Us boomers got to stick together.
I never liked the term "boomer" as if everyone born between 1945 and 1963 was a member of the same cohort just because they were all products of the postwar economic boom. Yeah, our parents may have all decided to have a zillion kids at the same time (after the Great Depression and WW2 could you blame them?) but really it was 2 distinct groups:
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I was a member of the first group, those born in the 1940s and very early 1950s. When I was a kid we still had horse-drawn daily delivery wagons in the city, bringing us our milk, bread, ice, and coal. More people still had iceboxes than refrigerators and more people shoveled coal into their furnaces than had thermostatically-controlled gas or oil. A wringer washing machine was a modern labor-saving device. Many people still used washboards. Public transit was mostly streetcars.
We had no running hot water. On bath night my father would light a gas water heater to warm our bathwater. When my mother did dishes or laundry, she heated water in a big kettle on the kitchen stove. She dissolved ends of bar soap in the dish pan with a metal cage thingy with a handle because they didn't sell liquid dish soap yet.
After dinner, we'd sit around the floor-model vacuum tube radio (no permanent-magnet speakers: a speaker had a voice coil and a field coil) and listen to radio shows like Amos and Andy or The Lone Ranger. Phonograph records were 78 RPM and made of shellac. Most people who had record players had wind-up acoustic phonographs. My father was a classical music collector so he had a electric turntable with a piezoelectric cartridge that you mounted metal needles into with a thumbscrew. It connected to the radio. When the first TV arrived on our block it was quite the novelty. All the neighbors came around to look at the tiny round screen reflected in a mirror because the CRT was mounted vertically. Music was still mostly crooners and big bands.
We bought our meat at a butcher shop, our produce from a greengrocer, and what baked goods that weren't homemade came from a bakery. Cheese was cut and weighed by the piece, also by the butcher.
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By the mid-1950s everything seemed to change. Everybody had a fridge, hot water, an automatic washing machine (and dryer) and a thermostat. All the horses and many of the streetcars were replaced by internal combustion engines. Supermarkets replaced specialized food shops. Foods were pre-wrapped and packaged.
Television ruled. Radios were relegated to music and to a small degree, talk. TV commercials effected how people shopped, ate, clothed themselves and went about their daily lives. The propaganda was relentless. McCarthyism gave us a new enemy to hate and fear. It wasn't the Gerrys and Japs anymore. It was the Commies.
As the decade went on, transistors started replacing vacuum tubes and vinyl replaced shellac. Rock&roll replaced swing and new attitudes arose. It was OK to have fun and be sexy again, just like during the roaring '20s before the Depression and the war made everybody miserable and security-conscious.
Anyone who wanted a job could get one and everyone seemed to have lots of money. A guy with an average job could afford to own a home, a cottage, a stay-at-home wife, 3 or 4 kids, a new car every 3 years, and still be able to save enough to send his kids to college.
The "boomers" born in these times were a completely different cohort from the "boomers" of the 1940s.
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Modern generational divisions are usually based on technological or social differences. GenXers are those who came after the cultural upheaval of the early 1960s with the Kennedy assassination and the emergence of the counterculture. The Millennials are defined by growing up with the internet. GenZ by life-long internet access and post 9/11 oppression. Gen Alpha by social media.
The early and late Boomers, however, get lumped together despite major societal and technological changes in the 1950s simply because of their numbers, which has more to do with their parents than them.
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