The "Silent" Generation Comes of Age 
                 A Tribute to Members of the Class of 1960 at Hamilton High School (West) Trenton N.J.

                                                         on Their Forty-Fifth Reunion, June 2005     

                                                              by Robert Louis Chianese, HHSW class of 1960

                                                                                                                                            

           Few of us would go back to being 17, 18, or 19, which is how old we were in June 1960. The poet Robert Southey said that "Live as long as you may, the first twenty years are the longest half of your life." He seems to have gone to school with you and me. Our ceaseless motion as we were shuttled around to various schools in those post-World War II days made school, always an endless prospect to a child, seem an even longer ordeal. Many of us walked or got bussed to six different schools together until we finally arrived at Hamilton High, from which we were graduated exactly forty five years ago this month. We’re members of the class of 1960, two million strong (1). 

           This jostling about for schooling may seem typical in 2005, but remember, almost none of our families ever moved—a few of our parents are still living in the same houses today. Our growing numbers simply swamped the old schools, and we had to be ferreted around like a prodigiously growing litter.

            But as endless as this experience seemed to us when we were young, it now seems a swift unrolling of years, very much in the past. It’s even more distanced since many of the buildings we were school chums and friends and sweethearts in are gone. De Cou School is gone, Rowan is gone, Maple Shade gone--leveled, paved over, demolished without a trace. There is a strange sort of desolation, an unaccountable loss in knowing that the first places you learned to learn in have been torn down, a loss of the very substance of memory and awareness itself.

            But I do remember it. 

            I first went to De Cou as I calculate it in the fall of 1947 at age four and a half. My mother still recollects that Bobby Gray (a pal with whom I would share every year of my schooling, including four years at Rutgers U.) came home with me after the first day and then headed off to his own house many blocks away by himself. She was awfully worried. We were so young and bold and scared and funny and had our whole school life yet ahead of us.

            De Cou was named after a landowner who had slaves, as was nearby Wiley School which some of us attended instead. It was a relic of the nineteenth century, of Horace Mann and the earliest public school movement in America. It had only four rooms on two floors, with a moveable dividing wall between the bottom two that could be opened for assemblies, which featured playlets, chorus singing, and concerts on the tonette--magic time. The square building was brown brick with exterior wood trim painted white, and looked like a child's drawing of "School House" with its front-and-center flag pole and smoking chimney. It had an outside latrine still in use on the boys' side when I went there and an immense field of Indian grass where in spring hop toads thrived. The play yard right around the school was covered with ashes and clinkers from the coal furnace in the basement, which was under the care of the venerable janitor Mr. Mather, who looked like Popeye the Sailor. And of course there was the jungle-gym fire escape which we climbed in defiance of repeated warnings not to.

            The wood floors creaked, the halls were dark and the stairs steep, and there were glass and wood exhibit cases in the hallways, the curiosity cabinets of turn-of-the-century science. Rowan and Maple Shade were simply larger versions of De Cou. There were separate boys and girls entrances and dark cloak rooms and heavy oak desks with ink wells and flip up tops inscribed with ancient blue-black hieroglyphs: they are Arts and Crafts collectors’ items now. The teachers hefted long poles to pull down the tall banks of windows that made up the outer wall of the room. The moveable front wall was paneled with slate blackboards that had flaked broken patches of unusable space, which the teachers had to steer writing around. Even the yellow writing paper we were issued was impregnated with little blotches of wood, forcing us to maneuver our green pencils the way our teachers swerved their chalk. 

            There was no air conditioning, though the heater boxes, which tapped out rhythms from bits of paper that got caught in their wheel fans, were supposed to circulate air in summer. The hot, high-ceilinged rooms were fitted with clocks that we watched as they reached 3:20 p.m., the time we were set free after spending the whole day there. The stale basements served as cafeterias, dance halls, bomb shelters, and science project exhibit areas and a place to have gym with Mr. Ricardi on a rainy day. One could pick off pieces of crumbly whitewash from the damp walls.

