Luggage over the years: Bloated vs. unobtrusive (more pictures)

After making six flights within a few weeks over the holidays, it struck me how much luggage people are carrying these days (and not only around their mid-section):

My impression was not that people are packing the same amount of stuff into larger and larger bags like a bubble, in the way that car trunks these days are like empty and unused cargo holds. There really does seem to be a lot of crap crammed in there. Anytime I leave with only a (stuffed) carry-on bag with no wheels, there's usually at least the cab driver or an airport worker who looks surprised: "Ah, traveling light!"

These days, traveling light makes you look like a nobody, almost like a hobo. "Don't you own anything?" Conspicuously hauling around a bigass suitcase gives onlookers the impression that you live in a house that has a home office and spacious closets, the entire contents of which you're dragging around on your trip. "I can't let travel get in the way of my super-busy work schedule," when most of that junk is unnecessary for whatever work you may or may not be doing. A good chunk is digital distractions for cocooners on vacation, not to mention the whole medicine cabinet's worth of cosmetics being dumped into women's suitcases.

By the way, how much more unwieldy are today's bags compared to yesterday's? Walmart's website has a luggage section, and their best-selling standard roller suitcase has dimensions 9" x 18" x 28". Searching for "1970s suitcase" at Etsy turned up this representative thing in avocado green, orange, and mustard yellow, with dimensions 6.5" x 13" x 20.5". So, today's suitcase takes up more than twice the volume of the older one (2.6 vs. 1 cubic feet), with each dimension being just under 40% larger.

I remember luggage getting big in the '90s, both the volume that each bag took up and how many bags people brought with them. My memory of the '80s here is hazy since I didn't take too many flights as a kid, but I remember them being more normal-sized. On the other hand, it could have been a case of the elite status-strivers changing first. "Garment bags" took off around that time, among the right people. And there must have been something of a trend toward hauling huge trunks, since Spaceballs and Planes, Trains, and Automobiles -- both from 1987 -- poke fun at it, and for opposite social classes (upper and lower, respectively).

Looking around pictures of airports from the '70s, I didn't find weighed-down passengers there either. Here's a typical shot of passengers at a train station:

Notice how much smaller the suitcases were for everyone, whether male or female, young or old, and these are all middle or upper-middle class people. Also notice how women don't have two bags slung over their shoulder, in addition to dragging a coffin of a carry-on. Chicks back then were more of the mind that toting around so much freight turned you into a beast of burden, while today they believe that she who is crushed under the most bags, wins.

The '60s were like the '70s for the two main zeitgeist variables -- rising crime and falling inequality -- so it's not much of a surprise to see the same pattern of light travel back then as well:

Now comes the critical point -- the '50s look like the '60s and '70s, and unlike the 21st century. This makes the "bloated luggage" thing a part of the status-striving and rising-inequality cycle, not the cocooning-and-crime cycle (in which case the '50s would look the opposite of the '70s, and similar to today).

The folks from the Fifties don't look as animated and gregarious as they would in the '70s -- that's the cocooning vs. outgoing cycle -- but they aren't strutting around like they and their bigass luggage own the place, the way today's cocooners do. The opposite of striving for status is making do and reining it in, and folks back then didn't worry their heads off if they couldn't ship their entire office, closet, and medicine cabinet to their destination.

Also, if everyone packs a gigantic suitcase, then they ruin it for everyone -- all those things clanging around, getting in people's way, taking up limited cargo space, and weighing the vehicle down. If everyone pitches in to restrain themselves just a little, it makes a big difference. That's the core mindset of people in a making-do society. (Note: unrelated to economic well-being vs. recession, since this is the affluent Postwar period by now.)

So, who does look more like today's people? It must be those from the Gilded Age and Turn-of-the-Century. Piles of unwieldy trunks brings to mind scenes like this of a steamboat wharf circa 1900:

In fact, the article on trunks at Wikipedia covers mostly the mid-19th through the early 20th centuries, i.e. when status-striving and inequality were spiraling toward their peak around WWI. This period also saw the founding and rise to dominance of Louis Vuitton, a little company whose travel goods you may have been seeing more and more of over the past several decades.

