“It was a time of change, but I didn’t notice it then.”-Jeff Davis

1947 brought many things. The Second World War had been over for two years and America was already on track to give rise to the “baby boom.” The automobile industry had begun to sell the first cars to American consumers since the beginning of the war (National Association of Baby Boomers Online, 2011), and the Captain Charles Yeager had broken the speed of sound (Darlington, 2011). The first televised World Series saw the New York Yankees beat the Brooklyn Dodgers four games to three and Jackie Robinson became the first African-American player on a Major League team (Brooklyn Dodgers). Over 1 million veterans of WWII had enrolled in college because of the GI bill and Tupperware hit the scene (National Association of Baby Boomers Online, 2011). The number of births during the Baby Boom is estimated at 790 million (Rosenberg, 2012), and among those born was Jeff Davis and he has his own perspective of events and life during the years that followed 1947 as compared to life today in the new millennium. The life of a Baby Boomer has been littered with uncertainty, hard work, and an uncanny ability to accept change.

Jeff Davis was born to Chief Petty Officer Benjamin Davis and his wife Elizabeth on February 21, 1947 in Rollie, North Carolina. I sat with Jeff just two days after his 65^th birthday only minutes after clocking him out from his part time job delivering pizzas in Bullhead City, Arizona, where he has resided for more than ten years. Jeff is my employee, but I have known him for so long (more than 8 years) that I consider him a friend first and employee second. Throughout the interview with Jeff Davis I was constantly thinking about the types of culture clashes that have occurred during the life of a Baby Boomer.

Jeff is a Baby Boomer. This is through no fault of his own and for that reason we should not hold it against him. Baby Boomers are considered to be the portion of American population that was born between the years 1946 and 1964 (Rosenberg, 2012). Young GI males returning home were eager to settle down and start families. Jeff’s parents were no different. His father was a Navy man who returned home, married, and had three children within the first three years of the Baby Boom. Now at 65 Jeff has sat down with me to recant some of the experiences that have helped to shape his life style that has always been unique.

Jeff’s first memory is not one of a specific time or place, but of an idea and a feeling. Jeff remembers being poor, living in a small house and his father being busy. Because of the GI bill many returning soldiers found an opportunity to better their lives and the lives of their families by returning to school and earning their degree. But the stresses of going to school, working at a dead end job and raising three children eventually caught up with him and Jeff’s father dropped out of college and took a job in sales. This story was not as striking as was the clarity of which Jeff remembered it. There was no hesitation, no question about what his first memory was. Jeff’s memory of his father working so hard instilled into him an appreciation for hard work as well as an appreciation relaxation. While reflecting Jeff’s current lifestyle, one where he was never married or had any children, I have wondered if the thought of being tied down to children never appealed to him because of the struggles his father had in the early years of the young family. 

To raise a family a married couple must make decisions. One decision Jeff’s mother, Elizabeth, insisted on was to raise the children Catholic. So Jeff and his older brother began school at the same time at a private catholic school in Rollie. “Nuns were very strict, slapping with rulers. They made sure you knew from right and wrong,” Jeff said while talking about his vivid experiences from his times as a student in a dialect that is uniquely his own which mixes a slight southern accent with the directness of a man who has spent a good amount of time in the west. In 2008 CNN reported that more than 200,000 children were still spanked at school (CNN, 2008). Jeff’s home state of North Carolina is reported to still allow corporal punishment. When asked about his opinion about corporal punishment Jeff said that “[t]here are a few kids I see everyday who could learn a lot from those Nuns.” Punishment practices aside, a few years in to his education Jeff’s parents could no longer afford the tuition at the Catholic school so they were shipped off to public school. “Public school was easy compared to those Nuns.”

“The thing was, Jon, life was simple then, even though there was no down time,” Jeff said as he was explaining differences he notices between today’s culture and the time when he grew up in terms of family customs, recreation, and work. Annie Stuart, an author on WebMD, wrote a piece titled Chores for Children where she listed chores as one of the best ways to build feelings of competence, teach real world skills, and valuable lessons about life (Stuart, 2012). Jeff’s parents did not have this list available, or even consider writing one to list what a good parent does for their child. By the time Jeff was seven, he and his brother had a number of chores and odd jobs to do around the house including mowing the lawn and being told to ride the two miles by bicycle down to the news paper stand and ask for a stack of papers to sell on the street corner. “There were days he and I would do that and we could earn one dollar. That would be enough to buy a carton of cigarettes for my father,” Jeff recalled as I watched him fold his tips from delivering pizzas that night which totaled well more than that one dollar he had to earn with his brother all those years ago.

The next few years in Jeff Davis life became a lesson in how things were. On February 2, 1960 four African-American college students sat down for lunch at a Woolworths in Greensborough, North Carolina (Smithsonian Online, 2012). The bravery showed by these four young men sparked a peaceful movement that challenged racial inequality throughout the south. This type of inequality was not unseen by Jeff in his youth, but it did go unnoticed until years later when he began to reflect on his childhood. When talking about changes in the national makeup with regards to segregation and integration Davis recalled a major billboard outside of a town near where he lived, which depicted a member of the Klu-Klux-Klan dressed in his white robes with a warning to all people travailing through. The very graphic sign read “Niggers and Jews Not Allowed!” According to Jeff, black people were just called “niggers” back in those days. The term was not taught to him as derogatory but it was easy to see the discomfort he had recalling how loose the explicit name for African-Americans was used. When asked about segregation laws and how he remembered the consequences, Jeff replied that “they stayed in their part of the town and we stayed in ours”. Jeff did not recall his town having a hard time with integration, but there were times that could have gone better. Jeff recalled when schools began to be integrated there were no protests outside his school but the black children that did go to his school (there were not many) were ignored by the other school children. He would eventually go to college with and participate in class with African-American students not because he was forced to but because he was accepting.

