You Kids Get Off My Lawn

I just had the sobering realisation that I started college in the same year as you, and I’m still a student.

Do people still remember Princess Diana?

Oh, poor college graduates. College grads who went to college immediately following (or even before) the end of high school. I went to college at 30, 14 years after dropping out of high school. I wish I only had to worry about dying before I got old.

Sorry, us poor are often bitter.

Do people still remember Princess Diana?

They probably do all the more vividly, now that we have The Queen.

do you old farts know where I can find some under-30 smartblogs? I see yglesias’ link to my right.

Well, young Kieran: When I started teaching (in 1992), somewhere between a quarter and half of then students in my classes were older than me. This academic year, most are born between 1983 – the year I entered university – and 1986.

My first memory of something political? The first Danish referendum about the EC (as it was then) in 1972. Not that I knew anything about it – I just understood that people were discussing the subject.

My only early pre-school memory is the day that I later realized was the peak of the cuban missile crisis. Fear vibe, incredibly powerful.

The first major event I recall was Pride’s Purge. I vaguely remember my parents discussing the execution of the Man of Blood, but I was too young to understand its significance.

JFK’s assasination?

Hey you guy’s are young!

I must be middle aged – I dimly remember the fall of Saigon. I’d have been circa 4 and I was not clear on what had happened, just that something important to the grown-ups was going on, and it involved helicopters.

I started college at 16, three years before Kieran, so I went thru this little crisis a couple years ago already. And I’m still in school too. No rest for the wicked or PhD candidates.

I attended college in the 1960s (starting at age *16*), in the 1970s, in the 1980s, and got my BS (math/chemistry) in 1991.

The diploma didn’t make me any better an employee, but my income quadrupled in 3 years. Suddenly, I was allowed to interview for jobs I was locked out of before. It’d really help our economy if they separated education from credentiation. Sorta like law school just gives you a diploma, passing the bar allows you to practice law. We have too many capable people being underemployed because they can’t prove they already know what the college they can’t afford purports to teach.

I remember standing out by the pumphouse, staring into the sky, trying to see Sputnik. We now know that wasn’t nearly as dangerous as Kennedy’s gamesmanship in the Cuban missle crisis, but even as a preschooler, I heard terms like “death raining down on us from the sky” and I knew people were scared of it.

I remember my Dad remarking “Sir Alec has got to go …”, which must be c. 1963 and someone bought me a copy of the Beatles “She Loves You” which stuck after about the third playing …. and people in the playground were very keen on Manfred Mann’s 5-4-3-2-1 (1964).

Those born when I first went to university will be 29 this year and most of my current students weren’t yet alive when I taught my first undergrad class.

Oh … and I recently dropped all reference to Nicolae CeauÅŸescu and Robert Maxwell from my Rousseau lectures, when it became clear that no-one in the audience had the faintest idea who they were.

Some things stay the same though. In 1977 (seems like yesterday) the Clash sang “No Elvis, Beatles, or the Rolling Stones, in 1977” and 30 years later Keith Richards is still doddering on.

Aaaaaaah! Shut up, Kieran, shut up!

(I started in 1990, too.)

Well, crap. I’m two years older than you, so it seems I’ve already been in that position.

Princess Diana? Egad.

I have a couple tiny memories about the 1976 election, when I was 5. I remember the papal elections of 1978 (7), though I had no clue what they meant or what a Catholic was or that it was unusual (after the second one, I figured they must be frequent affairs). The first memories of knowing things were happening and having a clue about what they meant all come in a 1979 rush: Mother Teresa’s Nobel Peace Prize, the Iranian revolution and hostage crisis, the invasion of Afghanistan, the spike in oil prices, Camp David, inflation, and the malaise speech. But those are all basically part of the same moment in my memory; I don’t have any clear sense of which came first in the year.

But I read this “Mickey and Goofy Explore Energy COnservation comic in 1978, and don’t think I was surprised to learn that oil was scarce and energy was expensive, so that had gotten ambiently soaked up at least a year earlier

A friend of mine told me a story about a sixties-era class at Berkeley. The professor asked his students, “Who’s President right now?”

The students responded, “John Kennedy.”

“How do you know?” the professor asked. “When was the last time you checked?” Etc., etc., probably would have tossed E Prime in there if it had been around.

