Every so often one will note an article in the newspaper or a magazine about "this generation" or "that generation." When I read the article I find myself wondering, "What is the name of my generation?" Those of us born from 1925 through 1940 were not part of the Jazz Age, the Flapper Generation. nor the Era of Prosperity, all of which occurred or ended near 1930

Some would say we are the Depression Generation but we were children then, too young to realize how really tough it was to just survive from day to day. My family was fortunate as my father, except for one six week period, was employed through-out the Great Depression. Others of us lived on farms or in rural areas (suburbia had not as yet become a large movement) where they were able to grow most of their own food. But I remember, as I'm sure most of us do, people down on their luck asking to trade work for food. My parents always seemed to have some small chores such as chopping and stacking wood, cleaning the chicken house. mowing the lawn, or weeding the garden. I tried to earn money doing some of the work but was told, "No, those people need their food and dignity more than you do." I was too young to know what dignity was but it must have been pretty important because it ranked right up there with food. So I earned my money by finding and returning beverage bottles for one or two cents each.

As I think back to those times, memories come bursting back into my mind. Some of us remember the iceman who would deliver a 25 pound block of ice to the house twice a week, early March through late October, and if you asked politely you were given a large sliver of ice you could slowly melt in your mouth. What elation! You might even get to pet the horse that pulled the icewagon. The movies portray that as happening in the tenement area of New York City in the early 1900's, but the last vestige of ice delivery lived on until the mid 1930's when refrigerators ruined one of childhood's delights!

The iceman was one of many who came to the door or through the neighborhood The bread delivery man with all those delicious pastries, the milkman, (some are still around), the man from the dry cleaners, the ragman who came down the alley calling out, 'Old Clothes, Rags," and he would pay a nickel or dime for old shirts and other items of old clothes, the Watkins dealer, the Fuller Brush man, the insurance man, the man with the fresh vegetable cart, and the list can go on and on.

I don't know if any of you readers remember wearing "knickers" (pants that ended with elastic just below the knees, ala Bobby Jones, the great golfer) but I sure remember them! I wore them once for ten minutes standing up and for thirty minutes under my parents double bed. My mother insisted I wear them and I insisted in not. She tried to get me from under the bed with a broom as I scooted from side to side. When my father came home, he told her, "I wouldn't wear them either," and mother commented, "Well, at least there is no longer any dust under the bed."

Halloween is approaching and I remember some of the pranks done by me and others. Kids couldn't do them NOW, either because they are now too dangerous or destructive. There even are some people who try to injure children with the treats. I remember one prank I and friends pulled on two successive holidays. Thc first time we tipped a neighbor's outhouse over and we thought it hilarious. The second time I thought it was wildly funny and my friends did not. As we pushed in a group to tip the structure over I noticed, in a spatial relationship to a tree, the outhouse had been moved and I stopped abruptly while my three friends did not. It was a good thing we were only a few feet from a river because that is where they went when they climbed out of the hole. I stood on the river bank laughing uncontrollably while trying to convince them that I did not know the owner had moved the outhouse three feet forward! They, of course, threw me in the river, took my outer clothing and left me to get home alone, some half of a mile.

What I'm trying to point out is that I believe we are the generation that is in between the old ways, customs, morals, life-styles and beliefs, and the new thoughts, ideals, systems and mores.

The things we have seen! ! Not in any particular order are miracle drugs, air travel coming of age, television (and in color too!), more than one radio in a household while many people in our youth didn't even have one, several phones per house and not on a party line, super highways, computers, space travel, telescope orbiting in space, human organ transplants, bread machines, micro-wave ovens, water softeners, stereo radios and tape players and CD players, boom-boxes in automobiles playing so loudly you can hear them six blocks away, common-place two-car garages (filled with two cars with another in the driveway), lamps that turn on by human touch, many childhood diseases nearly eradicated, college accessible to almost everyone, atomic and nuclear power, world-wide communication by satellite, huge oil tankers, concern tbr the environment, and the list would go on and on. We were witnesses to all those things! We were participants in some, some of us in all of them. We were there for the birth of the Nuclear Age. I was even a participant (solar and space weather support) for the landbig on the moon.

So, here we are, somewhere in between. We lived in and saw the death of a slower, more mellow, less hectic way of life. In the same life-time we have lived in and have seen the most startling and outrageous ideas come to fruition.

It isn't that we weren't expecting them. They just came so fast upon us. One night Bill Stanley and I discussed the possibility of space travel and the consequences of such a dream and we decided it would happen, but not for at least forty or fifty years. It took seventeen years for man to walk on the moon! Who knows what we'll see in another seventeen years?

Once again I say, " Here we are." A generation between two worlds. We are not the Beat Generation, the Yuppie Generation, the Lost Generation, or the X Generation. But a generation we are! I call us the Transfer Generation or the In-Between Generation. But those do not name. They imply but do not explain in one or two words who and what we are. You think about it and give me a name for our generation.

Paul Sulky

Email:plsulky@coastaccess.com

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