Modern Times
TBD
American High (1946-1964)
TBD
People: Birth (Baby Boomers): Donald Trump, William Clinton, George W. Bush, Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jackson, Steven Jobs, Stephen King, Rush Limbaugh, O. J. Simpson, Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, James Taylor, Dolly Parton, Billy Joel, our younger siblings.
Events: Fittingly, one of the last acts on the stage during this era was the Beatles’ first appearance in America, in 1964.
Family: My wife’s paternal grandmother, Nevada (Cary) Summers, died in 1950 near Tulsa in Bixby, OK.
My wife’s maternal great-grandmother, Eve Catherin (Marshall) Stallard died in 1955 in Cimmaron Co., Oklahoma.
Apart from a few years in the early 1950s when my family moved to Oregon, both of us spent our childhood in the Los Angeles area. We met in High School and stayed in contact into our college years. The 1950s was an extraordinary time to be in High School. We witnessed the birth of Rock and Roll, listened to Beat Generation poetry in the coffee houses and watched the initial stirrings of the Civil Rights movement, each of which was a precursor for major things to come. We were married in 1963 in California, the year President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. It was a horrible shock and both of us remember it vividly.
July 20, 1959, Apollo 11 landed on the moon. My Wife and I both worked for North American Aviation / Rockwell International in the early 1960s, the company that built the Apollo Moon Landers.
Consciousness Revolution (1964-1984)
TBD
People:
Events:
Family: My Wife’s parents retired in the late 1960s and built a retirement home in Wafford Heights, California which is in on a lake fed by the Kern River in the mountains east of Bakersfield.
After college graduation we relocated to the Puget Sound region of Washington State. Our children were born in the 1970s and, though they didn’t know it at the time, they would be among the first to get a ticket to ride on the digital/tech/media magic carpet that would change their world.
At the early age of fifty-seven, my father died of a heart attack in 1975. Under pressure from a corporate take-over of his company, he died of a malady that would be mostly eradicated in the years immediately following his death.
Social media / Financial meltdown (1984-2008)
TBD
People: (Millennial births, Boomers in charge)
Events: The “Great Recession” (2008), the election of Barack Obama as U. S. President (2008),
Family: In 1984 we experienced the wrath of Mt. Saint Helens as it blew its top in a spectacular eruption in Southern Washington State. We were some ways from the mountain, but we felt the initial blast and had ash falling on our house and property for a couple of days.
Delbert died in 1986 near Bakersfield, CA. Sadly, both of our mothers died in 1993. Hazel died in Garden Grove, CA. Delbert and Hazel are buried in Garden Grove, California. Our first grandchildren were born in the 1990s and early 2000s.
We suffered through the “Millennia Panic (2000), the bursting of the “Dot-Com Bubble (2001),” the bombing of the Twin Towers in NYC (9/11/2001).
Both of us retired in the early 2000s.
Culture wars / Pandemic (2008-now)
The recovery from the “Great Recession” of 2008 and the two terms of the first African American to be President in U. S. history dominated the early years of the present era. As time passed however, cultural polarization and the election of a very divisive U. S. President led to increasing unease and disruption in the country. With that backdrop, the impending 2020 Presidential election is taking place amid a global pandemic caused by a Virus known as Covid-19, of unknown origin and, despite unimaginable resources being spent to understand it, of mostly unknown weaknesses. It has ground the health system, the social system, and the financial system of the U. S. to a pulp and is standing in the middle of the street daring us to come out and play.
Climate change and Russian expansion are the hot items right now. I am not taking any bets on whether we find a way through this.
People:
Events: The election of Donald Trump as U. S. President, in 2016, was followed by the election in 2020 of Joe Biden, an old guy like me, as president. Ex-pres Trump refused to accept the results, however, and we are all in a bit of social pickle as a result. Everybody has their fingers crossed.
Family: We experienced the “empty nest” syndrome in 2009 as the last of our children set off on their own. The last two of our grandchildren were born in the 2010s. All our family are living through the experience of the Great Pandemic of 2020 and its accompanying wreckage and slow recovery.