Boomers: The Cold-War Generation Grows Up (5 page)

A sale price of $7,990 bought mostly young couples a new home that, even if it would never be mistaken for a castle, offered a phenomenally child-friendly environment in which to raise a rapidly expanding family. Each home featured a picture window fronting a twelve-by-fifteen-foot living room, a bathroom, a kitchen, two bedrooms, and an “expansion attic,” which could and usually was converted to two more bedrooms and an additional bath. Each house was equipped with a refrigerator, stove, washing machine, fireplace, and built-in seven-inch television.

While young couples fired barbeque grills and their children raced tricycles and used their skate keys, most Americans who were either single or over thirty-five initially stayed well clear of the planned-community experience. Levittown and its hundreds of nationwide clones were worlds teeming with children and baby carriages but largely devoid of nightclubs and taverns. The first Levittown was peppered with huge new shopping centers, surrounded by enormous parking lots easily accessible from connecting roads. More than a hundred miles of winding streets and sidewalks teemed with vehicles partial to children, from station wagons to kiddy carts. If myriad descriptions were accurate, young mothers pushed strollers, held toddlers' hands, dodged tricycles, and swapped recipes in the morning until an eerie silence descended on most of the community around noon. The next two hours were a mutually refreshing respite as children napped and mothers slumped into chairs or caught up on other chores. As late as 1950, only 10 percent of the children of Levittown were over seven years of age, encouraging one mother to explain that “Everyone is so young that sometimes it's hard to remember to get along with older people.” The absence of an older adult presence contrasted with a seemingly limitless array of parks, playgrounds, baseball diamonds, swimming pools, and kiddie pools that seemed to cater to every whim, as long as it was a young whim.

Levittown was only the first of thousands of suburban “subdivisions” that would eventually define much of America's postwar lifestyle and become one of the iconic images of film, television, and literature. If suburbia could sometimes be made into a fantasy—either dreamlike or nightmarish, depending on the narrator's outlook—it was also
the home of a substantial portion of the Boomer generation. Still, many postwar children grew up in places where their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents had spent their respective childhoods, and these locales continued to strike an important chord in the song of American culture. Children grew up in the rural farmland depicted on television programs such as
Lassie
and
The Real McCoys
; others experienced a small-town childhood, still a major topic of Normal Rockwell's iconic artwork; many Boomers resided in large cities, as reflected in TV's
Make Room for Daddy
. This author grew up in an “inner ring” suburb of Philadelphia, which had largely developed in the 1920s and 1930s. There stone Tudor singles mingled with brick twins and row houses, corner delicatessens, taprooms, and trolley cars, which hinted at an urban lifestyle while coexisting with the swimming pools, Little League fields, and barbeque grills that defined postwar suburban living. All of these environments featured many young couples with large numbers of children but also included senior citizens, single people, and childless couples, which made them appear slightly less Baby Boomer centered. Yet, in the postwar era, newer suburbs dominated by young couples and children often defined the Boomer experience in films, literature, and television. Since this suburban lifestyle offers both the distinctiveness of a new childhood experience and many elements of the more general experience of all Boomers, Levittown and its counterparts make a good introduction to the postwar home and family.

The physical makeup of a Boomer-era childhood home reflected the design of three prominent suburban models: colonial, ranch, and split-level. Colonials were, at first glance, the closest approximation to the “Victorian” homes
characteristic of much of the Northeast and Midwest and popular in most other sections of the country since the turn of the century. These are the homes most often seen in 1950s and 1960s family situation comedies and films, and featured the most traditional living arrangements. A colonial had two full stories with living room, kitchen, and dining room on the ground floor, bedrooms and bathrooms on the second floor, and often a basement and/or an attic. Unlike their Victorian predecessors, however, colonials largely dispensed with front parlors, front porches, and pantries, substituting powder rooms, dens, and rear decks. This configuration provided the advantage of relatively large kitchens that could also accommodate a table for meals, less intrusive noise for children sleeping upstairs, and the possibility of relatively generous storage space. The two major drawbacks of colonials were that they tended to be more expensive than other models, and the stairs could become extremely annoying when having to carry toddlers or wash baskets.

The most popular postwar suburban home model was the ranch house. The single-floor layout eliminated the tedium of stair climbing, but many families found more togetherness than they wanted with bedrooms in close proximity to living rooms.
(Times & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

The ranch was probably the most popular home model for the entire Baby Boom childhood period. Ranches tended to be rather sprawling homes with virtually all the living space concentrated on one floor. These houses looked very contemporary, eliminated most stair climbing, and, like the colonials, might include a basement or an attic that could offer more room as families grew. This living arrangement was less frequently depicted on film and television but was the most common new housing in American suburbs.

The third home model was generally a compromise between colonial and ranch—usually, but not always, designated a split-level. This style offered three or even four floors, divided by stairs that were roughly half the extent of steps in traditional two-story homes. In most cases, upper levels featured bedrooms; middle levels had kitchens, dining rooms, and living rooms; and lower levels included laundry rooms, garage access, powder rooms, and the most innovative of postwar suburbia, a “family room” or “recreation room” that often included a television, record-player system, a new “recliner” chair or two, and perhaps a fireplace, pool table, or Ping-Pong table. In many homes this room might become a gathering place for younger members of the family while the living room was used by adults or reserved for relatively formal occasions.

