I often think about the immense changes I have seen in my lifetime alone. I believe I have seen more changes in my lifetime than any other 75-year span in human history. My baby-boomer generation grew up during the cold war era acutely aware that we were in a nuclear arms race, and civilization as we knew it could disappear, and we were under the constant looming threat of nuclear annihilation. Fast forward 75 years, and we are living under similar catastrophic threats, real or imagined, and in 2022, fear has gripped the globe.
How can we possibly expect our grandchildren to understand what it was like for us growing up in a world with no computers, smart cell phones, gaming, virtual reality, and Amazon. Almost no one owned a clothes dryer, and many didn’t own a washing machine. But our technological future was growing at warp speed, and for the first time in recent history, the growing middle class had money to spend on things to make their lives easier.
My generation ushered in rock and roll, space flight, fast food, free love, sex, and drugs. We staged sit-ins, love-ins, protest marches, and witnessed a string of assassinations including John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X.
In the 1950s, not everyone owned a car because freeways were not yet everywhere. Almost every car and truck we drove was manufactured in the United States, and we were very proud of our “Made in America seals”. The average cost of an American car in 1950 was $1,100. By the start of the 1960s, innovations in power steering and power brakes were offered as an option on most American cars.
Imagine parallel parking with no power steering and no back up camera? The Japanese automobile import revolution was taking off, and by the late 1970s, Honda was introducing more car models in the United States than our own US companies.