Finding 19th-C. pictures of train passengers with their luggage was more difficult. A good fraction would not even have been "traveling" or "taking a trip" the way that today's airplane passengers are. Still, here's an idealization of the Chicago Railway Station around the 1860s. Those who are traveling have brought quite a load of stuff with them:

Here's a British satirical cartoon from the 1880s, showing a social atmosphere similar to today's. Everybody's strutting around like they own the place, just because they have an umbrella, walking stick,  newspaper of record, man-purse, quirky hat, conspicuous facial hair, etc.

Like our time, the Victorian era was the worst of both worlds, with cocooning and status-striving interacting with each other. Mid-century cocooning was at least "keep to yourself" atomization, and the peak of status-striving in the early 1900s at least benefited from the gregarious and fun-loving spirit of the Ragtime and Jazz Age. During the Victorian and Millennial eras, however, alienation takes on a hostile melee character -- a war of all against all.

Perhaps that gives the big-bag-carriers another purpose -- preparing for the apocalypse, should it strike during their business trip. They certainly look like they're suited up for battle, the Victorian men with their makeshift cudgels and Millennial women with their blocky boots and hammer-throw bags.

Finally, here is a website with lots of pictures of airports and passengers in Hawaii over the 20th century. Browsing is a bit slow, having to click through several layers of specificity before you get to the actual pictures, then having to dig out and dig down all over again. But it's worth looking at since you're controlling for other variables by sticking to the same airports over time. Here's Kahului Airport on Maui, July 1986 (click for detail):

Luggage doesn't look too over-the-top just yet, either for size of bag or number of bags. It looks like most other scenes from the '80s, and could have been shot in a mall. Lots of old people, who you don't see too many of in airports anymore (it's mostly college kids, 20 and 30-something strivers, middle-aged businessmen, and nuclear families with young children). And being integrated into a social circle, rather than only having their spouse or nobody else to experience things with. Then there's the couple who aren't hiding their plans of coming to Maui for a tropical sex marathon (the chick in red booty shorts and the dude who looks like a Venice Beach cousin of John Oates). The fact that nobody around them is butting into their business, since everyone is enjoying their own lives. Children climbing all over the column bases, standing up on the lounge seats, and probably going for a ride on the baggage carousel. Somewhere a boombox blasting out "We're on safari to stayyy!"

The presence of the "snack bar" instead of Vino Volo. No Mexican food (and no Mexicans...). No obvious faggots creeping around. I think the outgoing, social-circle-oriented ways of the Eighties kept a pro-social lid on some of the status-striving and inequality trends that were underway, which exploded more during the '90s when people started cocooning again.

Which major financier is a gay pederast?

A former pro who worked for the elite group that Eliot Spitzer patronized has a memoir out, Call Girl Confidential. The NY Post relates what must be the most disturbing of the book's tales, which does not name names:

A “major financier” who bore some responsibility for the 2008 financial crash flew her to Tokyo so she could tie him to a headboard and put clothespins on his member. “The more aroused he got, the more I punished him.” He paid Woodard $25,000. But after two years, he asked her, “Would you be able to get me a young boy?” She refused, told him to get help and wouldn’t see him again.

The "young boy" must not have been the kind that he could've gotten through an escorts-for-faggots service, so he was looking for someone quite a bit younger than 18. Since she didn't tell the cops, she must not have thought he had someone pre-pubescent in mind. Probably someone around 12, like the priests and Orthodox rabbis go after.

