Teenage secrets revealed, recovered
“They are everywhere – almost 18 million young Americans crowding into classrooms, spilling into the streets, filing cars and stores and beaches. They have been probed and prodded and psychoanalyzed. And yet, as behavioral scientists point out, “… the years between childhood and adulthood still remain an ‘Ill-defined no man’s land….'”
A take on the generation – Gen Zers – currently in high school? No. It’s the opening paragraph of Newsweek magazine’s extravagant 18-page rundown on the Baby Boomers, published March 21, 1966. Your columnist – I, me, myself- was part of the cohort under review, on the brink of graduating from high school, contemplating college, and, I suppose, life in general.
So what was life like for the Boomers – the millions of us born between the years 1946 and 1964, products of the GIs of World War II and their wives who just happened to be our mothers?
Here’s the (Kodak) snapshot, courtesy of Lou Harris polling and Newsweek for the 13-to-17-year olds of 1966:
* We believed in God – the Christian god, mostly. Only 4% of us were non-believers, while 96% professed a belief in a higher being. (The corresponding number for Generation Z is 74%.)
* Here’s something odd, maybe: An overwhelming 86% of teenagers in 1966 thought their parents were “mind(ing) their own business” in regard to them. Only 12% thought our parents were trying to “run our lives.”
* Asked what they liked best about themselves, 33% of us said the fact that we were “friendly … well-adjusted.” And what did we like the least? Some 26% said our looks, 16% our bad tempers.
* What did we teenagers “own” in 1966? Records and transistor radios, mostly. Ninety percent of girls owned albums or single records, 75% of boys. The same percentage of boys had their own transistors, compared to 73% of girls.
* What did we teens of 1966 want to own? Forty-four percent of the boys said a car, ditto for 37% of the girls. Only 1% of the boys and 8% of the girls wanted a “private phone.”
* For those of us in high school in 1966, John F. Kennedy, three years dead, was the person we “most admired.” Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, the Beatles, Elvis, Albert Einstein, Franklin Roosevelt, Jackie Kennedy, and Helen Keller all got mentions.
Newsweek didn’t ask about teenage sex lives in 1966, citing “the [questionable] legality of such inquiries” and because “such questions evoke an often meaningless jumble of wishes, facts, and boasts.”
The magazine did note the increase in the number of births among teenage girls in the years 1940 to 1963 – 40,000 to 101,000. It then quoted a panoply of sociologists, one of whom said “there hasn’t been any real increase in premarital coitus in recent years,” which is puzzling considering the 60,000 boost in newborns.
As for high school sex education, a girl from Nevada said, “Can you imagine making sex education compulsory? The parents and the church groups would scream….”
For me, two items leap off the page. Newsweek asked teenagers to describe, by word, “the world they live in.” The choicest words were “modern” and “fast-moving.” “Competitive,” “warlike,” and “impersonal” became more and more descriptive in the progression from 13 to 17 years of age.
“High school … separates the teenager’s world as cleanly as if the United States was riven by the Grand Canyon” into the college- bound (“the blessed”) and the rest (“the damned”), according to Newsweek.
“Separation between the groups is almost complete.”
Whatever possessed the magazine to put the matter in such shocking, binary terms (“blessed” and “damned”) is not exactly clear to me. Was there something I missed? Maybe I was fooling myself. Maybe I’m fooling myself now about not remembering. Was there resentment in the fact that one group seemed to be getting all the breaks? Does the resentment persist? What about the disdain the “haves” may have had for the “have-nots”? Does the disdain persist?
A smiling, bright-eyed 16-year-old by the name of Jan Smithers was on the cover of Newsweek for March 21, 1966. Head turned to the camera, she is seated on the back of a motorcycle.
A letter to the Newsweek editor showed up a couple of issues later. Harold J. Bassett of Prairie Village, Kan., wrote, “The teenager on your cover typifies today’s youth… Let’s hope the smile remains after she turns around and sees what’s ahead of her.”
Indeed.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.