Terry: Cultural milestones relevant to your age bracket

Life is filled with cultural milestones historic events that are seared into our memory banks. You just need to consider the audience before throwing them out.

I catch myself all the time throwing out a pun or making reference to something that I suddenly realize by the blank looks on my audience’s faces that

Karl Terry

they don’t get and weren’t around to experience.

With 15 minutes left in the workday recently we had a conversation going at the office about that topic. We had wide range of ages involved in the pow wow with the oldest able to remember Woodstock and the Apollo moon missions. One who’s early childhood memory was the Space Shuttle Challenger and the youngest was probably too young to remember much if anything about 9/11.

I told that one of the things I remembered about the moon landing was how they gave every student at school a 45 rpm record of the communications between Mission Control in Houston and the lunar lander. Later I thought, one part of the conversation isn’t old enough to remember 45s and the other probably thinks CDs were pretty ancient history.

Likewise, I can remember listening to stacks of old 45s with my grandmother on a pretty modern record changer and not quite grasping her explanation of how a gramophone might have worked without electricity. I sure didn’t understand how she got so excited about that dance called the Charleston that she demonstrated for me.

My wife is nearly six years older than I am and her early school memories were pretty potent with the ugly anticipation during the Cuban Missile Crisis. They lived in Alamogordo at the time and she remembers overhearing really grim talk from her parents about the potential outcome.

I don’t remember the Missile Crisis but I do have images of soldiers carrying their wounded buddies to helicopters in Vietnam. Burned into my brain by the first television images ever to show such things on a nightly basis.

While she understood what was happening during the Kennedy and MLK assassinations in the 1960s and watched it closely on TV, all I knew was the programs I normally watched weren’t on the set.

I remember the modern marvels of 8-tracks, seeing my first color TV, microwave ovens and touch-tone phones.

Early in my married years I was fond of teasing my wife with the joke that if I’d had a microwave oven and a color TV in my bachelor pad I might not have ever gotten married. The younger folks nowadays wouldn’t even see the humor in that statement. They would just wonder why I didn’t run to Walmart and pick those little items up.

One of the officemates involved in this conversation brought up freezing to death while in the service in a barracks in Korea in the 1970s. I cautioned him everyone else in the conversation but me now assumed he was in the Korean War.

It’s extremely important not to get tangled up around those cultural mileposts.

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

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