Hello. My name is Ric and I’m a Boomer. In fact, being born in 1950, I always had the feeling that year was peak boomer”. It was ground zero for a population explosion the likes of which the country had never seen. The people who returned from World War II, came home and reproduced like crazy. They went at it like bunnies.

When I was a kid, this got to mean overcrowded classrooms as the explosion hit the small suburban town where I grew up. It also meant that nearly all the kids in my neighborhood were my age or a little younger. And there were quite a few of them. The fifties and most of the sixties were among the greatest years the country had ever seen, as long as you didn’t look into any of the many nooks and cracks where the affluence of being middle class never reached. Like the designs of the cars coming out of Detroit, things seemed to get better and snazzier every year. Not only did almost every home have a washing machine, but some were also starting to get cloths dryers, too. (I think I was about ten when we got one.) I grew up with television. My father knew electronics and was good enough at fixing things so we could become what would later be called “early adopters”. By the time we moved to the neighborhood where I grew up when I was about to turn eight, everybody had one in their living room and people weren’t yet getting all that concerned about children watching too much TV. In fact, we didn’t. Kids’ TV was mostly all locally produced and there wasn’t all that much of it. 

There were a lot of things we didn’t have that would be unimaginable to today’s Millennials. 

• The only form of mail required a pen, paper, and a stamp, which we had to ask our parents for
• A home only had one phone line and possibly a second or third extension. Privacy during a call was next to impossible. If one of my parents picked up a call for me with a voice they didn’t recognize, the call was always followed by a, “Who was that?” If it was a girl’s voice when I was a teenager, the question would be replaced by a sly smile, unless the girl’s voice sounded particularly skanky for some reason
• In high school, I learned to touch type on a manual typewriter. I got a small, manual Smith-Corona for a high school graduation present and an electric version when I finished college. I was hoping to be a writer, so my high school guidance counselor wisely recommended that I take the stricter business typing class rather than the looser personal typing. It was probably the only recommendation he made that had any value
• I had no idea what I wanted to do when I grew up. The professions I spent much of my career working in did not yet exist
• Small, affordable transistor radios hit the market just as I was hitting my teens. That became the soundtrack of my life. And not just the music, the DJs. They were just as important to us
• Television sets had twelve channels, 2 – 13 for some reason. There were three networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC, and if you lived near enough to a city, you could receive all three through their local affiliates. Sometimes in the sixties, I think, independent UHF channels started popping up, running old movies and old reruns of network shows. 
• When I was a teenager, gas was about fifteen cents a gallon and cigarettes about twenty-five cents per pack. They had just gone up when I started smoking at sixteen
• About the only significant change to all of the above when I approached thirty was the advent of cable TV

And then there were the events that I was around for to experience first-hand:

• My father, a ham radio operator, and I listened in to the beeping of the USSR’s Sputnik satellite. To me it was amazing. I was too young to understand the strategic threat it represented
• My father took me out in the yard to watch Echo I soar over as it orbited the earth. It was a large, aluminized balloon that communication signals could be reflected off of. This would lead to the first actual communications satellite, Telstar I. I watched the first broadcasts from that, a live feed from London to New York on the day it was first lit up for network use
• I watched Alan Sheppard’s first suborbital spaceflight, John Glenn’s oft-delayed and prematurely terminated orbital flight, and virtually all the launches leading to the moon landing. Like most people, I started to get bored with the numerous landings that followed but was glued to the TV when Apollo 13 got into trouble
• John F. Kennedy was assassinated when I was in junior high. We were in an assembly. I remember hearing a woman cafeteria worker scream and break into tears before it was announced to us
• Like everyone at the time, I was glued to the TV for the events that followed. I saw Lee Harvey Oswald getting shot by Jack Ruby live on TV
•  The pill that changed the world
• Possible nuclear annihilation

The Boomer Blog is intended to be some first-hand commentaries on some of the above. It will be kept free of anything like boomer pride, if there is such a thing, and I’ll try to avoid getting too snarky. But it was a very promising generation that was never very good at keeping its promises.