Being born in 1945

The bombs, destruction, and horrors of World War 2 echoed throughout my childhood as our civilization worked to process the intense worldwide upheaval of it. It intensified the contrasts of the world before, and during the war, against the world that followed.

We had an old family movie made by my grandfather Lyons during the war, the young sailors and neighborhood girls walking, laughing and flirting in the park at League Island Lakes, South Philadelphia, and my mother and father bringing me home from the hospital. It is gone now, the way of so much technology of my lifetime - it was video tape and it degraded beyond redemption. In that film you saw the neighbors of South Philadelphia working on their victory garden allotments. These were people who had suffered shortages in most material goods including food. They knew want not only from the war years but the depression before it. My parents childhood was under the specter of hunger and poverty. What saved them both was family.

As I was growing up, the contrast blossomed - the deprivations of the war years were replaced with the bounty of the post war: Men had union jobs tht paid well and our industrialized nation was geared up for production - cars, televisions, canned goods, washers and dryers. And these men were tired and traumatized by the war, they had no interest in military things, they wanted barbecue pits and lawns to mow, love and wives and children, hence, the baby boom!

There were so many of us babies from the returning men and the grateful women, that they built a world around us and around family life. There were grand picnic parks with boat rides and when we moved to New Jersey, there were family oriented swimming parks with lakes and picnic tables and families could go there on the days fathers were off from work, and spend the whole day eating cold meatloaf sandwiches that mom made and potato salad. Families road tripped together staying in family motels with pools and scenic attrctions. People were frugal because they were one salary households.

No women in my world worked outside the home and they no longer wanted to. They had worked during the war years and now they were swamped with children and devoted themelves to home arts, cooking, making curtains, upholstering furniture, making rock gardens, making family parties with days of cooking and competitive cake baking! My mothr made birthday cakes that were trains, and she sewed my clothes from patterns copying Jacky Kennedy's fashionable and simple elegance. My mother and her best friend saddled up the baby stroller and went to the mall to see the wonders of the department stores and bask in the gleam of the luxurious future that had arrived.

The war always lay in wait in magazines and books, unfolding the infinite evil to which men are capable of enacting upon one another and innocent others, even children. Time and Life put out book after book of black and white photographs of the devastated cities of Europe and the concenration camps. That shadow always hung over us along with the shadow of the BOMB.

From grade school in my overcrowded indusrial brick factory of an elementary school in Philadelphia, to high school, we children of horror and plenty were constantly advised that bombs had been built that could at any moment blow up our world the way we had blown up Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We had drills. In the dank dark brick school of my childhood, we little ones were marched down to the damp and monstrous basement to lie on army surplus cots uring periodic drills, more frightened of the giant roaches than the bomb. Later, we just hid under our desks in drills in our modern New Jersey schools, long rancher style buildings which had no basements.

In our teens, we shook it off to the beat of the Beach Boys as we drove in our cars to the seashore to lie on the beach in blissful youthful antiipation of the future of romance and adventure.

Some of us never saw that future. Some died in Vietnam, some died in automobile accidents. I got to experience all the adventure promised by my long childhood immersed in LITERATURE. Books promised me foreign lands and Art and beauty and love and I had them all. I fell in love wiht a tall dark stranger and married him and went to live in Germany and tour 38 countries in Europe. I got to see the great monuments of European civilization. I got to experience deep intense romantic love. He was a deeply flawed and broken man but at least, I got to know what it was to fall head over heels in love and I adored him until his decline into mental inllness made him a different man. No regrets.

I was able to experience the euphoria and vast oceanic blossoming of the baby boomers flowering in the 1960's. I think it as like when the great barrier reef releases all its sperm and ova in one great oceanic orgasm. We were intoxicated by love and music and culture and youth and drugs. We were intoxicated with life. It was a wonderful time and culure still had relevance to us. Our minds were still growing and college wasn't a path to an indusrial commercial employment but to a world of art and philosophy, poetry and literature. Sadly when the 1970's died, I think that version of college died with it.

It is a strange new world to me now, an iolated electronic world. I am obsolete and out of time and touch with the new world though it is the new world on which I am typing and to which I am posting my thoughts - a letter in a bottle -

No purpose - just pure love of thinking and writing.

wrightj45@yahoo.com (as mentioned before, the comments function on blogspot is polluted so please write to me by e-mail if you want to discusss = and I don't make my e-mail a link because I am hiding it from the spam bots that polluted comments)

The trauma of the men of post world war 2

Post Script

In my early childhood there were three men present in my daily life, my father Joe Wright, my grandfather Joe Lyons, and my god-father Neal Schmidt. My father had lost his father in his teens and he had been forced to sign up with the CCC, then the Merchant marines and finally the navy for the War in the Atlantic and the Pacific. From 16 to 26, that was his world - a harsh, cold, dangerous world of men and labor. When he came home, fortunately he came home to a preturnaturally forgiving and loving wife and a job that though dangerous and difficult paid well and gave him a good life. he was an ironworker. He NEVER spoke of his life or his war years. All I learned about him, I learned second hand from his tv shows like Victory at Sea. When we watched that together as a family, I think he was sharing that experience with us. He never spoke of work or his youth. I found out about the Civilian Conservation Corps by going through his papers with him in his tin box and seeing his discharge. Also he took our family on vacation to Shenanadoah, Sky Line Drive, several times and told us he had built it! He kept himself to himself, as the old saying goes. He was watchful but not articulate, and when he got drunk, he let himself go and had minimal restraint on his anger and his sense of both entitlement and victimization. Mostly he was affable and highly active and productive. he was a builder - he built a garage, a varbecue pit, changed everything inside the house, doorways and so on. He had to be doing - he was immenssely energetic and he loved his home and having a family.

Grandpop Lyons, too, was a veteran, but from World War I. He hadn't been to war but to the Mexican border. He was a quiet gentle man, a postman. I think the walking kept him sane and the smoking. He hand rollwed his cigarettes by the cigar box full and smoked incessently, to my grandmother's chagrin because the smoke stained her Irish lace curtains so she made him smoke outdoors. He was gentle to the bone and self effacing. I never saw him lose his temper. He and I and the dog kept to the side garden a lot where he smoked. I was irresistably drawn to gentle people because I was afraid all the time from my father's unpredictable drunken violence.

Another gentle man was my godfather, Neal Schmidt, family friend, and a man who had suffered a tragedy so greaat there was no reovery. His fiance' and her whole family were killed in a catastrophic automibile accident. He withdrew into himself and lived on the periphery of other families his whole life. He too was gentle and sensitive and I loved him. Together we watched old movies in silent and safe companionship. I still have one of the dolls he gave me for Christmas, and Effanbee walker doll. He, too, never spoke of the war, the navy, or any of those experiences or any part of his previous life. None of them did. Their lives disappeared with them into the ground.

The only one capable of salvaging and saving their stories, me, hasn't got those stories, only my impression of them. The women are too much for this blog entry. Maybe later when the mood strikes again.