Baby Boomers: The Strangest Generation
A light look at growing up in the 60's and 70's, TV, music, family life, politics, drugs are just a few of the topics we cover. Whether you're a Boomer or not there was no other time like the Strangest Generation.
Baby Boomers: The Strangest Generation
Boomers, Factories, and the Fight for Identity
What if the untold stories of the Baby Boomer generation could change the way you view history and modern society? Join us as we explore the gritty realities faced by working-class families born in the 1960s in Rust Belt northeastern cities. From economic struggles and factory shutdowns to the pervasive influence of drugs, this episode shines a light on the stark contrasts between Boomers who grew up in affluent suburbs and those from working-class neighborhoods. Hear personal reflections on the ethnic composition of America during the 60s and 70s, and gain insights on how these historical contexts shape views on modern immigration.
Listen to the compelling narrative of growing up in multicultural neighborhoods where genuine connections broke down racial barriers. Experience the journey of marrying a Black woman and embracing a diverse family, while also exploring the dynamics between different ethnic groups like Italians and Irish. We also touch on the presence of the Italian mafia during that era and the rich cultural differences in cooking and community life. As we wrap up, we contemplate the fluidity of cultural identity and express hope for a more inclusive and unified American identity, urging future generations to appreciate and integrate differences for a harmonious society.
Hey, it's me. I've been off the air for a while. It was a mistake because I lost my credit card that paid for the Buzz Sprout platform that I publish on Lost it cancelled. It found it ten minutes after I cancelled it and every account that I had automatic payments for were discontinued, budsprout being one of them, and I kind of lost it. I was like, eh, I'm not that interested. You know, some people are listening. I got a few hundred people, but some people that I know friends of mine wanted to hear more. So I was like, okay, I've heard it three, four times, I'll put one out there. I got a list of stuff to talk about.
Speaker 1:But the thing is I listen to a lot of Baby Boomer podcasts and I watch YouTube and of Baby Boomer podcasts and I watch YouTube and watch Baby Boomer stuff and it's mostly nostalgia, memorabilia, partridge Family, the Monkees, banana Bikes, drive-ins and that stuff's cool, it was great, it was memorable, I did it all. But there's a different side to the 60s, 70s baby boomer generation that really kind of gets overlooked and not covered. That really kind of gets overlooked and not covered. And if you've listened to my past podcast, you hear that edge of the baby boomers and I'm not talking about baby boomers that were born in the 50s. They had their own set of characteristics. There's almost like two separate generation of baby boomers at all Really came from the fathers and families that fought in World War II and Korea, and I'm just part of that later leg of baby boomers born in 1960. Of baby boomers born in 1960. And it was a whole different experience.
Speaker 1:If you lived in a Rust Belt northeastern city and you didn't participate in the mass migration to the suburbs and your dad was a steel worker or an auto worker, you know it didn't really have a lot to do with TV shows and fads and kabonkers, those balls that you would clack together and yo-yos and bicycles. It had a lot more to do with drugs. It had a lot more to do with struggling through a working class economy. It had a lot more to do with factories being shut down and it was different than the baby Boomers are portrayed. So if I have any younger listeners that resent Baby Boomers, this is not an apology or a poor me or woe is me kind of thing, but I think you all think that we just grew up with a Jaguar in a driveway and we really didn't, man. We hit a friggin war to fight or trying to avoid.
Speaker 1:I was too young for Vietnam, but it was really present in my life, in my neighborhood. Many of my friends' fathers were there. Many guys that lived on the block had to go there and in between I guess I'm watching the Partridge family, you know. But it wasn't all roses and bubblegum and Mary Poppins. It was edgy but it was fun and I learned a lot For my baby boomer friends, my age, my demographic you're going to recognize some of the stuff I mean.
Speaker 1:If you listen to any of my past podcasts, you know what I'm talking about. I know a lot of you get triggered by the names of the drugs, the names of the bands that we listen to, rock concerts and things like that that really don't get that much play in the media when people talk about baby boomers Okay boomer, okay boomer. I heard Bill Maher the other day say okay, boomer is not a full sentence. You just can't depict baby boomers as one distinct group of people at all. So I look at today, I look at America, I look at the ethnic breakdown, the racial breakdown, and I want to tell my younger listeners again if I have any at all. I want to tell them look it, man, it was so different in the 60s and 70s.
