Previous generation “bridges”
Posted by Natural-Ad-3666@reddit | Xennials | View on Reddit | 35 comments
So we are the generation that experienced the change from analog to digital. That’s our big thing. Has anyone talked to their parents and asked them what they feel like their bridge was? My dad was born in the 1950s so he lived through the birth of rock and roll, the hippy movement, disco, the excess 80s, and then grunge when he reached the age we are now. Side question for those with dead parents. What do you imagine the bridge for boomers was? They went from sock hops to civil rights.
YarnBunny@reddit
Silent Gen parents, radio to TV as regular at home entertainment.
Greatest Gen Grandparents: getting radio and getting cars.
Sumeriandawn@reddit
Before my parents immigrated to the USA in 1980, they didn't have electricity, cars and indoor plumbing
PhotographsWithFilm@reddit
OK, I am a little outside of this generation. My parents were Silent Gen.
As children they went from the end of the depression and through the biggest ware that the world has ever seen, through to the birth of mass media.
I think that is enough.
WeenyDancer@reddit
My father's earliest memory was hearing the war (wwII) was over. Mind blowing how close, and how far, all this history is.
Impressive-Cod-7103@reddit
My dad turned 4 the day before Pearl Harbor was attacked, that was one of his first memories.
Natural-Ad-3666@reddit (OP)
That’s a good one. Thank you. My wife’s grandma was like that. Always getting on her for throwing out anything. “Save that aluminum foil!” She’d say. Depression kids are a different breed. They do NOT waste things. I actually feel closer to them with our shit economy oddly enough. I don’t want to waste anything. My backyard is basically a victory garden.
Appropriate-Neck-585@reddit
My Grandma was a Depression-Era kid, you nailed it.
Ineedavodka2019@reddit
I mean, in a lot of places reliable electricity wasn’t common yet. I remember my great uncle getting running water and electricity in 1993.
PhotographsWithFilm@reddit
The chore my mother used to hate the most was washing plastic bread bags when they were first introduced.
My father only got his first pair of shoes (hand me downs) when he started school.
My mother used to make me bring home the glad wrap that was used to wrap food in, so it could be re-used.
And it flowed down. What do you do if you get a plastic take away container? You wash it and keep it. I still do it to this day.
Natural-Ad-3666@reddit (OP)
I’ve recently come to the conclusion that my childhood was basically in ancient times. We had rotary phones, antenna TVs, no computers, vhs. It was a completely different life. That’s what prompted me to wonder why life was like for our parents as thy went from children to adults. We lived through the internet age. They lived through the space age.
Sufficient_Turn_9209@reddit
This applies to me as well. Born 79, but my parents were born 39 and 40. My parents remember listening to Edward R. Murrow on the radio after dinner with thier parents or some serial spy story that broadcast on Saturdays. My mom remembers getting her spy box in the mail to accompany the program just before they got their first tv. They remember sleeping on wet sheets with the windows open because there was no central air. My mom was "uptown" with an attic fan, and my grandpa would run the hose over the roof until about 11pm when he would tip toe out to cut it off and save water. Their grandparents still used a litteral icebox, and they remember 4 digit telephone numbers. They were adults before cordless phones and microwaves came out. I'd say their generation bridged the electronic appliance and elections in general shift.
PhotographsWithFilm@reddit
Yep, all good and valid points.
My father in particular was proper dirt poor rural. 1 of 13 children. He remembered going to church on a Sunday on a buggy towed by a horse. I recently saw pictures of it - was an old flat bed truck. You could still see the differential.
When my parents got married in 1965, they still didn't have mains power to the house. The fridge ran on Kerosene. They had a 48v DC system an would run the generator for a few hours a day.
it was a different world and when I look at where he was when he died, the things he had seen, I am amazed.
TransportationOk657@reddit
The generation before the boomers saw the electrification of the country, switching from radio to TV, indoor plumbing being commonplace,, the birth of the suburbs, the highway system, etc.
Natural-Ad-3666@reddit (OP)
Plumbing is such a good one. I often say that indoor plumbing is humanity’s greatest achievement. I flick a handle and I get drinking water at whatever temperature I fancy. I can’t imagine how it was to live through that change. Really puts Netflix to shame.
TransportationOk657@reddit
Yep, if you lived in rural America in the '20s and '30s, you probably lived by lantern or candle light, had a well for drinking water, had an outhouse (imagine having to use that at night!!), a wood stoves for heat and cooking, and would feel pretty isolated most of the time. We are beyond spoiled compared to that old lifestyle!
Ineedavodka2019@reddit
Yup. My great uncle didn’t get plumbing or electricity until the 1990s. My mom said she remembered when they finally got rid of the outhouse and got indoor plumbing. My dad grew up with an ice box and they had a big chunk of ice delivered to keep the days milk cold. They also had milk delivered in glass bottles.
canisdirusarctos@reddit
In the 1980s as a child, I experienced a rural farmhouse with no plumbing and minimal electricity firsthand. Even by the 1940s when my childhood home was built, electricity and plumbing were necessities in Los Angeles. A great aunt & uncle lived in a house that had been in the family since it was built in the 1880s and it had been retrofitted with electricity, but still had gas lights when I was a kid.
It’s kind of mind blowing the stuff I’ve seen and experienced in my lifetime.
