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

lauding their diligence. Most parents and teens in the fifties were clearly aware that some form of social revolution was occurring in the relationship between adults and adolescents, but both sides seemed ripe for compromise, and adults may have suspected that the big change might be exciting and fun.
    One episode of the definitive family situation comedy
Ozzie and Harriet
featured the newly emerging rock-and-roll superstar Ricky Nelson discussing the merits of his music with his parents. When Ricky asks his mother’s opinion of the new music, Harriet Nelson kiddingly says she can now stay in the same room with Ricky’s record player. Then, more seriously, she admits there is plenty of excitement that seems to reflect the emotion of the new teen generation. Similarly, most of the “teenpics” films had far less threatening plots than their advertisements promised.
Blackboard Jungle
ends with a teen—played by Sidney Poitier—and other kids allying themselves with the teacher—played byGlenn Ford—against the mindless violence of a punk nemesis played by Vic Morrow.
I Was a Teenage Werewolf
and
I Was a Teenage Frankenstein
show the real villains as adult scientists who short-circuit the laws of nature and God while the transformed teens are merely dupes who return to good behavior just before their destruction.
Teenager from Outer Space
produces a revolt of alien adolescents against their adult supervisors, but those adults are planning to conquer Earth, and the teens foil the plot.
    Supposedly “subversive” and “satanic” rock-and-roll music appears far less contentious if more than a handful of songs is considered. A perusal of
Billboard’s
Top 10 charts for the first three years of the rock-and-roll experience produces more than a few surprises. Top 40 rock-and-roll radio stations played many hits by such decidedly nonrock artists as Mitch Miller, Nelson Riddle and his Orchestra, Perry Como, Teresa Brewer, Pattie Page, and Doris Day. At the end of 1956, Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender” was dueling for number one with “True Love” by Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly—hardly symbols of teen rebellion. Even top hits by performers calling themselves “rock-and-roll singers”—“That’ll Be the Day” by Buddy Holly, “Bye Bye Love” by the Everly Brothers, and “Little Darlin’ ” by the Diamonds—provided few opportunities for adult dread of a social revolution. The widely derided teen jargon of the fifties—a litany of “cool,” “chicks,” and “squares”—seems no more threatening than the “hep” words of the forties or the “23 skidoo” of the twenties, and were more often used in film, television, and records than in everyday teen conversation.
    While much has been written about the relationship of fifties teens with the adult world, there has been less interestin the interaction between adolescents and younger children in the era. If the “first teenagers” were perplexing, bewildering, and exasperating to parents, they also evoked a response from their sibling rivals.
    One of the first defining realities in the relationship between fifties teenagers and Baby Boomers was whether it was based on family or neighborhood, and this often depended on parents’ age and World War II experiences. Boomers with teen siblings tended to have parents who were a bit older than average or fathers who had spent a major portion of their military experience in a stateside assignment. This group included couples who had married in the 1930s and produced children relatively quickly; men who were excused from the draft because they were parents or were employed in critical occupations; or servicemen who were stationed in the United States long enough to be married and have children before the end of the war. Boomers who were acquainted with teenagers only