our first color TV, and crowding around it to watch Star Trek. I also remember our first window air conditioner. In Pennsylvania, stores were closed on Sundays because of blue laws. My brother, sister, and I got new clothes once a year, just before school started. Then our old school clothes became our play clothes. We rode bicycles all over the place, played baseball in the summer, and football in the winter. In the summers my friends and I would be out and gone as soon as we got up and would be off doing something til sunset. Often just wandering the woods on some “expedition” all day. My mother didn’t have a bell, but she could whistle very loudly. When I heard that, it was time to come home. And If I did something wrong, my parents always found out about it. One thing I remember from when I was about 5 years old was that we had a ‘49 Ford. We didn’t have a lot of money then and my dad would run kerosene in it. We lived up a mountain road and the car, on kerosene, didn’t have the power to pull the hill, so my dad had to park it at the bottom and walk home.
 
Last edited:

mikephillips

Donation Time
While there are positives about today's world, the ability to chat with guys nearly anywhere in the world for example, or watching a cam like Trafalgar Square just for the heck of it, I do miss the days when we didn't all feel the need or push from others to be connected 24/7. And the ease of choosing what you were going to spend the day doing based on your age.
 

MikeH

Diamond Level Sponsor
While there are positives about today's world, the ability to chat with guys nearly anywhere in the world for example, or watching a cam like Trafalgar Square just for the heck of it, I do miss the days when we didn't all feel the need or push from others to be connected 24/7. And the ease of choosing what you were going to spend the day doing based on your age.
My first mobile phone was a Motorola brick. It was my car phone. I never took it out of the car. Just brought the battery inside to put it on the charger.
 

Bill Blue

Platinum Level Sponsor
We walked almost as much as a Frenchman. .7 miles to school, home for lunch! Twenty minutes to walk home, twenty minutes for lunch, twenty minutes for the walk back to school. Temperature 5 degrees below zero, suck it up and go. I'm pretty sure I froze my feet at least once, as an adult I've always had very cold, sweaty feet in cold weather. At least the math was easy. When Dad wrecked the car, we'd take the city bus to downtown to watch the Friday night double feature, but walked almost 2 miles home because the buses quit running before the last movie was over. I might have been in the 1st grade at that time. The City of Richmond (pop 44,000) school district owned a couple of school buses, but they were only used to transport the sports teams and the High School band to other cities. Walk to High School was 1.1 miles, but we could eat lunch in the school cafeteria.

Bill
 

bulldurham

Platinum Level Sponsor
I had to walk through 10 foot of shag carpet just to change the TV channel.
Actually we didn't have TV or indoor bath until 1956. The freedom to roam though was a big thing , as long as we got the cows milked, the firewood cut, the vegetables picked, the hay stacked, on a pole, the eggs gathered and the butter made. Didn't have to walk to school, though.
A lot of good things in those 40's and 50's, but I would not want to go through it again. Never had any cash but the trading was better than cash.
Tip boards were the most common way to make a dollar if you could afford the tip board and by todays standards cars were dirt cheap, well into the 60's and those cars are the one's everyone wants today.
Sitting in the outhouse and reading the Sears catalog was the greatest escape, dreaming about having the things you couldn't have.
I wonder if our Grandparents worried about us as much as we worry about our grand children today.
 

mikephillips

Donation Time
My first mobile phone was a Motorola brick. It was my car phone. I never took it out of the car. Just brought the battery inside to put it on the charger.

Reminds me of this guy I used to work with back in the late 80s, got himself a "mobile" phone in what was basically a large briefcase, battery like a loaf of bread. He used to like to call some of us just to say "I'm in a bar or car or such, and on the phone". We got to the point of saying that's nice, you actually want something??...
 

mikephillips

Donation Time
I had to walk through 10 foot of shag carpet just to change the TV channel.
Actually we didn't have TV or indoor bath until 1956. The freedom to roam though was a big thing , as long as we got the cows milked, the firewood cut, the vegetables picked, the hay stacked, on a pole, the eggs gathered and the butter made.

"Never mind pumping any water till your parents are caught with a cistern empty on a Saturday night, and that's trouble"....
 

MikeH

Diamond Level Sponsor
Reminds me of this guy I used to work with back in the late 80s, got himself a "mobile" phone in what was basically a large briefcase, battery like a loaf of bread. He used to like to call some of us just to say "I'm in a bar or car or such, and on the phone". We got to the point of saying that's nice, you actually want something??...
I remember going home on leave in the mid 80’s. My wife and I went to the new Mall. We saw a guy walking around talking on a phone with a bag hanging from his shoulder. My thought at that time was, man you must be important that you can’t be away from a phone.
 

mikephillips

Donation Time
I wish those who feel important would at least look up from it to avoid running into other people. Had someone, face down "charge" into me at the grocery store as they came around the corner and had the nerve to tell me to watch where I was going, despite the fact I was standing still.... I personally could live without the phone my job forces me to carry.
 

Bill Blue

Platinum Level Sponsor
Remember when paigers were a status symbol? I met a guy that had four of them that he carried all time!
Bill
 
Top