And they walked out of the classroom and found out that indeed JFK was no longer President, for he had died.

The first news I remember remembering now is about the hostage crisis in Iran. I can remember rembering it since my family talked about it a lot at the time. I also remember when Reagan won the white house in ’80. That seemed very good time at the time but then I was 6 years old, just about the right age to be impressed by Reagan.

whereas, in an early warning sign of David Broderism, I remember having the strong sense that obviously John Anderson should win, because Carter had made a terrible mess of everything but Reagan was all scary an’ stuff.

I was sitting at my desk in maybe 1982 when one of my undergraduate researchers came into my ofice and asked what it was like to have been alive during the Viet Nam war. He had been 7 or so at the time, certainly alive, but he had no memories of the divisiveness of the conflict.

My first specific memory of something that did not happen directly to me is probably Don Larsen’s perfect game. News on TV was sparse back then and I could not read until I was 6 or 7, so I was rather isolated from events. I saw the end of the perfect game on TV after coming home from school.

Same age and origin as Kieran. I remember 1978, the death of John Paul I, because his DEAD BODY was shown lying on his bed on the news. I remember John Paul II’s visit to Ireland in 1979, because there was nothing else on TV for 3 days, and he came in a big helicopter, and we ate dinner in front of the TV (otherwise illegal in my house). Then it’s 1981: Bobby Sands and the IRA hunger strikers, and assassination attempts on Reagan, the Pope, and Sadat. At this point I thought assassination was a major occupational hazard for world leaders. Oh, what year was the Yorkshire Ripper caught? Earliest sports memories are 1982: the soccer World Cup, Kilkenny shocking Cork in the hurling, and Offaly denying Kerry the 5-in-a-row in gah. Earliest entertainment memory: the queues at the cinema for E.T.

My first news memory: the RFK assassination.

Followed by clearer memories of the moon landing and People’s Park (hey…I was growing up in Berkeley). I also remember the late ’60s UFW grape boycott (my family honored it and I missed the grapes!).

A deep-seated mental image from my childhood: a pleasant stream (or perhaps a bubbling brook) meandering through some fields; next to it, a white picket fence with a very prominent gate. I knew vaguely that this was supposed to have something to do with the president (Nixon), but for the life of me, I couldn’t see the connection.

In an effort to spread this sinking feeling around amongst readers older than me, I started college in 1990….

Thanks ever so much.

OK, for me the first detailed political memories are the 1973-4 miner’s strike and the two elections in 1974. The miners in my home town (Stoke-on-Trent) just looked like a bunch of old gits, and I remember being very impressed by the idea that they’d gone down to London one day and overthrown the government, especially since I got the day off school when they held the elections.

Trump this! I was yanked out of college because I was in the inactive reserve corps and shipped to Korea in Dec, 1950, when the North invaded the south. It was to be a piece of cake but halfway across the Pacific, the announcement came over loudspeaker that the Chinese had just crossed the Yalu River. and,to push it back a bit, that was my SECOND time in the army. Yep. getting up there though not getting it up.

As Kieran knows I’m middle-aged, and have been for a while (I’m 43). First memories of political events are the street riots in Amsterdam and Biafra. But Issupect this is because we didn’t get a telly till then. I also remember the day that Round the Horne went off the air, and the first trailer for Dad’s Army. First political event I was involved with was 1974 — I made homemade badges saying “vote Labour” and gave them to all my friends. A waste of time in Aylesbury, but how was I to know?

Cheer up, Kieran. You are discovering one of the joys of academic life is being reminded regularly by your students about rapidly approaching senility and death. Get used to it.

I mentioned sports..not politics. How common. First real political memory is the second Eisenhower/Stevenson campaign (1956). My school had a mock campaign and election. Those of us in second grade couldn’t ignore it. I suspect the 5th and 6th graders got more out of it.

I mentioned that we had newspapers, but seldom read anything but the comics as kids, and almost no TV news (the evening news with Douglas Edwards was 15 minutes). I’d be interestd to know how 24 hour CNN and such has changed these earliest memories. In reading here, it appears very little. We had no visual news, but today’s kids have so many options instead of TV news. It seems to sort out to about the same thing; the first retained memories of the world around us occur at about age 7.

I vaguely remember Watergate. Sports memory would be Aaron’s 715th home run and the “magic number” countdown associated with the Reds’ “Big Red Machine” years.

