Vol. 71: The ’60s vs. the ‘50s

The unique mission of my 'Kennedy Class'

         Remember “Happy Days,” the TV sitcom about life in the ’50s that ran for 11 seasons in the ’70s and early ’80s? My daughters adored the show’s teenage protagonists, Richie (played by Ron Howard) and Fonzie (Henry Winkler). After one episode in 1977, when I overheard them gushing about how great it must have been to grow up in the ’50s, I endeavored to set them straight.

         “You know,” I said, “when Mom and I grew up in the ’50s, it wasn’t really like that.”

         To this, my daughters— then aged ten and seven— replied, in unison: “You lived in the ’50s?”

         As a matter of fact, the ’50s were a great time to grow up— but only if you were born before my birth year: 1942. “It was such a wonderful time,” a fellow two years my senior remarked at an elementary school reunion. “There was no war, no Depression.” But time-trip back to 1955 with my classmates— all born in 1942 and ’43— and you see a very different picture:

         At the Fieldston School in New York City, we first formers (that is, seventh graders) were told that we were the worst class in the school’s history: immature, rebellious, and disrespectful. Yet the Fieldston class immediately ahead of ours— the most earnest collection of suck-ups you could ever hope to meet— had been told that they were the best class in the school’s history.

Why were we so defiant and the class just ahead of us so eager to please? We never asked. But while writing a memoir (yet unpublished) about coming of age after World War II, I developed a theory, which I shared this month at the 60^th reunion of my Penn class of ’64, to wit:

Rebels with a cause

         We war babies born in 1942 and ‘43 were the first people to grow up with no conscious memory of either the Great Depression or the Second World War. If you lived through these two calamities, that scary 16-year stretch from the stock market crash of 1929 to V-J day in 1945 subconsciously dominated your psyche for the rest of your life. I have friends just a year or two older than I who tell me that even after the war, they had nightmares about bloodthirsty Nazis or Japs breaking into their homes. So, once that most horrible of wars finally ended, the world had a whole generation of young people who were slavishly grateful to their elders for bequeathing them a world of peace and prosperity.

         If you watch movies or listen to pop songs from those postwar years, you may notice something that’s inconceivable today: teenagers aspired above all to emulate and please their parents. Postwar jukeboxes abounded in adult-friendly romantic tunes warbled by crooners like Perry Como, Dean Martin, Tony Bennett, Patti Page, Teresa Brewer, and Kitty Kallen. Can you imagine a sappy ballad like Eddie Fisher’s “Oh, My Papa” making the hit parade today?

         Our parents, aka “The Greatest Generation,” were inclined to congratulate themselves for vanquishing both the Great Depression and global Fascism. But to my age cohort, Hitler, and the Crash of ’29 were already ancient history, just as the ’50s seemed like ancient history to my young daughters in 1977. We took the New Deal and D-Day for granted, just as we took our relatively benevolent country for granted. When we looked around, we mostly saw a complacent culture grounded in materialism, conformity, and racial discrimination. Unlike the teenage rebels-without-a-cause portrayed on screen by James Dean and Marlon Brando, we were rebels in a world that seemed overdue for rebellion. But we lacked the necessary vocabulary.

Rock ’n roll anarchy

Our brand of teenage insolence was something the world hadn’t encountered before, and it transcended our noble protest sit-ins at segregated lunch counters. Our preferred brand of music— rock ’n roll— was deliberately designed not to please our parents but to annoy the hell out of them.

Bill Haley’s best-selling paean to mayhem, “Rock Around the Clock,” burst upon the world in 1955— not coincidentally, the year we became teenagers. Soon after, the stamping of teenage feet at a rock ’n roll concert nearly dislodged a balcony at Times Square’s Paramount Theater, and the very same adult nightmare ensued halfway around the world at theaters in Indonesia and Japan. A rock ’n roll riot at Convention Hall in Asbury Park, New Jersey, sent 25 kids to the hospital with injuries; a similar show in San Jose, California, routed 73 policemen and injured 11 people. Teenage mobs were tying up traffic in Sydney and ripping up theater seats in London.