With the events of the Civil Rights Movement ongoing and racist organizations having enough clout within certain towns to print what they wanted, it would seem that the media would have played a large part in Jeff Davis’s life. But aside from the initial irritation of radio stations not playing requested songs because they were deemed “inappropriate” (the Rolling Stone’s Lets Spend the Night Together) there were no occurrences that seemed out of the ordinary for the times in which he grew up. Women in the media (television and print) were attractive. Jeff remembers having a crush on Mary Tyler Moore from her role as Laura Petrie in The Dick Van Dyke Show. Women were never shown to be sexy because of the strict morality codes that were followed in early television. There was small controversy on the Dick Van Dyke Show because Mary Tyler Moore wore Capri pants (Napikoski, 2012) that caused some backlash from the creators of the of the show and the network that demanded there be a certain number of scenes where Mary wear a dress  but ultimately did not amount to much.  There were never any woman Doctors, Attorneys, or police officers because it was taboo. Instead, women were generally shown as nurses, teachers, or as housewives. But the media could not quell a young man’s desire to see more of the girls he associated with.

Women and their sexuality did have a large role in the young Jeff Davis’s life. When recalling the role of women in the late 50’s and early 60’s, Jeff recalled that he and his buddies would go the girls basketball games more often than the boys games because they got to wear what he called “tennis skirts.”

There are a number of wide changes (girls basketball players no longer wear skirts) that have completely redesigned the landscape of the country affecting the way day-to-day life operates. For instance, America’s dependence on the automobile has alarmed Jeff. As a youth, if he and his family wanted to go somewhere the entire family would walk or ride their bicycles. The family car was reserved for long trips only. Now Americans cannot be bothered to walk one mile for a gallon of milk and bread. Stores are surrounded by large parking lots that can handle large numbers of vehicles. Children no longer walk to school in the numbers that they did in the 1950’s. Instead, they catch a bus for the one mile ride or their mother and father drop them off on their way to work.  Fast food restaurants have changed the way Americans eat. In the past there was no need to diet because if a person wanted something to eat they had to make it with fresh ingredients that were purchased in small, home grown grocery stores. Snacks, like cookies, were only available on special occasions and any restaurant outing was at a sit down restaurant. Jeff could not recall a time when his entire family went to a restaurant but he knew it had to have happened at least once.  In his teens soda stands, like A&W, became popular and the fascination with fast, on the go, fun food began. In Jeff’s youth most houses had one phone line that was attached to the wall. Davis recalls being one of the first houses in his neighborhood to install a second “business” line for his father’s sales business. Now there are families of four where each member has their own cell phone, the family has a house phone, fax line, and dedicated internet service for all their communication needs. Each of the cell phones comes with free long distance which is in great contrast to the upwards of a dollar per minute Jeff recalls his father paying to call family across state lines.

Jeff’s story is not supernatural nor is it all that uncommon. Jeff did not have any delusions about being incredibly famous or flying to the moon (but he would have loved to have been a photographer for Playboy Magazine). Thus far Jeff has lived a simple and complex life in his 65 years. Jeff values hard work, the value of a dollar, and the need for discipline, but not necessarily for him. Baby Boomers have lead all kinds of lives and their existence as an aging fart of society does not need to be felt as a drain but as a benefit that can be learned from. The Baby Boomers have seen the rise of America from a post war industrialized nation to consumer based society that has little regard for the thoughts or opinions of others. With the histories of people like Jeff Davis as a perspective for what we once were and the strides we have made in just 65 years it is possible to look past our own preconceived notions of what the world is and look to what the world could be. We are living in a time of change, but it is time for us to notice it now, before it leaves us in the past.

References

CNN Online (2008). Corporal Punishment: More than 200,000 kids spanked at school. Retrieved March 4, 2012 from http://articles.cnn.com/2008-08-20/us/corporal.punishment_1_corporal-punishment-students-children-spanked-us-schools?_s=PM:US

Darlington, R (2012). Breaking the Sound Barrier. Retrieved February 26, 2012 from http://www.rogerdarlington.me.uk/Mach.html

History Channel Online (2012). The Sixties. Retrieved February 13, 2012 from http://www.history.com/topics/1960s

Jandt, F.E. (2010). An introduction to intercultural communication: Identities in a global community (6^th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. (ISBN: 9781412970105)

Napikoski, L (2012). Feminism in the “Dick Van Dyke Show.” Retrieved March 4, 2012 from http://womenshistory.about.com/od/feminismandpopculture/a/Feminism-Dick-Van-Dyke-Show.htm

National Association of Baby Boomers Online (2012). 1947 Events and Facts. Retrieved February 27, 2012 from http://www.babyboomers.com/1947/

Rosenberg, M (2012). Baby Boom. Retrieved February 25, 2012 from http://geography.about.com/od/populationgeography/a/babyboom.htm

Stephen L Payne, & Barbara Holmes. (1998). Communication challenges for management faculty involving younger "Generation X" students in their classes. Journal of Management Education, 22(3), 344-367.  Retrieved February 14, 2012, from ABI/INFORM Global. (Document ID: 29915836).

Smithsonian Online (2012). Separate is not Equal: Brown vs. Board of Education. Retrieved March 5, 2012 from http://americanhistory.si.edu/brown/history/6-legacy/freedom-struggle-2.html

Stuart, A. (2012). Chores for Children. Retrieved February 27, 2012 From http://www.webmd.com/parenting/features/chores-for-children

Tennant Creek NT (2012) Photos: Women’s Basketball. Retrieved March 5, 2012 from http://www.fortennantcreekers.com/photos/w_basketball.html