Guessers at BlindGossip thought of Bernie Madoff, but I don't think so. He was around 70, and she uses the phrase "the more aroused he got." I checked Google Images, and he doesn't give off strong homo vibes. And why Tokyo? He doesn't have any known connection there, or preference for Asian culture. Plus, "bore some responsibility" would be quite an understatement to describe him in the tabloid media. They would've played up the drama more with "criminal," "con man," etc. At this point, nobody would ruin her for naming his name.

Then I remembered someone who would set anybody's gaydar off -- Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs since 2006. Like all other big wigs on Wall Street, he bore some responsibility, but is not widely reviled like Madoff. He's the Gala Chairman of the Rockefeller family's Asia Society, so he's more likely to pick Tokyo -- not what most rich guys would pick as their getaway destination for trysts. He would've been in his early 50s, so arousal wouldn't be so implausible.

And unlike Madoff, he's been an outspoken supporter of gay marriage for years, to the point of losing a big business client who didn't agree with it. Privately holding the belief wouldn't be unusual, but it is to be so outspoken for someone in such a high place within a nominally conservative sector.

Check out this mug, and pretend you're in the principal's office. Nope, no creepy pedo vibes here:

Other pictures of him smiling show the same giveaways that I detailed in previous posts in the "Hidden Homos" series. His upper lip doesn't curve up at the ends, but it pulled tightly straight across more like a small child's. And his eyes don't crinkle and squint, but show the typical arched-up eyebrows of a child showing surprise, eagerness, and excitement. It doesn't matter if they're the head of a major company, queers still can't help looking like hyper-sexualized Peter Pans.

Other pictures here, here, and here.

Who knows if he's the one being described in the tell-all memoir? It doesn't give too many specific clues. But he certainly does project strong gay vibes when he's trying to be his candid self and let it all hang out, and the other facts make him a more likely candidate than Bernie Madoff.

Then again, how many gay weirdos are there heading big Wall Street firms who aren't much in the public eye? People who are profoundly warped in one way tend to be so in other ways as well.

Eyeglass design over time: Open and transparent vs. narrow and opaque (pictures)

Looking over my aunt's 1963 high school yearbook, it struck me how similar the popular styles of eyeglasses are during the Millennial and mid-century periods.

It never hit me before because eyeglasses aren't one of those things that springs to mind when you think of "the look of the '80s." Even after poking around some pictures for reminders, they still don't click, the way you hear an iconic song you haven't heard in forever.

That's because eyeglasses from the '70s and '80s try not to be noticeable. Folks were more afraid of looking nerdy when the primary goal was being cool (part of being people-oriented). Now and during the '50s and early '60s, they enjoyed making a fashion statement out of something geeky (part of being thing-oriented).

Let's take a closer look at what specific features tend to go together during a given zeitgeist, and how that changes over time. There's a good variety of pictures and item measurements at this vintage eyeglass store on Etsy. Then there's this rich collection of old pictures of famous people wearing glasses.

Here's a representative sample of glasses for women, and then men, from the '50s and early '60s (click to enlarge):

Their most defining feature is the tiny height of the rims. Since the width is about the same for any two pairs, the smaller height gives these ones a narrow, almost squinty look. I get the feeling of being looked at suspiciously, as though I'm trying to get into a building and there's someone scrutinizing me through a slit in the door, asking me for the passwoid.

The frames are also fairly thick, particularly the temples (the arm parts). The colors are usually quite dark, though there's the odd beige or light grey pair. And the surface tends to be opaque and reflective. Thickness, darkness, and opaqueness all give them a more solid material presence -- more clearly a gadget that's been grafted onto your face.

Fans of these styles call them "architectural," but to me they seem more mask-like, especially combined with the narrow openings. And they're celebrating the thing-ness of glasses, rather than trying to make them blend organically with the human face.

People in cocooning periods are suspicious of each other on an interpersonal level (institutional trust is distinct, and related to the inequality cycle), and are more thing-oriented. The popular glasses above are just what you'd expect to have been popular during the mid-century.

