Sexy sixty? Doug Deuchler gets his gray hair trimmed by barber Christine Brletich, as other members of the first Baby Boomer class (1946) await their turn at Joe Dell’s Hair Salon on North Boulevard-(left to right) actor John Roeder, special ed teacher Sue Zoloto, and Marilyn Pocius, culinary writer and author of A Cook’s Guide to Chicago.
Photo by Frank Pinc
In case you haven’t heard (fat chance!), the Baby Boomers have started turning 60. We’re a massive group, those of us born in 1946, from Bush and Clinton, to Liza and Cher, from Donald Trump, Diane Keaton, Reggie Jackson, Susan Sarandon, Sylvester Stallone, Jimmy Buffett, and Suzanne Somers, to Dolly Parton, Connie Chung, Patty Duke, Tommie Lee Jones, Sandy Duncan, Deepak Chopra, Sally Field, Candice Bergen, and Danny Glover-the list goes on and on. We are turning 60 at the rate of roughly 7,918 per day. And this week is my turn.
By the time you read these lines, I will have become a sexagenarian.
Well, the term at least has sex in it.
Turning 60 is a daunting experience. But my friends who were also born in 1946 insist, “60 is the new 40.”
Yeah, right. I’m so sure we’ll all live to 120.
My age peers also keep reminding me, “Age is just a number.”
Yes, but we only get so many numbers. There’s the rub.
Actually, I do appreciate “turning the corner” into our 60s. These crossroad birthdays do make you look back and reflect.
Those of us born 60 years ago were such a huge mass that from the get-go we really felt empowered. From kindergarten on up we were routinely told we were the biggest class each school had ever seen. Everything from the Salk Vaccine to Disneyland was designed for us. We made the news and we read the news-diligently.
It pains me now that so many young people don’t even watch the news, let alone read the paper. Back in the day we nave, deluded Baby Boomers were intent on changing the world-our world. We felt ownership of what was going on. We were cynical but still thought we knew ways to fix things. We were luckier than kids now; we thought we could make a difference, and in many widespread ways we did. We worked in civil rights, we fought in Viet Nam, we protested against the war in Viet Nam. Involvement was our thing.
Yet for sure it wasn’t all about social activism. When we came of age in the Summer of Love, many of us took psychedelic side-trips, too. Some of us even inhaled. Lots of us became hippies, at least for a while. Now we’re “abbies”-Aging Baby Boomers. We once talked endlessly about drugs and sex and rock ‘n’ roll. Now we discuss which blood pressure meds work best, the advantages of an AARP membership, and so-and-so’s latest surgical procedure.
There’s no denying, we’re growing older (note: I said older, not old-we upper-end Baby Boomers never allow use of the “o” word in our presence.) Some of us, in fact, will have to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into our new decade.
See, we were the ones who vowed to stay “forever young.” We’d never trust anyone over 30. Now we’re twice that age.
But there’s no point in whining about turning 60. It’s a gift. By the time Mozart was our age, he’d been dead for 25 years.
When it comes to getting older, you simply have to keep your sense of humor. It’s too scary otherwise. Aging is perhaps God’s best practical joke. Every time you look, something new is growing in you or on you. I now have more hair growing on my back than on my head.
You just can’t take anything too seriously, especially yourself.
But aging does help you sort things out. Stuff makes more sense; you have a clear image of yourself. I don’t know if I’d call it wisdom, but it’s a calming and steadying force. Though they’re long gone, for instance, my parents make lots more sense to me now.
Of course, I still have not found out the answers to the big questions I used to ponder during childhood, like: If Pluto and Goofy are both dogs, why does one bark and scamper around on all fours while the other wears a fedora and drives a convertible?
Generationally challenged
Each generation has its challenges and issues. I’m always amazed that the so-called Baby Boom begins with people my age-those of us born in 1946-and includes those born all the way down into 1964, our year of high school graduation. John F. Kennedy was killed during the fall of our senior year. Those born at the tail end of the Baby Boom were in college during the Reagan era. Needless to say, the values of the two “end zones” are markedly different.
