One in 74,000,000: Introduction

By Alan Sivell

I’ve written a bit in the last 50 years. Here’s the intro to a book I’m writing. I’ll post more throughout the summer.

When Mr. DeSalvo broke the news to me about my brother, all I could do was stare at the 5 or 6 hairs growing on the bridge of his nose. A bald man would have been proud to have that much hair on the top of his head, I thought. Then and there, I made a solemn vow to always care about my appearance.

After all these years, I still remember that moment on that hot, sticky August morning, deep in the Connecticut woods. Mr. DeSalvo was a kind and caring teacher, a guy with real life experiences: He had been shot down over Germany and held in a prisoner of war camp. And he was speaking to me at one of the most gut-wrenching, pivotal points in my life. And my main memory? Those hairs on his nose.

If you figure that there’s at least one pivotal moment in the life of every American baby boomer, there are at least 74 million moments like this, many deserving a fuller explanation and examination.

I’m writing down my moment and a few others because if I don’t, the only earthly notice of my middle-class, middle-American existence might be a feature story in a nursing home’s newsletter when I reach 110: “Last Surviving Woodstock Attendee: ‘It was a hot, muddy mess.’” And a few years later (if it’s a slow news day), a brief in the local newspaper: “Last Woodstock Festival-goer, 113, Dies.”

And I’m writing it because I am sick of the inaccurate portrayals of Baby Boomers. We aren’t all alike any more than members of any other generation. We’ve been stereotyped with a catchy name and described with generalities as accurate as a daily horoscope. We’ve been targeted by advertisers and politicians alike, and, as a whole, have responded as if we were members of Aldous Huxley’s pleasure-seeking, consumer population of Brave New World.

Our parents’ generation, The Greatest, had a superlative name, in addition to monumental events to frame their lives: the Great Depression, WW II, and the Red Scare. They experienced a harsh life ripe for the printed page. Though we had quickly tired of hearing about their hardships when we were kids, as adults, we couldn’t get enough of their stories and turned their memoirs into bestsellers.

Our lives have been framed by big events, too – notably the civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam, the moon landing, and the assassinations of our most charismatic leaders. But unlike the generational-wide experiences of the Greatest that they faced first hand, many Boomers watched life unfold second hand, in two dimensions on TV, as if we were the characters in Plato’s cave.

Some events, though, were experienced in real life, as with polio and the dawning of the nuclear age. We couldn’t swim in water that was too cold and practiced diving under desks at school. But once polio was cured and we eventually integrated nuclear annihilation with our other, less spectacular fears, we Boomers were able to live out our relatively carefree, insulated existences playing ball and tag in empty lots and schoolyards, many of which have now been covered over with strip malls, fast food restaurants and, increasingly, storage lockers.

In those days, when milk came in glass bottles without pictures of missing children, I felt free enough to bicycle all over Altamont, New York, sometimes wandering so far that I missed dinner because I didn’t always make it home before dark. The TV menu then was not the buffet it is today, with only three stations available. Still our parents limited even those limited choices and worried about the effects of the new medium. On hot summer evenings, when only the doctor’s family on the next block had air conditioning, we cooled off on the front porches as the disappearing sun gave way to the only relief of the day. The sounds of baseball announcers ricocheted around the neighborhood as Vin Scully, Mel Allen and Red Barber described the games so vividly you felt as if you were sitting next to them at the game (“The lights in Yankee Stadium are so bright, you could read a newspaper at midnight in centerfield,” my dad told me.). And late at night, tucked in bed with our most prized possession, our connection to the world – a made-in-Japan transistor radio powered by a 9-volt battery – we discovered a love of radio and rock and roll.

We dated at the drive-in movies, the only place we could escape the watchful eyes of our parents and where, while Godzilla was destroying major American cities, we groped each other until the car windows were so steamed you couldn’t see out to see the screen.

During these years, I worked mind-numbing jobs, scooping thousands of ice cream cones and installing panels of ceiling tiles in cubicled insurance offices as big as football fields, plotted imaginary, but very vague futures and generally endured the twists and turns of life that troubles every kid in every generation.

I trudged through the muggy, muddy fields of Woodstock and the frigid, empty D.C. streets at Nixon’s inauguration to his second, doomed term. I marched in peace protests (and apparently, in the revisionist history of today, was the only protester in America not to spit on a soldier). And before I became fully committed to the cause, I lost a six-pack of beer to Boston’s riot police at my first. I didn’t dodge the draft but did try for every deferment available short of getting married and having a kid, and then prayed for a high number when the other methods didn’t work. Those prayers, if things really work that way, were answered.

I spent five years wandering the country in my ’69 VW convertible, always on the lookout for an open gas station, an odd job and the meaning of my life. I put up power poles in Wyoming, groomed a golf course in Connecticut, and made ski boots and spun records in Sun Valley, Idaho.

After chasing the sirens of fame and then, as a reporter, the sirens of authorities, I found myself married with kids and locked into a job. Life suddenly slowed down and I settled into a life of normality – a teacher at a small Catholic university on the banks of the Mississippi River.

When Mr. DeSalvo told me that my brother had died, my sobs should have been heard on the far side of the universe. But all I could do was stare, fascinated, at the hairs growing on the top of his nose. I hadn’t known that was possible. Now that I’m well past the halfway point in life, I’ve bitterly learned that as we age, hair sprouts from the most unlikely places. Sometimes overnight. And as adults, we don’t have a teen’s limitless mirror time to hunt for and purge our imperfections. But I keep trying.