There’s a lot of talk about generations. Generation X worries about opportunity; Baby Boomers look toward retirement. Even President Bill Clinton and his challenger, Bob Dole, labor under the emblems of their respective age groups. The media tend to emphasize the divisions; where is the common ground? Amy Wu, who is 20, talks about growing up then and now with Timuel D. Black, a retired professor of social science at City Colleges of Chicago. The 77-year-old native Chicagoan experienced the Great Depression and served overseas for three years in World War II.
Q: When you look at my generation what baffles you the most?
A: I don’t know what to expect. There’s very little predictability because you’re so individualistic. The group norms that were part of my generation–family norms, community norms–they don’t exist for your generation. What you feel like doing you do. At the same time, I don’t see the vibrancy, I don’t see the happiness. I get the impression that a large number of young people, regardless of class and income, can’t see much future.
Q: We’re always being told by educators that we’re not going to surpass the success of our parents’ generation, that we’re going to have eight jobs in our life. That gives young people hopelessness.
A: We not only had more stability, but we had more hope for the future. Our exposure to the movies and radio tended to be on the optimistic side, it was very romantic–there was Clark Gable–but we were not bombarded as your generation is with images all day long.
Q: For my generation, technology is wonderful. It saves time; you can have a microwave meal in five minutes and fax a friend.
A: But what is the rush? You don’t have any more leisure time than we do. You want to do more because you think you’re wasting time if you don’t do more. I’ll give you a scenario: 4 o’clock on a Friday the world will shut down, and it will not open up again until Monday morning. So from Friday till Monday all that time belongs to you to have a good time and to relax.
Q: I can’t even imagine what you’re telling me because if the world shut down at 4 on Friday, I wouldn’t know what to do. Even just walking down Lake Shore Drive I would say, “What am I doing, I’m wasting time.”
A: Yeah, like, where is my computer? Don’t you carry your computers with you? For me, of course, I’m remaining primitive as long as I can. You’ve noticed that I don’t have an answering machine at home. I don’t want one.
Q: What if you don’t get your messages?
A: They’ll catch me if they want me. Once upon a time there were no answering machines.
Q: What kinds of things made young people in your generation happy?
A: On 4 o’clock on Friday the world shut down, we made a new world. We went to plays, we danced a lot, we went to places like the Aragon or the Tremont, we’d go to movies. You’d go to friends’ homes, sit down and listen to records.
Every Friday or Saturday we would go to a friend’s and play new records we had like Ellington or Goodman. We’d take our records, buy some beer and we would just sit in the middle of the floor. Even after the war, though everyone was getting married and making a living, we did that for a long time. These days, every Wednesday, a group of us fellows who grew up together–each of us has known each other for at least 60 years–we meet for breakfast.
Q: Weren’t you bored in your youth, just sitting around?
A: Oh, no. There was concert music, picnics and parks. You talked a lot with your family, you had radio–and radio forced you to use your imagination–and different kinds of shows like Bob Hope or Benny Goodman or Louis Armstrong.
Q: I think my generation is growing up a little bitter. Our parents keep telling us about times that were better and happier. We’re upset that we can’t experience it.
A: We were so determined to make our children and grandchildren live a better life materially that we gave them much less attention. Women started working. You had to have two jobs to do the things you wanted to, you had to have two automobiles, and the children had to have phones.
Q: Was the war a turning point in your life?
A: While I was in the service I became much more serious about life itself, saw the horrible, very tragic results of violent war. I had not been out of the country before then. I saw brutality like no one should ever see–death and all of that–and had the frightening experience of seeing one of the camps of the Holocaust. It sobered me about the way the world was run.
When I saw this it was a very unpleasant but a very enlightening experience. I came out with a sense of mission and sense I had escaped death, that I was living a second life and I had a responsibility to live it productively. I’d been active in things before but it was kind of haphazard, when I returned (from the service) it was much more focused. I wanted to go back to school.
Q: Our parents keep on telling us that we have to get out in the job market and network as soon as possible because the market is so unpredictable.
A: If we had an education, we were certain to have a job. I knew when I got my first teaching job that I could teach until I retired or quit. I wasn’t going to get fired. I know young people today who have better training or as much training and can’t get a teaching job. Part of it was that we had more resources to invest. One of my friends who came out of the service went into business and now he’s rich.
Q: Don’t you think that you and your generation would be depressed if you were a young college grad with no prospects?
A: Fulfillment is not in material achievement, that’s only part of it. Fulfillment comes with one’s evaluation of one’s own success and belief. What is happening, because the family is so unstructured these days, is that you don’t have Mama and Daddy to say, “Baby, that sure is nice.”
Q: Do you have any advice for young people these days?
A: De-emphasize some of the materialistic things and emphasize more the relationships between one another. That’s not easy because of the mobility and competition. But I think if a group of people in your generation says we’re going to get together at least once a week, just let our hair down, take off this uniform that we wear all day, everyday, and don’t know we have it on, but we’re uncomfortable because it is on. Relax, you’re not going to change the world. You can do what you can to make it a better place, but there’s nothing you can do to make it the way you want it to be, and maybe that’s a good thing. In fact the speaker at my high school graduation said life is not a destination, it’s a journey.
———-
An edited transcript.