Appropriate-Neck-585@reddit
As a Black Xennial, I'd say the bridge was my Boomer parents had an extremely better life than their Jim Crow Era parents did. My Dad could drink from any water fountain or use any bathroom he wanted. My Grandpa could not. 🤷🏾♂️
lavasca@reddit
i was a big ol’ retirement shock. My parents were born during the Depression. (My pals’ grandmas are the same age as my mom and, in a couple cases, younger.)
i’m going to say Jim Crowe to Black Is Beautiful.
That is the big shift. When Rodney King happened I was so scared. I was shocked to learn that was still, somehow, normal.
Natural-Ad-3666@reddit (OP)
Holy shit! All the racism! I didn’t even really consider! That’s brutal for minorities. I went to a mostly black school, so Rodney king and OJ were big deals even when I didn’t really understand why. Kind of like the Berlin Wall or “piece” in the Middle East. Damn. It’s so interesting to learn about different perspectives of the same time that we lived through from different skin tones.
Kabraxal@reddit
Talking with my great grand parents when J was a kid, it is basically 2 things they experienced that were complete paradigm shifts.
indoor plumbing. This completely altered the world like possibly nothing else. I can somewhat imagine it given my camping experience of weeks with digging latrines… but even then I did not understand not having running water like we do now.
the mass produced car. I think this one is self explanatory. The car revolutionised the life of everyone.
From my grandparents:
Since then, it was stable until the internet. But the smart phone is the real paradigm shift. The internet was a quicker radio/TV but it wasn’t always at your fingertips. The smart phone might be the most revolutionary jump in human history. The only thing that challenges is it is the car.
Our kids are being raised in a world completely different from our childhood. There just aren’t massive shifts like that. Maybe just two others in the car and the printing press.
canisdirusarctos@reddit
My parents are Jones and although they’re considered a cusp generation like ours, they don’t really have an equivalent. The big changes happened for their older siblings.
DameKitty@reddit
My grandma was born in the early 1900s. She made it to almost 100. She saw a lot. She loved books on tape and the library the most.
Natural-Ad-3666@reddit (OP)
That’s wild that she lived so long and was there to bridge the gap between centuries. I wish I had appreciated my great grandparents more when they were alive.
DameKitty@reddit
She used to sing to me and my brother when we went somewhere in the car. She never turned on the radio, just sang songs she remembered. She loved baking, and canning. She had 2 pear trees, and 7 pine trees in her yard. She showed me the difference between spearmint and wintergreen. (She had both) I miss her a lot.
Natural-Ad-3666@reddit (OP)
And that’s the kind of stuff that I’m so interested in now. I would love to grow different kinds of mint.
DameKitty@reddit
Mint should be grown in pots. Spearmint and wintergreen can be grown in the ground, they are bushes. (At least, my grandma's were)
Natural-Ad-3666@reddit (OP)
I read about a guy who mint bombed his whole neighborhood. No mint grows in everyone’s yard and the whole place smells like mine. The postmen love his neighborhood because it smells like mint.
Constant_Concert_936@reddit
I get the sense…
1) they didn’t think about generational differences much or at all and
2) things crawled so slowly back then that most people experienced much of the same things generation after generation that they don’t really have micro generations.
Like, we (Xennials) have pre-internet and post-internet. But installation was easy and costs were minimal, relatively speaking.
Compare it to, say, owning an early car. There are obviously people who remembered getting their first family car, where before they only walked or rode horses/buggies, but did it happen all at once for an entire generation? I’m guessing no.
And anyway if it did happen all at once for, they didn’t have the means to talk about it, or to find out how many others had the same experience, or reflect on it like we do.
Maybe the boomers have a micro gen, like people who relate to hippies and those who do not.
Natural-Ad-3666@reddit (OP)
I like to talk to my other IT savvy friends about my first computer not even having windows. I wonder if it was similar for people describing their first family car.
xRVAx@reddit
Old boomers (late 1940s) were the first generation to experience television in their childhood, and they watched TV and movies evolve from black and white to color. For them, black and white meant "old and traditional" and color meant "modern and fashionable" (probably something later generations take for granted as a movie trope). The black and white era was Leave it to Beaver and Father knows BThest and Miracle on 34th Street. Color was Johnny Carson and Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie and M.A.S.H.
Likewise, old boomers saw the emergence of the Eisenhower Freeway system, and by extension, the final death of rail travel. They would have been the first generation to experience long family car trips to Yellowstone and Mount Rushmore. They also saw their downtown department stores (with tea rooms and Christmas window traditions) due off in favor of the suburban shopping centers and malls built in the 60s and 70s. The death of downtown featured prominently in the 1985 movie Back to the Future
Natural-Ad-3666@reddit (OP)
That is very well said. I think we can better appreciate their media than modern generations just because our choices we so limited, but our leisure time was so vast. There wasn’t enough current media to fill all of our down time. Kids today have something like 100 hours of media uploaded to YouTube every minute or something.
New_Stats@reddit
The Wright brothers flew a plane for the first time in 1903. We got to the moon 66 years later
I think the people who lived through both events saw the biggest leap in technological advancement.
Imagine growing up knowing humans can't fly, and then before you die, humans walked on the moon. It's mind boggling
Natural-Ad-3666@reddit (OP)
That is wild to think about. And here we are talking about how much worse the internet got for us.
New_Stats@reddit
They went from 1 in 7 homes having electricity in 1910 to nearly every home having electric in 1960.
In the early 1900s indoor plumbing started to become popular in cities. By 1950 it was commonplace
That's such a massive difference. I could live without the internet and without a computer. I wouldn't like it but I could do it. I couldn't live without indoor plumbing and electricity