Turning now to the '80s (glasses from the '70s look similar, but the traits are more pronounced further on):

Glasses were HUGE back then. Typically the height is at least 2", and I found some that were 2 3/8". The ones from the '50s and early '60s were generally at or under 1 1/2", and I found some that were as narrow as 1 1/8". So, glasses became about twice as wide open. It exaggerates the wide-eyed look of someone who already knows you, trusts you, and is devoting their full attention to you.

The frames are also thinner, only somewhat for women's glasses but more so for men's -- the temples that look like 2x4's whacking you upside the head are long gone. The colors are also lighter, either lighter shades of dark colors or new brighter colors like yellow, orange, and red (although they're not very saturated or loud). And the material looks less material -- translucent plastic for thicker frames, and wispy wires for metal frames.

Those features all work toward making the glasses blend quietly into the background rather than stand out or get in the way of the person's face.

The stereotype of '80s design and fashion is that everything was loud and attention-seeking, but here's a clear counter-example. Outgoing people-people don't want to be loud about something so unavoidably nerdy.

With the return toward cocooning as the mainstream form of social behavior, the set of features that was popular over 50 years ago has returned, sometimes quoting the original but usually not paying attention to history. Like-minded groups of people will independently develop similar cultures (in those domains where they are like-minded). Homosexuals are particularly drawn to the nerdy look, since as Peter Pans they don't care at all about being cool.

Finally, to help us remember a rather indistinct style (nothing wrong with that in this case), here are some real-life pictures of people from the late '70s through the early '90s, taken from the Bespectacled Birthday blog.

Christopher Reeve was meant to recall the nerdy Fifties office worker, yet they didn't give him narrow black glasses. That would have made Clark Kent look less trusting and keeping others at arm's length. The way-wide-open contemporary glasses give the character a more open and vulnerable look. It makes him easier to sympathize with, and it heightens the contrast with his more confident and in-charge alter ego.

Carl Sagan, perhaps the closest thing there was to the Nerd Laureate in the '80s, doesn't look very nerdy at all. Unlike the '60s and the 21st century, intellectuals didn't feel like they had something to prove by desperately sporting thick, conspicuous Intellectual Glasses. The wide openings place the rims away from the eyes, where they might distract you, and the rims and temples are so thin that you don't notice them. The large eye spaces also look more understanding than indiscriminately judgmental, always a worry for intellectuals.

That's Charlize Theron as a teenager. The temples are kind of thick, and the color is on the dark side, so they stand out a little bit. But because they're so wide open, they still look inviting rather than distancing. She looks like she'd be eager to talk to boys, not bothered by their presence. Isn't it strange how mature teenagers looked then, compared to 20-somethings today?

The one on the right is Heather Locklear, a rare example of a woman wearing super-thin frames. Not much of a fashion statement, although she has some golden and purple color to liven them up. It's probably the expression she's making for whatever TV show this is from, but she doesn't look as inviting as Charlize Theron. Still, she doesn't look stuck-up or high-maintenance. No-nonsense, maybe, but not catty or bitchy. Those women are long gone too, not just their glasses.

You often hear the '70s and '80s aviator style glasses on men being referred to as serial killer glasses, pedophile glasses, and so on. Here's subway vigilante Bernie Goetz and cat person Stephen King doing their best to prove stereotypes. I don't think the glasses themselves make them look weird. I think the association people make between these glasses and serial killers and pedophiles is that they were both a lot more common back then and are much rarer now.

Perhaps their creeped-out reaction is caused by the disconnect between the traits suggested by the glasses and the individuals wearing them. To me the squinty mask-like glasses look more voyeuristic.

Add eyeglasses to the list of things that used to be unpretentious but are now required to be conspicuous design objects. Time to buy a new old pair.

Familiar yet mysterious band names

Dead or Alive, Men at Work, Missing Persons, General Public, Talking Heads -- these are all standard phrases or idioms, as well as the names of new wave bands from the '80s. See even more here.