            Through such reminiscing, one can see how old, how obsolete those schools were (2). My father went to Maple Shade, probably in 1915, and had Claudine Zapf as his teacher. Such dedicated women, many of them resigned spinsters, kept things going despite the old buildings, stuffed and crowded as they became with the growing swarm of kids. Miss Zapf was the principal by the time our group got there thirty-five years later. She probably had yelled at my father's generation the way I remember she yelled at us: "Heeeeeey, youse guys, stop running in the halls!" I'm told she is still alive: so, a belated thank you, Miss Zapf, for the love and concern you showed for us. These women are the unsung heroines of America.

            We were also, later, the first group to go to McGalliard School, which was exciting to watch being built as a boy, even though it continued the destruction of our beloved woods and swamps--a place of high adventure on the edge of suburbia. We were also, I believe, the first students at the brand spanking new Steinert Jr High and the first to use the new wing at Hamilton High. So, we were one of the last groups in the old, turn-of-the-century buildings, now gone, and one of the first in the modern ones, which looked and felt so very different. They were glass and steel boxy structures with rubber tile floors, modular furniture, clocks that raced ahead to catch up time at the end of the hour, and blackboards that were no longer black, but green.

            The distance between the old schools and the new ones measures the distance between old and new eras in America, or as Miss Donnelly, our revered geometry teacher, would say, between "horse-and-buggy and manned-satellite ways" of doing things. We seemed to be at school during the last stages of this transformation, just as the old became the new and as America changed from a basically innocent and isolated country to a painfully experienced world power.

            Most of us were born in the years from 1941 to 1943. The modern epoch of our country begins with the Second World War, or more explicitly with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. I was born eleven months after that attack, and many of you may want to calculate the effect of that singular event and the U.S. entry into the war on your own entry into the world. At the end of the first phase of this modern era, John Kennedy was elected president, the youngest man to hold that office and the first Catholic. Thoroughly modern, he started the Peace Corps in 1961; and, in 1962 when John Glenn orbited the earth, Kennedy pledged to put a man on the moon in ten years, a promise America fulfilled. This was the dawn of "the 60's," a watershed decade and start of the current, second phase of the modern era.

            But all of this happened after high school: birth control, the Bay of Pigs, the building of the Berlin Wall (which has come down and changed the world again), Pete Seeger, the first ICBM, Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits, --all that and more in 1961. In 1962, the Cuban missile crisis, US troops firing on North Vietnamese troops, Bob Dylan, and Catch 22. In 1963 the modern era was well underway with Martin Luther King and the civil rights march on Washington, pop art, lasers, computers, the Beatles, satellites, color t. v., with 162 million sets tuned to "The Twilight Zone," "Gunsmoke," and "The Beverly Hillbillies." Kennedy had only a thousand days, and so, as we were getting married, or working up a career ladder or beginning college as sophomores or juniors, he was shot, and a new, more troubling phase of the modern era began.

            We, however, were out of high school before "the 60's" really happened. Our period is slightly earlier than this, and we had Eisenhower, from 1952-1960, and not Kennedy, as "our" president. I remember being paraded to the sloping front yard of De Cou School to see candidate Eisenhower's campaign entourage drive down Broad Street toward Trenton; we all waved. I also witnessed his funeral train pass through St. Louis years later on a warm afternoon on its way home to Kansas, marking for me the beginning and passing of an era. We are not the post WW II Baby Boomers, who get all the attention. Moreover, we were, in comparison with what came after us, less outspoken, more accepting of the status quo, "silent" and perhaps unconscious.