Speaker 1:Ethnic breakdown of America right now has more to do with white, black, latino, white black, latino, arabs, middle Easterners, mexicans, and that really was not what we grew up with. We grew up with this as a result of this wave of Western European migration to America that happened around the turn of the century, where waves and waves and waves of people came to America for a better life and trying to have kids and raise families and get decent jobs, much like you know the people who come to America now. This is why I don't really have a problem with immigrants coming here. I think it's a good thing, because I'm really starkly aware of my roots and how my family got here and why they got here and how much better it was for them to be here. So here's what it looked like back in 1968, 69, 70. Here's what neighborhoods looked like. There was rich neighborhoods and they were mostly people who were white and Protestant. Like they came over on the Mayflower and shit like that and they ran companies and they were lawyers, and they were big Mayflower and shit like that and they ran companies and they were lawyers and they were bigwigs and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:I got to tell you I didn't know any of them. I didn't even know about them. I just knew that I wasn't one of them. So that's one group. I didn't have much affiliation with them.
Speaker 1:Then there was my group, irish Catholic. We grew up cloistered in our own little neighborhoods. We did not know anything about anybody. We didn't know about Jews. We heard about them, we thought they were somebody from the Bible. We didn't know that they. I didn't grow up in New York City or anything like that. So you know, I knew one Jewish kid in my life. He went to a Catholic school because he was a problem child and the parents wanted him to get roughed up by the priests. And I've come to know many Jews you know in my life and they're fine people. And I've come to know many Jews you know in my life and they're fine people. And I've had one or two really good Jewish friends. But as a kid I knew nothing about Jews. They were just nowhere near us.
Speaker 1:As an Irish Catholic kid I grew up with Germans. Their ethnic identity was pretty much washed out by that time. There was one or two German restaurants in town but nobody really knew much about Germans. You know, the Germans came over. They really didn't come over because they were poor. They came over because they had money and they could come here and make more money. For the most part we had polish kids. There was a lot of polish people and again, I didn't give a shit. I knew that they talked different, they had a weird accent and they lived in certain pockets of town and they ate weird food Like blood tongue and sausage and shit like that. And we Irish we didn't eat anything. We had the worst food of anybody we had in our neighborhood.
Speaker 1:Italians In our neighborhood. Italians, the Italians and the Irish kind of mixed together a lot because of the proximity and the dates of their immigration to America. But when we were kids we didn't know shit from Irish-Italian. You guess a football? Yeah, let's play. You got a bet. Couple of minutes, let's play. You know, we knew their names were different, our names were different, but we didn't give a shit, right, we didn't care.
Speaker 1:Puerto Ricans yeah, there was a Puerto Rican pocket in my neighborhood. Didn't know shit about them, didn't go down there, they didn't come here to our place, we just didn't really care. But of course, in this time, in this day and age, back then it didn't matter if you were in a different neighborhood or you were a different ethnic makeup and you were in the wrong place. You really had to, you know, go to war. After, into your teenage years, there was African Americans, but we were so isolated from them that I really can tell you that I never knew a black dude until I was maybe 15.
Speaker 1:Where I lived, there was a in our neighborhood. There was a bridge over the railroad tracks and on the north side of the bridge is where we lived, the Irish, and what we called the back of the bridge was black and we didn't go there and they didn't come over the bridge. You couldn't go over the bridge. The schools were segregated. They were two different cities, so the school system wasn't connected, but you just didn't do that. If you got into trouble with the police over some bullshit when you were a teenager, they would, instead of arresting you or taking you home, they would drop you, take you over and drop you on the other side of the bridge and you would have to run back over that bridge. They do it to us, the whites, and they do it to the blacks and it was funny. It never happened to me, but I know a bunch of dudes that it actually did happen to and you just hope to get out of there alive.
Speaker 1:But when it comes to the blacks in the 60s and 70s there was a lot of civil rights stuff going on. There was a lot of riots. I remember hearing about stuff down in the South. I remember the Black Panthers. I remember the riots in South Central Detroit, I believe. I remember the bombing in Philadelphia of a black neighborhood by police. I remember Angela Davis. I remember knowing of black people, but then I'd be watching Bill Cosby on TV, flip Wilson on TV, right.
Speaker 1:So I knew I was supposed to not like black people, but I never knew one, so I couldn't not like them. And I gotta tell you, man, I am going to be completely honest I grew up in a neighborhood where the white people that I grew up many, many, many of them were very racist and I heard the N-word all the time. I'll tell you one place I never heard the N-word was in my house, never from my mother or father, but I remember cousins and friends and just being out and having some beers and somehow it would always come around to at some point during the night. They're gonna start talking about blacks and I'd be like I don't get it. You know, I'm no pope or saint or anything, I'm just logical. I'm like you don't even know a black dude. What's the friggin' problem? I just kept my mouth shut and later in my life I really got to know.