Because they're standard, we don't have to think or decode what the names "really mean." They're familiar and unpretentious. However cool the names Velvet Underground and Vampire Weekend may sound, they strike us as self-consciously designed and planned out, almost as though they wanted to be remembered more for their awesomely enigmatic name than their music. And most attempts at enigmatic names fall flat and sound annoying, like Matchbox 20 or The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus.

But new wave names aren't transparent either: stock phrases only pick up their meanings in context. Unlike a more straightforward name like Niggaz Wit Attitudes. (Gotcha.) Lacking further clarification, a name like Naked Eyes remains suggestive.

Allusions or references are not always transparent, such as Joy Division or Sisters of Mercy. Both of those names are ironic, alluding to things the band doesn't actually identify with. The more sincere ones tend to sound fanboyish, like it's a shibboleth or an inside joke -- Fall Out Boy, Ladyhawke, VHS or Beta, etc. For a small, tightly knit community, inside jokes are fine, but they don't work well for drawing a broader audience. Using shibboleths in front of a potentially large audience sends a signal that their fan base will be drawn from the kids who are all tribalistically possessive of the dorky music they listen to.

They say never judge a book by its cover, but what if the author himself designed it? It sure seems like the style of name reveals a lot about the group -- rappers are dumb and obvious, indie geeks are jealous fanboys, art rock was too concerned with self-presentation, and new wave drew you in with the familiar while exciting you with something exotic and unheard-of.

Education bubbles and rising inequality

Below are a series of comments I left on a post at Steve Sailer's. They look at the history of the relationship between rising inequality and education bubbles, as well as discussing some of the mechanistic links through which more and more schooling (and a more and more academic focus within schools) breeds widening inequality. Hence, all of these elite liberal plans to cure inequality by expanding education will make the problem worse. A populist liberal plan would scale back pointless education, and give it a more practical focus for most folks.

In Peter Turchin's model, status-striving drives inequality, and one of the most reliable signs of striving is a higher ed bubble. It turns out that, at least in America over the last 200 years, this bubble spread more broadly to pre-college schooling. Now it's extending toward a pre-K schooling bubble.

Once upon a time, not only did few people go to college, they didn't even bother with high school. My hillbilly grandfather spent most of his school days roaming around backwoods Appalachia hunting whatever little animals he could scrounge up for meals, and generally enjoying himself. He grew up to get good union jobs, mostly as a carpenter but also as a coal miner. That was during the Great Compression (he was born in 1914), when folks weren't going to harass him for not showing up to class -- he was already getting the education he needed.

I saw the same attitude in my aunt's senior yearbook from 1963 -- shop class for guys and home ec for girls. That reflects a practical rather than academic orientation, even for those who did continue through senior year of high school (and only about half of the freshmen would bother, when they could begin working instead).

However, this isn't just "the past" vs. "the present," as such scenes would have struck a Gilded Age observer as disturbingly backwards. Surely our great nation was headed down the sewer now that the proliferation of colleges was grinding to a halt and school kids weren't expected to be familiar with Greek or Latin.

Thus the changes with the status-striving phase of the cycle are both quantitative (more students enrolled, more colleges founded, more graduates competing against each other) and qualitative (more academic rather than practical).

Anyway, here are the comments, unedited, hence more off-the-cuff and probably agitated than if I re-wrote them into a post.

* * * * *

Not only a "liberal" issue -- conservative morons have been in hysterics about mediocre schools dragging down our prosperity and international competitiveness since 1983, A Nation at Risk, which recommended the requirement of 3 years of high school math. No Child Left Behind built on that foundation.

Conservatives are not challenging the silly notion that Americans need more education -- a greater share of a given age group, a greater range of age groups, and for a longer duration of the school day and school year.

Nor do they challenge the elitist agenda of making the content all academic. Show me the thriving grassroots conservative movement that wants to bring back home ec for girls, shop class for boys, and vocational training more broadly.