            We were ninth graders at the new Steinert Jr. High in 1956 when Eisenhower was re-elected by a landslide and continued the Cold War, with Vice President Nixon pushing anti-communism, and Elvis Presley sang "Hound Dog," "Don't Be Cruel," and "Love Me Tender." These songs now seem fitting glosses on Cold War tensions. As high school sophomores, we watched a Senate committee on t.v. investigate racketeers and mobsters, while West Side Story opened on Broadway and the Russians launched Sputnik. In 1958 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Arkansas had to integrate its public schools; and Ike, whom "we liked," sent troops both to the Caribbean and Lebanon to assert American dominance. We played songs from musicals and parent-approved alternatives to Elvis and Chuck Berry, such as Frankie Avalon, Neil Sedaka and Connie Francis. In 1959, Nixon had his famous "kitchen debate" with Khrushchev, and Fidel Castro in Cuba overthrew Baptista and received a hero's welcome in New York. And the Motown sound of soul took over rock and roll.

            By 1960 we were seniors in high school and things immediately heated up. Ominously, the U. S. embargoed exports to Cuba, our U-2 spy plane was shot down over Russia, and we threatened North Viet Nam. In the middle of all of this, we found dates, took some exams, and went to the senior proms. We didn't start the "fire," but it was starting to burn when we were hugging each other in the back seat of that, be-finned old Buick. We should have held on to each other a bit tighter and longer, because the world was about to take a roller coaster ride we are still on today. Many of us would soon wish we could get off, get out, come down.

            Despite the building storm clouds, we were fairly out of it politically in high school and our local universe seemed balmy. We believed we could get jobs, or somehow get to college. We also believed that we could buy a house, do better than our parents and settle down somewhere, but only when we were good and ready. We felt we had plenty of time for everything. We didn't know any divorced people, and sex wasn't "free" but an extension of love and led to marriage, or so we said. We were serious types, aspiring adults, and anyone slightly wild -- there were fist fights--became labeled a "J. D.," a juvenile delinquent.

            We should have been more aware of the struggle for equality by black people, but we didn't really pick up the clues before 1960. They were all around us, challenging our prejudices, such as Mr. and Mrs. Shack, whose good humor, push for excellence and care for us gave us very positive models of black adults. And, our classmate Freddy Giddens inspired us with his multiple athletic abilities, his wit, and his likableness. We didn't see what he, now gone, was trying to tell us in the way he drove himself as an athlete, even when in pain, which he often was, probably in more ways than one.

            We didn't know the term "women's liberation" in 1960, and it would take ten years (in the early 70's, after Viet Nam) for women to define their own agenda and break from the patriarchal system that limits both men and women to the narrowest of gender roles. But we had plenty of evidence of the brains, ingenuity, creativity, courage, and perseverance of the young women in the class of 1960, who were our class leaders, and career seekers, our visionaries, top scholars, and talented performers.

            And, gay men and women stayed discretely closeted, one imagines fearfully so, as we would have treated them mercilessly.

             We were, many of us, children of first and second generation immigrants, and the persistent American dream of hard work and personal sacrifice leading to success and a life committed to one's family and community motivated us. Of the 280 of us in our senior high school class, only 25% had English names -- names at this time still carried ethnic identities with them. Twenty-four percent, an almost equal amount, were German. But the rest of us, over half, were children of more recent immigrations, or were decidedly "minority" in status. Twenty-two percent came from Eastern Europe and the Balkans: Poles, Czechs, Slavs, Hungarians, Romanians, Lithuanians and others. Then came Italians, which made up 12% of the class. Only 7% were blacks and 3% Jewish and a miscellany of Russian, Scandinavian, Greek and French nationalities rounded out the remaining 11%. Fully half of us were not of Anglo-German descent.

            This may be one source of our special identity. Like so many children of immigrants, we were ready to join America's mainstream, but we were still tied by language, values, and culture to the ethnic world of Europe. Such cultures demanded specific religious beliefs, moral principles, social customs, and personal behaviors. We adhered to some of this, enough perhaps to keep us close to some useful values, such as hard work, respect for real authority, and even reverence for nature and the land. But we could assimilate and did quite easily during a fortuitous time of economic growth and opportunity and chose to buy into the greater personal, religious, and social freedoms of America, much to the chagrin of our parents and grandparents.