If it helps, I started college in 1985.

Hiroshima. (My parents told me that two years earlier, I looked up from a copy of the New York Times that was spread out on the floor and said, “I see the Russians have pushed the Germans out of Stalingrad.” But I don’t remember that.)

Noone posting so far has actually said that their first political memory was the fall of the Berlin Wall yet, so I will. I also remember the Alvin and the Chipmunks Berlin Wall special featuring Michael Jackson, for what it is worth.

It’s funny. I have very clear memories of two events in 1986–the Iran-Contra Hearings (at age 5 I came home from school each day to watch them on PBS) and the Challenger explosion. But oddly I have no memory at all of Chernobyl, which was also 1986, and indeed until sometime relative recently when I was told of its date had always assumed it happened before I was born.

I’m surprised more people my age and slightly younger don’t answer with Tienanmen Square. I have a very vivid memory of Connie Chung interrupting Saturday morning cartoons and telling us kids to go get our parents. I ignored her instructions, watched the news myself and then went to go tell my father on the front porch. While I remember the other events of 1989 too, including the Berlin Wall falling, nothing is as vivid as that morning.

I got to college the fall of the Clinton impeachment hearings. I remember an older friend of mine noting how weird it was that the formative political experience of people my age would be that nonsense, while his was what is now known as the First Gulf War. Little did he know that the actually formative political experience of my generation would be far more absurd–the 2000 election decided by judicial fiat. Relatedly, Ken Starr’s report was the first time I learned about rim-jobs, except I didn’t know they were called that then.

I’m about the same age as abb1 and steve t. – i.e., JFK’s assassination is my earliest news memory, although I recall things like the duck and cover air raid drills a couple of years earlier.

In grad school I TAd for a well known economic historian (now dead), who, about 20 years ago, decided it was time to change the end of his US econ history course from WW2 to, roughly, 1980. I think this is the counterpart to Chris Bertram’s (April 25th, 2007 at 10:19 am) dropping references to Nicolae CeauÅŸescu.

Kieran, to make us feel younger, here’s what happened yesterday at a seminar I attended. My colleague here at the Center, Jack Rakove, was presenting on federalism and mentioned that he’d been studying a text by Madison that we were looking at, since 1970. He suggested that that may have been before some of us in the group had even been born. And I got to nod.:-)

I’m a couple of years younger than Kieran, but I remember the Iran Hostage Crisis vividly (there was an Iranian kid in my preschool class, so that must’ve focused my interest.) I also remember coming in to my parents’ bedroom the morning after Reagan (damn his soul to Hell) won in 1980 and talking with my mother about how depressing that was. By the time of the Royal Wedding and the Space Shuttle launch, I was already a news junky, getting up before the rest of the house every morning to watch Bob Schieffer, and sometimes even the Farm Report. If there was a test pattern, I went back to sleep.

I remember thinking that because my family lived in the northern part of the country we must be on the side of the North Vietnamese. Also have a very vague recollection of the moon landing.

#57 is almost exactly me. Except I didn’t really remember Iran-Contra either. But I had the same experience of not knowing Chernobyl happened in my lifetime until some time much later (high school I think). And it was my Berlin Wall experience that happened during Scooby Doo rather than Tienanmen Square. I think Exxon Valdez is actually probably the first big thing I really remember well – I remember Challenger, but can’t tell if it was a memory I made up a year or two later or actually noticed at the time.

I was walking home from school and when I was a block away my brother ran up, yelling, “Kennedy’s been shot!” I was seven at the time.

Some guy walking on the moon, probably in 1971. I was 6 at the time. Don’t know why 1969 didn’t register. But, yeah, Kieran, get used to it. This is middle age. Don’t think you ever are going to understand your students again, the way you used to.

A little younger than Kieran, but I remember my mother being upset about Pope John Paul I’s early checkout. (She got more upset about John Lennon’s death.) I vaguely remember Thatcher’s victory in 1979. I definitely watched the Iranian embassy siege get, um, broken by the SAS in 1980.

(But I also remember watching the Queen’s car drive rather speedily down the road near my grandma’s house for the Silver Jubilee.)

