When Two Worlds and Two Generations Collide.
I was born during World War II. Some so called experts on generations put me in The Silent Generation, others the X Generation and yet other call us Baby Boomers. Fact is, I was born two years before the oldest Baby Boomers and way later than most members of The Silent Generation. I look at The Silent Generation as an older generation than me and The Baby Boomers as just nuts. I guess you could say I'm a misfit and you wouldn't be too far off the mark.
But I have a foot in both generations. There are two big things that set me apart from the Boomers. I never took drugs other than one puff off a joint in the early sixties and I detested their loud meaningless music and the way they had holes in their jeans; the way they had long hair and seemed drugged out all the time. Okay, so I hated more about them than I thought.
It is said that Bill Clinton and George Bush, both boomers, either still do drugs or did so until recent years. True? How the hell would I know. They both act like it. They're just weird.
Yet I was not silent. I marched on Leavenworth with the Berrigan Brothers. I can't recall why. But in the sixties everything seemed important. I marched for the ERA in new shoes that nearly killed me. I wore a jeans jacket with a flag and writing that said, Power to the People on it. And I wrote scathing anti-establishment articles that lashed out at the old men who ran our hateful government. I didn't trust government then. I do not trust it now.
But I still had one leg in each generation. When I lived in California I felt far too conservative for the people there and in the mid west I felt far too liberal or even radical. So I'm not really a part of either generation in the common sense of the meaning.
Oh, I would never have gone to Woodstock and run around with no clothes on. The foot that was in the fifties would have found that appalling. And frankly, I think most people look much better in clothes. In those days looking good was very important to me. Later in life I began to care less. But not enough to run around naked.
I was reared in a time when there were two kinds of women. Well, two that I'll discuss today. One was the majority of women of the forties and fifties. The women who stayed home. They were elegant women. Or at least the ones I knew were. My mother wore white gloves and stunning hats with vails. She wore real hose with the seams in the back and a girdle and garters and all those things that women used to stuff themselves into. And those damned heels that would in later life ruin their backs and legs and break them down.
My mother did her housework in a dress! Mother's world was a world of culture. The opera. Good books. Pleasant living. Comfort. Each summer was a time for big yards, wicker chairs and a summer read. My summer read always was and still is Giant, by Edna Ferber. I could never identify with the world of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the coldness of his characters. I loved the real world that Edna Ferber wrote about. Perhaps that's because Edna Ferber was a newspaper woman. Newspaper women were real. What they wrote was real and raw, uncut and unvarnished.
And then there was dad's world. His was a world of newspaper men and women and politicians. All were heavy drinking, chain smoking, loud talking, low life devils but they were pillars of the community and leaders of our state. Ah how little the voters know!
Mother hated dad's world. I've read that Jackie Kennedy hated Jack Kennedy's world. Culture and class and politicians are not a match made in the heavens.
In dad's world were a group of women who made their living writing on newspapers. In other words, newspaperwomen. They were tough. Most had never married and those who did marry tended to keep their own names and stuck their husbands at the end as an afterthought long before it was cool or accepted to do so. Helen Townsley Coogan comes to mind.
These women, Bertha (Bert) Shore, Ada Montgomery, Helen Townsley Coogan and many more were newspaper women of the old school. They worked hard and played hard. They were cynical. They held no one in awe and were intimidated by none. They had seen the underpinnings of life and people and knew that basically everyone was all the same. Everyone had the same fears, needs and wants. And most people in high places had low values.
One night The Kansas Press Association was having a convention in the capital. Everyone was on the roof of the Jayhawk Hotel around the swimming pool. Bert Shore and dad were drinking quite a lot and Bert said to dad, "Hutch, this dress is supposed to be drip dry. Let's see if it is." She then jumped into the pool.
Years later I was in the same hotel. Only this time I was older and was in the company of Ada Montgomery of The Topeka Capital-Journal. We were in the elevator. The car stopped at a floor and picked up about four nicely dressed men. The men were minding their own business. Ada pipes up and says to them, "If you're gonna' rape us do it and get it over with. I have things to do."
These women were just rowdy, tough women. But they were good women.
Bertha Shore was born in Hiawatha on October 15, 1897, and graduated from high school in Pleasanton. For eight years she taught school at Powhattan, Herington, and Great Bend. She once joked that she taught the second grade because she "couldn't work the arithmetic in the third grade."
In 1928, she joined her brother in the purchase of the Augusta Daily Gazette, where she worked from then on, putting out the paper almost by herself in the shortage days of World War II. She attained considerable prominence for her pungent editorial writing.
Bert was the first woman inducted into the Kansas Newspaper Hall of Fame. She died in March, 1963, at age 66, and set aside funds for her friends to have a party after her funeral.
While I shared my mother's love of opera and good books and I appreciated her classic beauty and her style, I gravitated to my father's set of friends. My mother's teas didn't appeal to me. But dad's running to emergencies and covering stories and seeing politics close up --- those things appealed to me. And I just loved the newspaper women of the fifties. They had such a keen sense of humor. They had sharp tongues and sharp pencils to match.
Those of us in the media see lots of things that the average citizen doesn't see. For example, I was at the state house one day and saw our former mayor holding one of our state senators up against the wall saying to him, "Wichita belongs to me. You keep your f----- hands off it!"
See, here's the deal, the government thinks it owns the governed and power corrupts. Good news people know this and they're the watchdog of the people. It's their job to watch out for the people. Often, however, they join forces with the low life politicians.
But to return to my saga and hopefully wind it up, I loved my mother's world to some extent. But tea parties weren't my --- excuse the pun --- cup of tea. I longed for the action of the newspaper office. I loved the click clack of the presses and the tap tap of the typewriters and the click of the old linotype and, above all, the smell of printer's ink that every old newspaper office had in those days.
So today I journal life in its rawness and I love to write more than life itself. But I also love the opera and my summer read. I love big green lawns and white wicker chairs. I have one foot firmly planted in the fifties and the other in the sixties with the boomers. I love culture and I love the rawness of real life. And that's what happens when two worlds and two generations collide.
Susanna on 03.09.06 @ 11:41 AM CDT [
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