            But we didn't quite break with the old ways either as we embraced the new. For just as we started to move out into the brand new world of the 60's, things turned sour. We were thrown into a new society giving birth to itself through turmoil, but we had known relative security up to that point and could draw on the strengths of the older, ethnic cultures as we sought to land on our feet. Thus, we could pick and choose our way through what soon became a minefield of war, drugs, sex, violence, economic instability, and the whole array of discriminations.

            We seemed to have been lucky as a group in other ways. We, unlike the high school kids of today, had a home base and a neighborhood that we walked out into daily with a sense of comfort and exhilaration. These streets were an improvisational theater and a testing ground for identities we could forge out from under the misunderstanding eye of adults. And we could cross ethnic and economic lines. I don't believe there were interracial marriages in our group, but we did not share our ethnic parents' animosities about other nationalities. Catholic Poles dated WASPs, and Methodists courted Jews. I owe my own academic career to the mothers of Jewish girls who insisted that everybody, naturally, went to college and whose homes were laden with books, which grandparents read in my presence, and where I was made to feel welcome. We all learned other people's ways: what they ate on special days and why; how to make the best compost and bury a fig tree for wintering. We knew why the priest came to bless an Easter meal; why two sets of dishes; and who Charon was who would receive the silver coins placed under the pillow of a dead grandparent for his passage over the river Styx. Classical myths, folklore, and ancient customs were still alive.

            A liability became another asset. Our parents were not very well off. They may have thought of themselves as middle class, but financially things were otherwise. Most fathers worked in factories or in offices or were tradesmen. Only a handful were plant managers or lawyers and no doctors, though I was recently told that a friend's father had a Ph. D.. Mothers stayed at home or, if heads of households, taught. Having a shop of one's own, such as a florist, or a card store, or a salesman's expense account would have been a sign of real wealth. We, as boy scouts, delivered food baskets on holidays to school chums' families. No one thought much about it. Anybody's family could be strapped by a strike or a lay off or a simple injury or an unplanned pregnancy. I mean in one's mother's case, not an unmarried sister's. Only a few girls left school for that reason.

            Such lack of money was the general condition of people I knew at the time, and the gap between the poor and the not so poor was not as large as it is today. This, along with our strained but real loyalties to our "old world" families, who feared change and preached the gospel of getting by, and our general unawareness, meant that we did not aim very high. We did not seem to mind being channeled into the general, commercial, or academic tracks fairly early on, which surely limited our aspirations. I estimate that fewer than 15% of us went to college from high school. In our modest dreams, we hoped to get a "job with the state," join the Armed Services, become a secretary, a printer, or a foreman at the local General Motors plant, or, noblest of all, become an engineer, a teacher, or a nurse.

             Our superb drama teacher, Lee Yopp, saw and developed talent in us we never knew we had. Our elaborate productions of broadway musicals and American theater classics such as Inherit the Wind are still talked about today. But few of us became star struck or pursued the arts; the plays themselves sobered us to life’s realities and reinforced our generational solidarity. We learned to dream, but, unlike subsequent generations, we knew the limits to fantasy.

            Modest careers were within our grasp, and so we were more cooperative than competitive as classmates. I don't remember fierce, cut-throat races for grades or influence or recognition in our class. We often coached each other about our developing understanding of how to make "it" in life, and for most, that "it" did not mean big money, status, or fame.

            And this is what Project Talent discovered about us as high school seniors: we made very conservative career choices. This to me, if nothing else, signals our fifties' mentality.

            Project Talent began as a twenty-year study of the career aspirations of students in 10th, 11th and 12th grades in selected high schools throughout the United States. Four hundred thousand students participated when it started in 1960, and we were part of what continues to be one of the largest long-range surveys of student attitudes and career goals ever conducted. It's still in operation (3). The Project's summary bibliography of research materials is itself six pages long and lists nearly 50 books and studies, all about the class of 1960 and its successors (4).