Most of the new ranches and at least some of the colonials and split-levels had a feature that illustrated the downside of postwar tract housing. Many 1950s and 1960s homes were not only considerably smaller than their twenty-first-century counterparts, they were also more cramped
and shoddily constructed than models built several decades earlier. Traditional attics and basements had become less than standard features on “contemporary” homes, creating a never-ending storage crisis. Bulky children's items such as tricycles, bicycles, and strollers vied with lawn mowers, grills, and gardening equipment in crawl spaces, garages, and driveways. Even that icon of suburban upward mobility, the two-car garage, frequently became the no-car garage, containing every wheeled object except an automobile.

The interior of a new Boomer-era home was often equally cramped. Cost-cutting imperatives reduced halls to a claustrophobic width of thirty-six inches, which turned passage from one room to another into a complex maneuver when two family members met along the route. Many new kitchens had space for a counter and stools, but the absence of a traditional table often turned breakfast into a stand-up meal on the go. The combination of thin walls and one-floor design in a ranch home often made adult television viewing in the living room a major sleep impediment for younger children, who might have to put pillows over their ears to reduce laugh tracks and commercial noise. One of many
Life
articles on the realities of suburban living implied that behind the façade of cozy ranches were frayed nerves and petty arguments caused by close quarters and unstored toys.

Whatever the merits or defects of postwar homes, they became the setting for a frenetic social drama centered on new parents and their burgeoning families. While there was no “ideal” or “typical” Boomer family, some general patterns are noticeable. First, the average marriage age for young men and women was gradually falling until in 1957 it reached 21.5 years for males and 19.5 for females. This meant that a large percentage of girls were becoming engaged late
in high school or very early in college. Newspaper wedding announcements featured great numbers of teenage brides and only marginally more mature grooms. Second, these young newlyweds started their families quickly, which in turn pushed the average family size toward four children. By the mid-1950s more families had six children than had one child, while childless couples seemed relegated to peripheral status in family dynamics. The cast of characters in these ongoing family dramas also included fewer non-nuclear family members as the number of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins living full time in the same family home as mother, father, and children dropped substantially.

The family-life dramas that engaged young Americans across the continent showed considerable continuity with past counterparts but contained enough unique aspects to promote interest decades later. A peek into a representative 1950s home would often reveal an amazingly young, rather formally dressed mother barely out of her teens, organizing a household of several children and deputizing the slightly older ones to take some responsibility for their younger siblings while she cleaned, shopped, and cooked. In this occasionally magic and frequently hectic environment, older children became confidants to their young mothers as they formed a special bond based on their partial responsibility for the great enterprise of “family life.”

While spanking and screaming at children had not disappeared from parents' corrective repertoire, the strict environment of earlier decades had mellowed considerably as many mothers exhibited the patience, grace, and intelligence of the well-known TV mothers—a June Cleaver, a Donna Reed, or a Harriet Nelson—while often interacting with far more children than their television counterparts.

Gender roles also seemed to be gradually softening as the postwar family structure crystallized. Far more postwar women drove automobiles than their mothers had, both through the necessity of a car-oriented suburban culture and a sense of empowerment that driving was not exclusively a male prerogative. In those suburbs with access to public transportation, the wife often logged more driving time than the commuter train—dependent father, who was now relegated to weekend and vacation driving in a vehicle that had tacitly become “mom's car.” As driving errands now shifted to more of a female role, the rise of the “barbeque” culture turned more than a few men into amateur cooks. Contrary to myths that hapless 1950s males found heating a frozen TV dinner daunting, this era turned much of the outdoor cooking experience into a male domain. From backyard grills to picnic fireplaces, young fathers, with or without “World's Greatest Chef” hats, became iconic figures of the period and often passed their skills to their sons. The gradual shift to more night and weekend hours, from pediatricians' offices to supermarkets, also contributed to a softening of gender roles as doctors' visits and shopping excursions more frequently engaged both husband and wife far more than the strict weekday hours of prewar shopping and services.

Gender roles among children were also changing, more than is apparent from looking merely at the doctor/nurse divide in medically oriented toys. The black toy doctor bag did have stern-looking glasses, absent from the white nurse bag, and included more active diagnostic instruments and fewer bandages. But the distinction between “cowboys” and “cowgirls” was much smaller, as girls were “allowed” to have guns, holsters, hats, and boots, much the same as boys.

Perhaps the most flexible gender relationships occurred as older children were often designated junior parents in the crowded households of the times. Many boys changed younger siblings' diapers, took them for walks in strollers, and rode their bikes to the store with a grocery list from their mothers. Girls helped move heavy furniture, showed their little brothers how to play basketball, and helped their mothers wash and polish the car. Various levels of babysitting experience often depended more on age than on gender; few parents would hire an outside baby-sitter to watch younger children if there was a twelve-year-old son in the house, and at least some boys expanded their baby-sitting to include neighbors' kids, just as girls took on newspaper deliveries in some communities.

Much of the image of American society from the late 1940s to the early 1960s is based on the concept of a comfortable but rather conservative lifestyle with relatively little questioning of the status quo. Yet investigation of contemporary sources reveals that discussions about optimal methods of parenting and adult-child relations were noticeable in almost every medium, and young couples were convinced and delighted that they were entering a new frontier of family relationships. In fact, period discussions about the 1950s equivalents of “soccer moms,” “helicopter parents,” and “tweeners” culture appear quite modern in tone. Yet, along with these recognizable concerns there are strong suggestions that the fifteen to twenty years following World War II were indeed “Happy Days” for both parents and their children.