Speaker 1:I opened a medical practice in an inner city neighborhood and got to know black people in a really wonderful way and I'm so glad I had that experience because I got to see how interesting they are, how different they are, what their values are and how, as a white guy, doctor, privileged they thought I was privileged. They thought I had been born a doctor or something and I wasn't that like that. But they would think that about me and then they would catch my edginess and my I-don't-take-shit-ness and they really liked it about me. Eventually I wound up marrying a black woman and to this day we're married a black woman and to this day we're married and I have black grandkids and a whole black family and I love it and we get along great. So black and white like it is today was really a major thing and you just didn't go there. You just kept away. But you know I'm no hero. But I just remember when I worked at the steel plant I met black dudes. I was you know like, you're all right or you know what you're an an asshole. But I could meet an Irish guy. That was an asshole. It didn't really matter to me, it was just the foundation that my parents gave me where they would not allow anything like that to go on in our house and it Anyway, anyway, I want to get down to the bones of it.
Speaker 1:The Italians and the Irish. We lived together In the beginning. We didn't know from nothing Italian Irish. We didn't know from nothing Italian. We didn't care. We went to the same church. If I brought home an Italian girl, my mother was not happy that she was not Irish, but if she was Catholic and Italian she could kind of be alright with it. I actually married an Italian woman many, many years ago and she was a wonderful woman and my mother and father took her into our family. But my point is nowadays it's like you know, the Arabs, the Russians, this and the we're always gonna frigging, delineate different groups and the group that got here first is gonna piss on the group that got here after them and it's just corny bullshit. So we got the Italians, we're with them, but we don't really know it until we get into, like junior high Now, the Italian dudes.
Speaker 1:I'm going to tell you right now, I'm going to speak the truth. I know Italian guys that are doctors, lawyers, judges, but I knew a lot of Italian dudes that were half mafia, a lot of them. And so, as a baby boomer and I hope that a lot of the boomers that are listening remember this as a baby boomer, we grew up with the presence of this entity known as the Italian mafia, and it might not have affected you personally, but it was out there and everybody knew somebody that knew somebody that could get this done, and it was there. And where I lived, there was a concentration of Italian blacks neighborhoods One was called the Hill, one was called the Court. I got bussed into the neighborhood called the Hill, where I was one of the only non-Italian people there and I love Italian girls. They were beautiful, I was a smart ass, I made a lot of Italian friends, but the older we got, the more Italian they got, and the more Italian they got and the more American we got, as the Irish Italian guys used to run in groups. They would dress in a certain way, we used to call it the uniform. They would dress in a certain way, we used to call it the uniform, and this would be in schools and in the bars and clubs and things like that. And Irish guys really weren't clicky like that. We were clicky but we didn't really identify that much as Irish.
Speaker 1:I heard a guy on a podcast the other day and he told a little metaphor. He said a fish is swimming by another fish and the one fish says to the other the water is nice today. And the other fish said what's water? That's kind of how the Irish were. What's water? That's kind of how the Irish were. We didn't know anything about anything other than us. But I knew one thing Italians could cook and I got to tell you the Irish can't cook. I'm just going to tell you the Irish can't cook. I'm just going to tell you Potatoes, cabbage stew. We had to eat fish every Friday and it was Mrs Paul's fish sticks and it wasn't real fish. But the Italians, man, they could cook.
Speaker 1:There was a kid that lived down here. He was a good friend of mine, lived a few doors away from me. His grandparents were full-blood Italian, didn't speak English and they lived in a double up and down and the grandmother would cook every day and the grandfather grew grapes and would make wine. And the grandfather grew grapes and would make wine and I would just hang out, starting around 4, 4.30 at that house, wait to smell that sauce, and I would get myself invited to dinner because Italians are very hospitable, very welcoming, and I would sit and they would speak in Italian and I would just eat and I knew they would be talking, speak in Italian and I would just eat and I knew they would be talking about me. He's so skinny, why don't you eat? Mangia, mangia, mangia. And I would eat and eat and my mother would be looking for me yelling out the door where are you? Where are you? It's dinner time. I'm like, yeah, I'm not going to eat frigging Wonder Bread and Velveeta cheese. I got a frigging homemade Italian dinner with sauce and noodles and antipasto and wine, and you know I'm eating there.
