Kennedy's assassination and funeral (which I think everybody watched on a grainy B&W TV) are among my earliest memories of a wider world beyond my immediate surroundings.

I was 6 at the time and previously unaware that Eisenhower was no longer president! Somehow that one had passed me by unnoticed - LOL!

First mention of the draft lottery numbers! (Mine was 15....)


whm

#48;in 1972, but made to 355 in 1973

My number was 15 but those of us born in 1954 didn’t have to go for the draft. Which might be why we got classified as being part of this so-called “Jones Generation.” We spent our high school years obsessing about the draft, but when it came time to show up for the exam it was “you guys, never mind.”

But we were classic boomers and shared all of the characteristics.


whm

So, because I was also born in 54 I am not a true baby boomer?
This is getting deep.
And the draft, I threw that away as soon as I knew my number was good.

That’s the “Jones Generation” thing some have been talking about in this thread - I never heard of it before.


whm

We lived in England when I was in high school in the 60s and my family lived there til ‘75. Can still remember sitting at a pub with friends looking up our draft numbers in the Herald Tribune. My number was 50 on the first go round. Can’t remember my number the second go round. Maybe that’s how I ended up on The Group W Bench. Anyone else have a bike with solid rubber tires when you were a kid?

Jeff

As a reminder, you only had one number...the one you drew when you became eligible for the lottery (the year of your 19th birthday; you had to register for the draft at 18). All potential draftees 19 or older had to abide by the first drawing, in December 1969 (so my permanent number was 88). Those turning 19 the following year were in that year’s (1970) drawing, and so on. But you kept the number you first drew. However, early 1973 was a linchpin moment, since as Wade notes, those drafted thereafter were no longer automatically marked for service in Nam.

Cheers,
Dirk

No longer automatically marked for service, period. There were plenty of guys in the service during the Vietnam years who never went near Southeast Asia; I had one friend who spent the bulk of his tour of duty in Germany, others went to South Korea, and my best friend’s older brother stayed Stateside at a language school in Santa Cruz, California, I think it was.

Anyway, my draft number was 15, and at the time that was announced the announcement that we wouldn’t be needed hadn’t been made yet, so I spent my last year of high school convinced that I was going to be cannon fodder.

That’s one of the reasons I went to military college: if I was enrolled in ROTC, I couldn’t be drafted.

I figured that the war had to end at some point, but if it didn’t it was better to go as an officer....


whm

Amen.
My brother went in to go to VietNam.
He told me this years after he had gotten thrown out.
He forced the Army to throw him out by acting crazy.
They promised VietNam, but sent him to Okinawa.
He did not have it written on his contract.
He wanted to go to VietNam for easy access to heroin.
Mindblowing.

#28 here......

I have 3 brothers, so together with me that makes 4 males in the family. We were born in consecutive years from 1951 - 1954. Miraculously, none of us were picked in the draft lottery. What are the odds of that happening?

I was born in 1957. I have always thought that there was a huge difference between the early boomers, up until around 1954 or 1955, compared to the boomers born after that. So I find the “Jones generation“ classification to have some merits.

Several early boomers have commented about spending the whole day outside as a child during the summer. One of the big big differences between early boomers late boomers - “Jones’s” - is that the early boomers childhood, up until they were teenagers or even after they were teenagers, was spent in the era before most people had air conditioning and televisions. After everybody had air-conditioning and televisions, kids stop going outside as much.

Just before president Kennedy was assassinated, We moved onto a block that was right across the street from the local Catholic cathedral, it was owned by the Catholic Church. Every family on the block had anywhere between 5 to 10 children. Nobody had air conditioning yet. We did have televisions, but we spent most the time in the summer outside playing in everybody’s backyard. I can remember being seven years old, and my mom would send me to the local store about three blocks away to buy a loaf of bread. Nobody thought anything of it. What a different world that was!

Two years later, we moved into a house in another neighborhood. This was the first house that we had with air conditioning. There was only one other family with children on the block. We didn’t see them very much. We started spending more time indoors in the summer watching TV.

A Few years after that, when I was 10, we moved into get another house. Again, not many kids on the block, but I was old enough to have a bicycle and a few friends within a mile or so, and we spent most of our summer afternoons for the next couple years in the city pool.

As a teen, in the early to mid seventies, I hitchhiked to get around town in Omaha Nebraska, and also on the interstate going back-and-forth between Grand Island and Omaha. It seemed like by 1980, nobody was hitchhiking. Hitchhiking was not considered safe anymore for either hitchhikers or for the people picking up hitchhikers. A close friend of mine was murdered while hitchhiking in California around 1977.

SAT Scores went up nearly every year for the early boomers, and then started going down those born right around somewhere between 1954 - 1957.

I remember being interested in an academic career as a classical guitarist. One of my teachers, who was 5 years older than me, told me to forget about it, saying that the faculty positions at all of the colleges that started classical guitar programs in the 1960s and early 1970s we’re filled - mostly by early boomers. He was very talented, he had a masters degree in classical guitar, he had studied with Segovia during one of Segovia’s summer workshops, and he couldn’t find a faculty position. He later switched careers to be a financial advisor.

Same here.

I was born in the middle of 1945 so technically I'm not a boomer but I was so close that I shared all of the things that the early boomers did.

Graduated in June of 1963 and entered the Navy the next month when I was still 17 so I never had to register for the draft until I was discharged from active duty. It was a strange experience standing in line at the draft board (this would have been 1966) with a bunch of nervous teens waiting to be seen by the draft board. When the board found out I was a newly discharged vet they treated me like returning royalty.

I did spend some time off of the coast of Vietnam and we did do some fire support missions for the Green Berets but I was never in combat, something I was eternally grateful for.