Our parents survived the Depression, yet we haven’t done as well saving our money. Many of us consider ourselves more evolved, active, and tolerant than our parents. Lots of us, especially those of us from the working class, were the first to graduate college in our entire extended family. We enjoyed far more opportunities than our folks could ever imagine.
We were the first generation to be so heavily influenced by the media. I wore my Davy Crockett “coonskin cap” to fourth grade and carried a Gene Autry lunch box. On my way home from grammar school one day, scores of us dangerously ran into heavy traffic, chasing “Little Oscar” in his Wiener-Mobile until that bizarre phallic vehicle finally stopped and the beaming midget in the cook’s hat pitched wiener whistles at us. (I still have mine.)
I now experience “senior moments,” when I forget what was just on the tip of my tongue or what I’ve gone to retrieve from another room. But I’ll never forget any of the mass of useless trivia that’s jam-packed into my media memory-like Sky King flew a plane called the Song Bird, Friday was Talent Round-Up Day on the Mickey Mouse Club, Dobie Gillis’ beatnik buddy was Maynard G. Krebs, Ricky Ricardo played his conga drum at The Tropicana, and Spin and Marty spent their summers at a dude ranch called The Triple R. I still hear Jiminy Cricket in my head, helping me every time I write the word encyclopedia (E-N-C-Y-C-L-O-P-E-D-I-A!).
We learned about love and romance from doo-wop ballads and Motown “girl group” 45s. We were terrified we’d become boring married couples like Ozzie and Harriet or June and Ward Cleaver.
The times, they were a-changing
Our generation changed many things, from attitudes to dress codes. When I was in high school in the early ’60s, girls’ skirt hems had to hit their kneecaps or they were sent home to change. I was once suspended (suspendered?) because I’d forgotten to wear a belt to school. At college in the middle ’60s, girls’ dorms had strictly enforced “hours.” It was a bizarre era. Pubic hair and genitalia were airbrushed away on Playboy centerfolds, rendering the models anatomically incorrect. Yet we males routinely swam naked in gym classes, which they told us was “a Greco-Roman tradition.”
When I was a kid in the ’50s, we often tried to imagine what life would be like in the 21st century. I was certain we’d all carry ray guns and live in giant dome-like homes, with our own personal robots fixing us dinner. In college in the ’60s, we wondered what the problems of the next generation might be, once we’d eliminated war and poverty and won everyone their full civil rights. Thank God for our naivete and idealism. We always had hope.
If someone had told us that someday we’d spend a buck-fifty on a small clear plastic bottle containing only water, we’d have laughed our heads off in disbelief.
It’s a more expensive, precarious world today, yet in most ways it’s far better. My only real apprehension as I slip into my 60s is that I am turning into a cranky old geezer. Perhaps this curmudgeon syndrome happens more to men than women, though I’m not sure why. I find some of the dumbest things can make me crabby. (Do no clerks make eye contact or say “thank you” any more?)
When we were kids, your mom warned you to change your underwear in case you got run over. Today if you’re young, you especially need to wear clean underwear because you are obliged to show several inches of your drawers to be hip. Frankly, I’m glad I’m not young. I’d never be able to handle all that piercing and tattooing.
Some of the wisest people I’ve known in this community (like the late Elsie Jacobsen and Frank Walsh) told me decades ago that the way to stay young is to cultivate plenty of younger friends. Good advice, but it’s not always so easy to turn the trick. There’s that gap in culture where you spend so much time footnoting your allusions for folks from different generations who’ve never heard of Eldridge Cleaver, Gabby Hayes, or Eddie Haskell. The Grimes sisters were Chicago murder victims, not performers on the Lawrence Welk Show.
When you get right down to it, I like being this age. Sure, I wish I had my 1960s body. I clearly don’t have the boundless energy or the keen hearing I once enjoyed. But at this age, you appreciate who you are, and for the most part you can see how you got that way. You no longer worry so much about what people think or what others have.