I watched BBC Schools programmes (usually during the holidays) that featured German families divided between east and west. That today’s first-year students weren’t out of nappies during the collapse of the Soviet Bloc feels strangest to me.

b. 1976, entered college 1994. First memories are of the 1980 election – I liked Reagan’s hair, and I knew that there were 3 guys running and that was unusual. Don’t remember Carter being President at all, vaguely remember the hostages coming home from Iran.

I vaguely remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, or at least, my father planning to convert an old trench type concrete silo (we lived on a dairy farm) into a fallout shelter.

And I clearly remember the Kennedy assassination: we had taken a family trip to Chattanooga TN (the closest city)and my mom had a gynecological appointment. On the way to the Doctor’s office, we heard the first radio reports, and at about that time, an ambulance crossed in front of us: the street it was on ran downhill infront of us, and as I saw the person on the gurney in the old glass-sided ambulance bounce as they hit a bump in the pavement. This image was alway my personal memory of the Kennedy killing, that and the days of television coverage.

I remember listening to Armstrong on the moon over the radio.. no TV, but the radio was still pretty exciting.
My wife is back in college, she complains that her brain is old and full up: can’t take any more information, chemistry in particular. Ow.

I was wrapping up grad school when you were starting university, you young whippersnapper, you!

When I started teaching Western Civ on my own, I was pushing the envelope by ending the course with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now students react to that as if it is ancient history and, to them?, it is. Being in education gives us a constantly moving target in our work as the new year brings a new crop of mostly fresh, young faces: both a challenge and a frustration.

Apollo 11; my father wouldn’t let me stay up to watch it on TV.

I also have a vivid memory of being tear gassed during an anti-war rally on the Stanford University campus. I was on my way to the Bing nursery school which is located on the campus. It scared the hell out of the 4 year old me.

I have a vague memory of the death of Elvis – but I was only three at the time.

First major political events I remember vividly were the ’81 hunger strikes (black flags hanging from windows and low-level hysteria in my home town as a result of the influx of nationalist refugees from the North) and the colourful ’81 general election in Ireland.

Rapidly followed by the ’82 general election.

It’s too late in the thread for an anecdote, but time for passed-along perspective. A not-much-older academic said “It’s when you realize your students’ parents are looking younger and younger that it really sinks in.”

I remember being struck, in 1982, that the gap between the end of WWII and the Kennedy assassination was now smaller than the gap between the Kennedy assassination and the present — and that was a long time ago.

The oldest news memory I have is Yeltsin’s siege on the Russian parliament

My mother voting for Adlai Stevenson in 1956. Before that my father at a podium, on televison, and being asked questions and it was very important to us how he answered them.

Mostly Sputnik, just a glimpse of Hungary 1956. But I can cheat back to the Korean War with inarticulate memories from age 3:

Pre-dawn family drives that I later learned were taking my father (USMC WWII) to nearby reserve duty

And pretending to read the Sunday comics with my older brother. Big Picture newsreels on the TV, and green convoys outside: our street was on a reserve/Guard route.

Oh yeah, burritoboy?

I was let out of the edubba early when news arrived that the armies of Sargon had attacked Uruk. We put down our clay cuneiform tablets and rushed to the top of the ziggurat to have a good look. The sound of bronze on bronze will ring forever in my memory.

Shirley MacLaine was there too.

21 y.o. – I’ve got a shameful block on the Berlin Wall, but I remember the Gulf War, as it coincided with my first year at school. I spent much of my playground time being a scud missile or an F-15.

My first political memory would either be the Sydney Third Runway protests or the 1996 Labor loss to what would become the dreary conservative government of my teenage years (it’s actually a good thing to have in a lot of ways).

For me, it was the Democratic convention of 1956: JFK was competing for the Vice Presidential nomination, but lost it to Estes Kefauver. Later that year, I was in a very small Democratic minority in the 2nd grade, and can still feel the burn of “Whistle while you work, Stevenson’s a jerk, Eisenhower has more power, whistle while you work.”

I was 6.

I still hate Republicans.

JC

Ben Alpers: Hey! I grew up in Berkeley too, probably about five years ahead of you. Yep, People’s Park and all that fun stuff. I remember one Sat. afternoon I was at a teen church group thingie at St. Mark’s Episcopal on Bancroft. Afterwards we walked up towards Sather Gate to enjoy the riots and see what pepper gas smelled like.

Sigh. Challenger. Mainly hurts remembering that it was once feasible to dream of walking the sky.