            What Project Talent discovered in its five- and ten- and fifteen-year follow-ups of our career choices is that we changed. That's not surprising; we'd expect high school seniors to have vague notions of what they plan to do for a living in the future. However, the data show that we were lousy at predicting our careers, lousier than the graduates of 1970 for example, who presumably would have more choices to select from and thus make more changes. Project Talent worried about this, since it was primarily trying to help educators and guidance counselors aid students in selecting careers, but it may have missed a key point about us that goes to the heart of our "silent" generation's experience.

            For example, Project Talent discovered that more women than men changed their career choices made as high school seniors in 1960 and notes as a likely cause the expanded career opportunities for women in the late sixties and seventies (5). Only high school women who said in 1960 that they wanted to be a wife and mother were more likely than any other category of student to realize that choice five or ten years later. However, both men and other women altered their career choices in substantial numbers. Not surprisingly, women who were planning to be teachers, nurses, or secretaries, traditional choices for women at that time, changed their actual careers more than most men did. Only men who said they wanted to be engineers fulfilled those plans in greater numbers.

            What Project Talent may have missed was that the world changed so much right after we were graduated that it was hard for us to follow through on our high school plans. Things got deadly serious, the war got nasty, consciousness changed, media accelerated our awareness of opportunity and new ways of living, and groups formed and demanded justice. It all got impossibly disorienting, drugged, wild, exciting, and scary to the point of fracturing the very way we thought about ourselves, our society, and the traditions of family and work that had carried us through high school.

            But we didn't fracture, at least not completely. Perhaps being the first generation of young people to have to learn to accept the possibility of total annihilation by "The Bomb" helped in some painful way to forge our survivor mentality. Those of us who were males were just old enough not to be seriously threatened by the Viet Nam draft when it finally came in 1966. (We know of one of our classmates, Walter Simpson, who was killed in Viet Nam.) Many of our fathers had fought in World War II, but they were not gung ho military types, and they warned me about the horrors of battle and the reckless belligerence of politicians long before anti-war sentiment became widespread. All of this turmoil could have as easily deranged us, but it didn't. We hit the wall of modern life, with its physical and psychological dangers, its disrupting effects on relationships and marriages, its alienating and numbing coldness and apocalyptic threats, but we bounced back.

            Each of us, as we close in on 65, will have to explain to himself or herself how we foundered yet survived and learned to negotiate the modern world. I know many of my classmates' stories, and they seem to follow a pattern of dislocation and recovery. One of my classmates confided in me at a previous reunion that she had been told in high school by counselors that she had the aptitude to be come a waitress, and so she did, for five years, and then, after children and a failed marriage, discovered new resourcefulness at thirty five that drove her to become a criminal lawyer. She was then in the process of trying a landmark case in the Boston courts.

            Not many of us will have so dramatic a story, but many of us have similar tales to tell. Ours is not the typical American tale of sad rags to exorbitant riches, or of a fall from great heights due to overweening pride, or of debilitating discrimination, but rather one of modest aspirations, followed by a serious though not catastrophic or fatal loss, and then recovery. While our lowered expectations in high school were a hindrance, the sources of those tame expectations--our ethnic heritage and limited, stable world--laid down a substratum of strength, security, and caution. We had the positive, rooted experiences of the "old" world as a preface to facing the "new." This is what got lost in the sixties and was literally demolished along with the ancient school houses of our collective past -- the world of childhood security and measured adolescent rebellion.

            If this makes it sound that we deliberately played it safe out of cowardice or calculation, we who went through this experience know better.  We may, like the modest Eskimo hunter, simply give credit to good luck. But we know that we have developed a skill for moving forward, carrying our heritage as a companion not a hindrance. Our back-and-forth connections to and escape from our stabilizing origins have been the dynamic forces in our rebounded lives. Perhaps all creatures on the cusp or edge of something get to learn when to flow with or push against the stream. We did.

