Editor’s Note: Marlow has been mining some of the same recollections that many of the Boomer generation have dredged up in this latest transitional period of the Republic. This one captures the unspoken images of the generation that preceded us. It is worth remembering as we turn the shop over to a generation that doesn’t.

-Vic

To Better Days

August 1945, 75 years ago — no, I wasn’t there. I arrived a bit later that decade to participate in a phenomenon called the Baby Boom. I’ve been thinking about what those times must have been like.

My father was home on Long Island during that month, at least for a while. He had spent the last 2-1/2 years, in training, then as a crash boat skipper in Florida, rescuing downed flyers or gathering their remains to send to their families back home. That last part hadn’t been easy. He never much talked about those grisly moments.

Saving lives at sea was more than a job or mission. It was like the best drug in the world. Yet these crews denied themselves those moments’ floaty lightness since they would head out the next day only to see mangled gore or sea monsters doing what sea monsters have done to sailors for millennia.

All these years later I think it was a horror show for him and his crew. I saw it in his reaction to the film Jaws. While we watched it together, he physically tightened and blanched during each Great White Shark scene. I strongly feel he was re-visiting those horror shows when he was trying to rescue injured aviators as the Gulf Stream’s apex predators reached the airmen first. None of us have the right to judge them for what they may have done in response.

They saw things people wouldn’t believe. Shark attacks just off Homestead and the lower Everglades. They watched the ocean suddenly glimmer dark red as airmen disappeared below the waves. All those moments were lost in time, like tears in rain as they bore witness to others time to die.

He and his crew at sea were separate, had their own code, something that kept the horror at bay. Despite its mercy, it stayed a silent part of them, and it never went away.

I’m not sure when he arrived back home but his mustering out papers to the inactive reserve say to me it couldn’t have been much before June 30th.

His papers pointedly reminded him that he was still in the Navy at that time, but it seemed that he was not going to do any further fighting, even if the dreaded invasion of Japan became necessary.

He like the rest of the nation didn’t know that better days were ahead. But they were.

He later enrolled that summer to get his MS in metallurgy in what now is part of Columbia University. With that degree in 1948 he moved his new wife to the Midwest and embarked on series of classified R&D projects that led to things like the nuke reactor for the USS Nautilus.

Which brings me to my point:

What the hell happened to us in the intervening 75 years?

We’re currently worried about an economic rough patch and global disease upheaval (and we should be) but so were they. They were worried that the Depression would return and that the US would suffer a million casualties invading Japan.

Permit me this trivial side note: 1945 and 2020 are the only two years since its 1933 inaugural when no July Major League Baseball All Star game was played.

The difference is not in the problems we face. The difference is in our attitudes. They were united then in a way that we can only imagine, and they were determined to face their problems. They endured the casualties of the war as well as severe rationing and other economic privations. Much of our country today seems embroiled over masks/no-masks, statue/no-statue, and assorted other micro assaults in words, history, or guilt.

Folks in 1945 didn’t piss and moan about gas, meat, and food rationing. I’m sure a few did but in the end, they knew that this was for the common good. I think that’s what we’ve lost, at least in part: the notion that we have a common purpose and a responsibility to put that ahead of our personal needs at least some of the time.

The 1945 version of the United States wasn’t perfect. For instance, July 1945 saw the first time in nearly a century when Independence Day was celebrated in Vicksburg Mississippi. The military was still segregated, and Jim Crow reigned supreme across the land.

But most of that generation tended to regard problems as obstacles to be overcome, not some manifestation of the malevolence of the other political party or a hoax perpetrated by bad guys.

Maybe our growing wealth and standing as a nation over these intervening years have led us to take too many things for granted. I know my parents many times told their older kids early on we were a bit soft. Compared to the youth of today, we were paupers, but we knew we were loved and blessed. I am not sure if that’s still the case.

I feel like they handed us Boomers the torch and we dropped it. Can we pick it up somehow? Will we? I’d like to think so but I’m not at all sure.

I hope I live to see what happens.

To better days!

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