By 60 you’ve acquired a clear sense of yourself and what you need to feel fulfilled. We simply have to work harder at keeping our sense of humor to stave off bouts of crankiness.
We can’t fight aging, but we can resist getting old. (Whoops, there’s that “o” word. My bad!)
Doug Deuchler poses in front of a 1940’s-era stylish jalopy in the far north suburbs where he grew up.
Photo courtesy of Doug Deuchler
The Baby Boom began with a flourish of births as soon as the returning G.I.s arrived home. Unfortunately, there was very little housing available for vets and their new families. Several of the public parks in Oak Park, in fact, were equipped with metal Quonset huts-government issued units of emergency housing-that were furnished and decorated by the high school home economics and manual training classes. Everything from window boxes to draperies was created by the high school students. Hundreds of World War II soldiers began their civilian life living in Oak Park’s public parks.
Yet still there were not enough apartments for the returning vets. Many paid “under the table,” while some homeowners split their Victorians into rooming houses to accommodate multiple families. The housing shortage was the biggest problem facing the postwar community. The Veterans Commission worked “round the clock,” appealing for help in finding housing for returning war veterans.
A typical letter that ran in the local press read: “There are few disappointments equal to the one I got when I received my discharge and tried to find a place to live in the town where I grew up.”
Rosie the Riveter and most of the other women workers left their jobs at war plants when their men came home from “overseas.” There was an incredible flourish of local marriages, quickly followed by hundreds of new babies.
Local bookstores were pushing Dr. Benjamin Spock’s 1946 instant classic, “The Common Sense Book of Baby & Child Care,” which dispelled many oppressive methods of past child-rearing. Expectant parents embraced the book. Pediatrician Spock’s message was simple: “Trust yourself. You know more than you think you know. Simply make your kids feel good about themselves. Treat them with affection and celebrate their individuality.”
Despite the fact that the war was over, over 4,000 local Victory Gardens were maintained for yet another year in the summer of 1946 to help alleviate the postwar food shortages.
The local ration board closed. Meat was back in the stores. At the Jewel, 809 S. Oak Park Ave. (now Pan’s), round steak cost 35 cents a pound, and ground beef was 25 cents per pound.
Not all was halcyon, however, in the months following World War II. Many local officers recognized an unrest among the “out of control youth.” Vandals smashed over 300 windows in the Oak Park schools during the summer of 1946.
The Oak Park YMCA, situated in a brick building on Oak Park Avenue (now luxury condos) just north of Lake Street, began a massive drive for a new, modern building. Nearly a decade later the Y would move to 255 S. Marion St.
Everyone was talking about the proposed Congress Expressway that was scheduled to run through the “south end” of Oak Park. Most were opposed to the massive project, which would drag on for over a decade. Many homes and businesses would need to be razed and there was not yet a clear plan in place as to where the street-level elevated trains and the railroad would be situated.
Among those who spoke at the 19th Century Woman’s Club in 1946 was Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes.
Downtown Oak Park and River Forest was booming, enjoying great status as one of the best shopping districts of the region. There were scores of both department stores (Wieboldt’s, The Fair, Marshall Field’s) and chain stores (Woolworth’s, Lytton’s, Bramson’s). Streetcars ran down the middle of key streets; parking was seldom a problem.
The three biggest films to play at the Lake Theatre in 1946 were: “The Best Years of Our Lives,” a drama about the adjustments of returning war veterans; “Notorious,” a Hitchcock romantic thriller starring Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman; and “Song of the South,” a Disney combination of live action with cartoon figures portraying the Uncle Remus stories (including the hit song “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah”). This once-beloved classic will probably never be reissued because it’s now considered a politically incorrect embarrassment by the Disney empire.
The Baby Boom continued to escalate throughout 1946. In October alone, 339,499 babies were born. (I was one of them.)
-Doug Deuchler