            The world has changed radically since we left high school and this decade's graduates face very formidable odds. A study by the National Association of State Boards of Education reported that "America is raising a generation of adolescents plagued by pregnancies, illegal drug use, suicide and violence" (6). The investigators found that: "1 million teen-age girls--nearly 1 in 10--get pregnant each year; 39% of high school seniors reported they had gotten drunk within the two previous weeks; alcohol-related accidents are the leading cause of death among teenagers. The suicide rate for teenagers has doubled since 1968, making it the second leading cause of death among adolescents; and teenage arrests are up thirty-fold since 1950." The investigating commission of educators and medical professionals were "astonished" themselves by these figures and recommended that schools play a larger role in improving the health of adolescents. The rate of unwed teenage mothers continues to increase today despite the availability of birth control and abortion (7).

            This was not the world of high school as we knew it, and even our own children, many of whom may have gotten submerged in the quicksand surfaces of modern life, seemed to have fared better as a group than the young people reported on here. And though some of us are still struggling mightily to pull our own kids out onto dry, solid ground, that phase of our lives we can begin to put behind us as they grow up into productive adults, still benefiting from our own experiences as resilient survivors vouchsafed what looks like a utopian adolescence when compared to today's.

            Some reunion classes leave gifts to the old school, and we, the "silent" generation, could leave the valuable legacy of our own experience to improve the lives of the current generation of teenagers. Our personal survival skills are an invaluable resource for the high school juniors and seniors of today. We can get involved in community efforts to provide better health care and education and emotional stability for the teenagers of the twenty-first century. We can volunteer at our schools to help tutor students, develop programs to provide sports equipment or computers, work in libraries, or serve as community curriculum consultants. We can pressure our elected representatives to fund programs to keep kids in school and shielded from violence and abuse. We ought to be good at this, since we're good at enduring volatile change, taking uncertainty for granted, and finding a means of rescue in the middle of turbulent times.

            We can be the generation that helps today's graduates escape prejudice and despair and drugs and poverty because we knew these things but not as intensely, at a time when most young people had a "head start" built into their lives. We can mentor this generation, which often seems abandoned by its parents and shuns maturity. Robert Bly calls them a “sibling society,” people raised without real adults who remain uninitiated boys and girls behaving like adolescent siblings throughout their lives (8). We can help them find adult models of achievement not motivated by greed or fame or power over their lives. We can show them how to make radical transitions and to adapt to an ever-increasing rate of disorienting change. This dedication to our fellow classmates forty-five years our juniors will keep us engaged and alive, for surely by now all of us have discovered a fundamental law of life: you must continue to grow or you begin to atrophy and die. Our own youthful spirit can be maintained in the second half of life by our dedication to the current young.

Endnotes

1. 1, 858, 000. Statistical Abstracts of the United States. 1990.

2. I'm told by classmate Eleanor [Goldie] Guear, now a teacher, that her current school, Klockner, is of the same vintage and is still in operation today (2005).

3. American Institutes for Research. P. O. Box 1113, Palo Alto, CA. 94302. The Project Talent Founder, John Flanagan, is a famous innovator in research about education and careers and has a web site at <http://www.air-dc.org/research/edrefor1.html>.

4. "Project TALENT Publications List." American Institutes for Research. Palo Alto, CA.

5. Project TALENT News. Vol. 10. No 1. June 1973.

6. The Los Angeles Times. June 9, 1990. A2.

7. Laurie L. Lachance, “Teenage Pregnancy. Highlights: An ERIC/CAPS Fact Sheet: “Although slowed because of the availability of legal abortion, the rise in the out-of-wedlock birthrate has continued among almost all groups of teenagers. The rise has been steepest among 15- to 17-year-old whites.” http://www.makewayforbaby.com/teenpregnancy.htm.

8. Robert Bly, The Sibling Society. New York: Vintage Books, 1977, 1996.