Growing Up in the 60’s

I was an elementary school student during the 1960s. In the Midwest where we lived the social climate was rather conservative and not especially contemplative. Rock-n-Roll music and race riots were not something that we cozied up to. Adults were generally uncomfortable with the Beatles and their long hair as well as the noisy “racket” they made on stage. Many adults were still spitting with rage at communists who were hiding behind every tree.

The Viet Nam war was raging in Southeast Asia and much of America bought into the Domino Principle cited by politicians. The John Wayne movie The Green Berets was playing in theaters and it resonated with a great many Americans.

We watched Lawrence Welk and Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom on the television which was broadcast out of Des Moines. It was the lovely Lennon Sisters on Saturday evening and all of the accordion you could stand followed by Wild Kingdom’s Jim Fowler wrestling alligators on Sunday. They always had some ridiculous pretense for capturing the wildlife but we eagerly bought into it.

After the adventurous Wild Kingdom on Sunday was the congenial face and lilting voice of Walt Disney on The Wonderful World of Disney. Walt would always start the show with a few minutes of grandfatherly monologue introducing the show. When Walt spoke, all seemed right with the world, at least for a kid.

In the absence of travel or a more worldly family, this kind of TV programming expanded our knowledge of the outside world, albeit along some very narrow and artificial pathways. In those days the TV network censors were very strict and did not allow controversial or titillating content onto the airwaves.

In my world of the 1960s, women’s fashion was to evolve beyond the stodgier clothing of the 1950s. Dresses were giving way to pants, mini-skirts and short shorts. In those days, we were led to believe by puritanical adults that a slip showing below the hem of a dress was a social faux pas and worthy of a snicker.

But away from home in junior high school, things were changing. Most of the girls were experimenting with the new fashion and we boys were uniformly agog over it, though the teachers thought the girls were walking on the wild side.

By 9th grade, I had already been to a few house parties with black lights and fluorescent posters as well as painfully loud acid rock music blaring away. During this time I developed a taste for Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin and classical music. Some kids were smoking tobacco and there were even open containers of beer scattered around. If there was pot smoking, I wouldn’t have recognized it even though marijuana plants were plentiful in the countryside. Just another weed to kill.

In 1972 I moved to another state and fell in with a different group of people in high school. Science nerds they were and electronics was the thing. Discrete components were just giving way to integrated circuits and you could buy chips at Radio Shack with AND, OR, NAND or NOR gates to build logic circuits. Still, discrete components like transistors, diodes, capacitors and resistors were yet in large-scale use.

During this time Bobby Fisher was playing Boris Spassky in Reykjavik, Iceland, for the world championship. In high school at this time I actually started a chess club and we even played a tournament with another school. We got demolished 5 ¹/₂ to ¹/₂. I scored the draw.

I can now understand the puzzlement my older relatives had with the way the newer generations are going. But, this is how the US has been in the 20^th and into the 21^st centuries. We’ve been riding a wave of great change since at least the revolutionary war and it is the birthright of each young person to explore the opportunities before them. Despite the grim looking global conflicts of today, we have much to look forward to. As someone famous said, we are standing on the shoulders of giants.