This gleeful challenge to authority, this embrace of the anarchistic lyrics and music that so threatened our parents and teachers (“We’re gonna rock, gonna rock around the clock tonight”), was a public statement of defiance echoed by teen throngs throughout the free world and even behind the Iron Curtain.

         Some of this rebelliousness could of course be chalked up to hormones. But however inadvertently, our generation was on to something that our elders failed to recognize.

Double standard for women

         My class was further emboldened by John F. Kennedy’s election as president in November 1960— the fall of our freshman college year. When Kennedy spoke at his inauguration of a torch passing to a new generation that would change the world, many of us were already primed for his message.

         At Penn, our rebelliousness took the form of involvement in Civil Rights and especially gender equality. Penn’s women students, who previously had mostly attended college to find husbands, now increasingly prepared for independent careers. At that time, Penn men outnumbered the women by 4 to 1, which meant that women had to be smarter and more resourceful than the men to gain admission in the first place. Yet Penn’s men were treated as adults and the women as children. Undergraduate women were barred from many campus activities, including the Daily Pennsylvanian and even the cheerleading squad. They were not permitted to use the main stairway in Houston Hall, the student union. This was just the way things had always been done.

         “Why are Penn women herded around like cattle, subjected to all sorts of ridiculous rules, and told where to eat their meals?” I wrote in the DP my senior year. “…The way of life which is presently imposed on several hundred Pennsylvania women is an insult to any community of thinking minds.”

James Dean vs. our dean

         The queen of darkness who enforced this archaic regime was Penn’s dean of women, a sexually repressed (or so she seemed to us) spinster harridan named Constance Dent. She and her fellow deans kept the lid on our pressure-cooker by finding pretexts to silence their critics, much like Vladimir Putin in Russia today. Mel Goldstein was removed as editor of the Daily Pennsylvanian in our sophomore year, ostensibly for publishing “lewd and suggestive” content. Paula Gomberg— an outspoken critic of Dean Dent — was barred from serving as president of the Women’s Student Government because she had broken curfew one night. My classmate Sharon Ribner, the first woman ever to get a byline in the Daily Pennsylvania, was threatened with expulsion if she continued to submit articles to the DP.

         In retrospect, I understand where our deans were coming from. Constance Dent was born in 1923, which means she was six when the stock market crashed and 22 when World War II ended. People of that age understood, as we did not, the fragility of our seemingly secure world.

         In the charming 1978 film titled September 30, 1955, a college football coach in a small Arkansas town lectures a James Dean-stye rebel about the overriding importance of teamwork: “That’s how we won the war,” the coach explains. “And that’s how we keep the peace.” There, in a nutshell, you have the perfectly understandable mindset of my parents’ generation.

Vietnam and revolution

         Kennedy’s assassination midway through our senior year reinforced my classmates’ unique status as the “Kennedy Class.” That label further motivated us to push for positive social change after we graduated.

Later in the ’60s, a wave of reform movements sprang up in professions like business, law, medicine, and journalism, and it struck me that the prime movers all seemed to be people exactly my age, give or take a year. But by that time, a new crop of college students, disillusioned by America’s misadventure in Vietnam as well as the assassinations of JFK, his brother Bobby, and Martin Luther King, had concluded that what America needed was not reform but revolution— either that, or dropping out altogether. So those early ’60s when my “Kennedy Class” was in college were a narrow window indeed.

Constance Dent comes out

         But what became of the authoritarian elders we battled back in the day? After leaving Penn, our dean of women Constance Dent spent 32 years as a psychology professor at Kutztown University while also maintaining a private psychology practice — the sort of work that inevitably required her to venture inside the heads of other, younger people, not to mention her own. During that time, she helped create Kutztown’s Women’s Awareness Group; she also co-founded its Women’s Studies Program, as well as the Berks County Prison Society, which provides support services for inmates. These were the very kinds of reform efforts that you might have expected from my own liberated Kennedy Class, not from a defender of the detested Establishment. And eight years ago, at the age of 93, Constance Dent got married for the first time— to…a… woman.

         It may have taken her 93 years to come out, but come out she did. I like to think that, in the process, this erstwhile champion of her generation became, in some sense, a beneficiary of our generation.

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s new memoir, The Education of a Journalist: My Seventy Years on the Frontiers of Free Speech. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com