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.
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