Speaker 1:So when it came down to it, the Italian boys ganged up. They were mini-mafia. They would start with little street gangs. Their fathers were in the mafia and the sons would start gangs, little gangs, in hopes that for many of them in hopes that they would, you know, become mafia guys, and many of them hoped to become doctors and optometrists and plumbers and lawyers. But they did run in gangs In the Irish. We weren't like that, we were rogue, we didn't know we were Irish, like I said, but we kind of knew we weren't Italian, because those boys would come at you with four or five guys and there'd always be this tough, loner, motherfucking Irish guy who was dangerous, a man-child in junior high and freshman in high school. But we didn't gather around like, hey, we're Irish. It wasn't like that. They were gathered together and when they saw a tough kid, an Irish kid, they would go after him in gangs.
Speaker 1:Now, I wasn't a tough kid, I was a skinny little kid, but you know he fought a lot, he had to fight and had a big mouth. So you know, I hid my scraps, but nothing too serious. But I kind of liked Italian women. They were sexy, they were different, they were exotic, and so I would have to. If I met an Italian girl I would have to go down into the hill or the court, ride my bike down there.
Speaker 1:Well, it so happened, I dated one girl, went down to her neighborhood, saw her in her house and at a certain time we were in her garage and a certain time she came to me and she said you have to go now. I said, well, it's still, it's only o'clock, what's going on? And she said you got to go now. And I look out the door and I see a group of these dudes and one of the dudes is her boyfriend and he is in the gang. So I got on my bike my one bike I ever had that got stolen and I tore my ass out of that garage and got all the way back to my house and still, you know, wanted to see her. But she was the girlfriend of this guy and I'm going to tell you I've looked this guy up on Facebook and this guy wound up being a major MF-er in Vegas and is long gone for life.
Speaker 1:So next day I got to go to school and I go to school with all these guys and, like I said, the Irish, we didn't run in gangs, we just made friends with whoever. And I was walking down a stairwell with my books in between classes and, about, I'll say, four guys, four Italian dudes, caught me in a stairwell and they started pushing me, yelling at me, talking about the girl, and I know I'm dead. I'm a dead man. These guys are going to fuck me up, they're going to kick the shit out of me. So I'm screwed. But here's a funny part of this story.
Speaker 1:Remember the show Happy Days with Richie Cunningham and the Fonz and all that stuff? A couple of nights before this incident happened in the stairwell, happy Days was on and Richie Cunningham, ron Howard, he's not a fighter, he's a nerdy kind of kid and he gets into a situation where a bunch of guys are going to beat him up and he knows he can't fight. And I remember the scene. He just went fucking berserk, he like ripped his shirt open, he he started throwing shit, he started yelling and he just went like psycho.
Speaker 1:And I'm looking at these dudes and I'm like, my God, I'm Richie Cunningham, it's my only way out. So I'm standing there with my books in my hands and I take the books and I smash them against the wall, I rip my shirt open, I start going fucking crazy how I'm going to kill you, I'm going to fucking stab you, I am going to, yeah. And I just keep going. And I see these guys are fucking scared. They think I'm nuts, I'm sweating, I'm spitting, I'm cursing, I'm pacing, I'm goingitting, I'm cursing, I'm pacing, I'm going to kill somebody. And they all backed down. They all backed down. Actually, in the end a couple of dudes came up to me, a couple of Italian guys, and said look, man, I got no problem with you. I just want you to know it was Joey's girl, not my girl. I don't have nothing to do with it. And I thought that was so funny. I really never saw her again because I was too scared to go down there, but never had any more problems with the Italian guys.
Speaker 1:Most of them went on to become respectable citizens, as they probably always were, just being kids, and I guess my point is this is that back then there was divisions in our culture and our society, as there are now, but when the young kids look at it, they see a different world. They see divisions among gays and straights and transgenders and illegal immigrants. We saw the world as Irish, italian, polish, black, white, rich, middle-class, poor. But in the end, in my generation, we all came together and we're just all American now. We all came together and we're just all American now.
Speaker 1:You know Other than St Patrick's Day, or you know the Sopranos. We're just all considered American and my hope is that this generation now that draws these distinct lines between different ages of people, different backgrounds of people, different sexual identities of people, they all just cool down, take it easy, because, you know, 30 years we're all going to be Americans again and there'll be a new wave of who knows what and we'll all piss on them for a while and then they'll become Americans too. That's my hope. My name's John. I hope you liked it and have a great day. See you next time.