Boomers

By T. W. Burger

A delicious irony orbits constantly around the popular nickname of the generation I was born into. Starting in 1951 at our naming by a journalist, those of us born roughly between 1946 and 1964 were pegged as Baby Boomers. Though some quibble over the exact dates, Baby Boomers, or simply Boomers, we have remained.

Et Voila! Me, my brother and almost all of my friends, enemies, paramours, wives, and co-workers, whatever our similarities and differences, have been and remain Boomers.

But “Boomers” had another connotation as well.

(Parenthetical digression that is really at the core of this column:)

Pre-dawn one chill, overcast morning in the mid-1970s, my wife was dropping me off at the Department of Education at The University of Georgia. We were in our trusty 1966 VW Bug. As I grabbed my bookbag a bright flash of light and heat struck our faces through the window. We threw up our arms and screamed.

What we thought had happened was a nuclear strike on one of the likely targets within killing distance of our home.

What had actually happened was the sun, just breaking free from the horizon, had also broken free from the thick, dark clouds that made the morning so murky. Sunlight hit us strobe-quick in the dark dawn,

The rest of our reaction had been bred into us through 25-plus years of Cold War doom and gloom, of ridiculous duck-and-cover drills in elementary school, of studying kill zone maps to determine if one could survive a nuclear strike where one lived, if one could find a fallout shelter, and thinking about whether one would even want to survive, considering the world that would remain.

)End of digression,)

So, that sort of “Boom,” for a lot of us, was always lurking in the backs of our minds, like the shapes almost seen in an open closet door in a dark childhood bedroom.

Officially, the Boomer label is a nod to the very sharp uptick in the birthrate in the United States after WWII, when service men and women, including both of my parents, returned from war, mostly in good health and feeling frisky.

Before WWII, the U.S. birthrate had declined to an average 1.6 children per mother. Starting in 1946, the first year of the Boom, 3.4 million babies were born in the U.S. By 1953, all the way to 1964, that number hit four million babies per year. At one time, we Boomers made up a quarter of the U,S, population.

Now, we are between 62 and 80 years old, and those of us not already busy pushing up daisies still make up 20 percent of the population.

I suspect a much lower number of us still ride motorcycles, though a lot of us still wish we could.

If only because of the weight of our numbers, we Boomers have had a huge influence on our culture, affluence, art, and music. I drive a sensible Japanese car that gets decent mileage. But I still get goose-bumpy and envious when some motorhead passes me in a V-8 dinosaur with glass-pack mufflers and a manual transmission. I’m old, arguably smarter and more responsible…but I’m not dead yet.

I’m not going to get into one of those old fart rants about the generations that have followed us Boomers. God knows we did plenty of grand things, but if I think a bit, I’m sure I could think of a few flubs as well. It’s your turn. Try not to screw it up.

A hint: I can’t help but notice that the whole topic of nuclear warfare has reared its ugly head again. Only this time, the people standing watch over those swarms of grim reapers are even bigger fools than the last batch.

 T. W. Burger was raised in town and graduated from Athens High School in 1967, then worked as a driver of everything from fork trucks to garbage trucks,

He is now a semi-retired journalist who resides on the banks of Marsh Creek, just outside of Gettysburg, Pa.

He can be contacted at twburger@comcast.net

You folks might want to take care of that first.