Boomers: The Cold-War Generation Grows Up by Victor D. Brooks

teenagers,” and even well-behaved kids scared adults when they swung or shook to the startling rhythms of Chuck Berry or Little Richard.
    In the period before World War II, adults generally referred to young people between thirteen and nineteen as “adolescents” or “youth,” and possibly drew some comfort from the fact that most of this group would spend at least half of these years working or seeking a job.
    During the war, adults cringed at the dress and morals of “Zoot Suiters” and “Victory Girls,” but most young people spent the war maturing rapidly as paratroopers or welders or even baby-sitters as they aided the war effort in many ways. By 1944 psychology, sociology, and education textbooks were just beginning to call this age group “teen-agers” (the hyphen was soon dropped), and late that summer
Seventeen
magazine sold out its first issues as it trumpeted the intelligence, energy, and style of this newly defined cohort. Then, as America reached midcentury, a new watershed was reached. For the first time more young people graduated from high school than dropped out, and educators predicted that this percentage would surge during the coming decade. For a brief time in the early fifties it seemed that the only unique aspect of this newly designated group called “teenagers” was their common experience in completing high school more frequently than their parents.
    In mid-decade the motion picture industry, the recording industry, radio, and television all began to create or reflect an image of a new cultural subgroup in America, an “invasion of teenagers.” The first hints of change occurred with a surge of articles dealing with the rapid increase in juvenile delinquency and juvenile crimes. The phenomenon did not reach the epidemic proportions implied in print, but Hollywood quickly latched onto the theme. A disturbing film of 1953,
The Wild One
, had featured Marlon Brando as an angry, violent member of a motorcycle gang terrorizing a small California town. While Brando and his minions were clearly well past adolescence, the film resonated with some teenagers, and black leather jackets and tight jeans began to enter the periphery of young male fashion. Two years later, in 1955, producers shifted this surly, anti-social behavior to the high school environment and dropped the young rebels’ ages from the twenties to their teens.
Rebel Without a Cause
and
Blackboard Jungle
were huge hits, and the opening song in the latter film, “Rock Around the Clock,” became the first clearly designated rock-and-roll tune to reach number one in sales in
Billboard
magazine’s “Hot 100” survey. At almost the exact moment when Davy Crockett and Mickey Mouse Club mania was producing iconic images of Boomers at play, the media were just as eagerly reporting the new “teenage craze” of rock-and-roll music. Radio stations discovered they could reclaim ratings lost to adult television watchers by adopting a “Top 40” format of new rock-and-roll songs geared to a teenage audience. The genial Bill Haley and his Comets became the first contenders for rock-star status when “Rock Around the Clock,” “See You Later Alligator,” and “Shake, Rattle and Roll” all emerged as Top 10 songs. The Pennsylvania group was mobbed in London, sold out in West Germany,and was vilified as crazed, capitalist hoodlums on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Yet if Haley’s music was enormously popular, he was a little too old and a little too bland to have the sex appeal needed for a truly magnetic superstar. That role would fall to a young Southerner who began a rise to stardom just as the Comets were beginning to fade. Elvis Presley was younger than Bill Haley but just a bit older than mid-fifties teens when he made the transition from regional favorite to national idol. After individual appearances on the
Jimmy Dorsey