Nope, all that they argue over is what academic topics and instructional techniques will be used in service of the unchallenged goal of more ed, and more academics.

E.g., focus on rote memorization rather than self-discovery of principles -- not asking whether the thing they're learning is worth everybody learning, or whether it'll be a huge waste of time, no matter how they learn it. The quadratic formula, for instance.

A Nation at Risk complained about how few high schoolers could write a persuasive essay. Why does a plumber need to know how to write a 5-paragraph essay? All that time, effort, and money to achieve the goal is pure waste.

Also, what kind of goal is it to have all Americans be able to BS their way through a half-baked argument? Might that turn us into a national of BS-ers?

As for inequality, expanding education leads to wider inequality. A brief overview of the history of American education:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education_in_the_United_States

There was rising inequality from circa 1820 to 1920, falling inequality from then until sometime in the '70s, and rising again after then through today.

Compulsory education for youngish children was absent in the early days of the Republic, and only began spreading during the rising-inequality period, beginning in 1852 and ending in 1917. The high school movement was a little later, but also a Gilded Age / Turn-of-the-Century phenomenon.

Then, as now, the emphasis was on academics and classics, a waste of time for almost everybody passing through.

The rising-inequality period also saw an explosion of higher ed, both number of colleges and student populations. Sound familiar? Peter Turchin looked through data on law school enrollments, and found an explosion of law school attendance during that time as well. Again, ring a bell?

The Great Compression, when inequality was falling, saw the society putting a lid on the older status-striving pursuit of more and more education. The proliferation of colleges wound down, lots of kids skipped school and weren't punished, and vocational and practical classes started to develop. That was the heyday of home ec for girls and shop class for guys.

Pursuit of more ed, and more academic ed, is nothing more than status-striving. Hence, status-striving had to decline before inequality did, and it had to re-emerge before inequality could rise again.

The Progressive movement around the 1910s were pushing for vocational training, and inequality fell shortly afterwards. The Great Society programs began the "excellence for all" discontent and return to status-striving, and inequality began rising by the later '70s.

The grassroots change has to target the spiral of status-striving in this country, not inequality itself, which is an effect. I don't see that turning around any time soon, though, even with conservatives or lower-status folks. They take it as an insult, like "Oh, so you don't think my kids would benefit from high school, or an academically focused curriculum? My kids deserve more than you think, and I'll show you."

Less schooling, and a more practical focus in school -- that's what we need.

What's the mechanistic link between the expansion of education and widening inequality? It equips the aspiring elite with the skills and knowledge necessary to crush other people's skulls in order to climb to the top, and to BS your way through a self-advancing argument. So, the ceiling on incomes will rise.

It also wastes the formative years of the lower majority of the population, training them for a way of life that they'll never ever make a living in. It's worse than just sitting around doing nothing -- it's *mis*-direction of their efforts. They could have been learning a trade, apprenticing, or by middle and high school, working in wage labor. Earn early, save early, and retire early.

If they also get trapped in the expansion of higher ed, they're also mired in debt for life, while the successful elite will be able to pay of their student loans.

Establishing and continuing to run an expanding public school system requires public funding, i.e. taxes. Except for those too poor to pay taxes, the middle 70% (or whatever) of the population is paying regularly to have their children be misdirected. Schooling isn't exactly cheap.

Eventually, the elite's goal is to privatize schooling in order to mire the majority in debt for K-12 schooling, not just for college. And then pre-K -- $20,000 in student loans by the time you're 5 years old!

Human-scale vs. Earth-shattering stakes in movies

Here is an article about how movie audiences these days require the entire universe to be at stake, or else BORRRING. The counter-trend is for banal or saccharine kiddie flicks to take up more and more market share, catering to those viewers who don't feel like yet another cataclysmic war this weekend, yet who still feel that personal + sincere = awkward. The optimal middle level of sincere human-scale stories has been squeezed out. They still appear in serial television dramas, but I mean a format with a dramatic beginning, middle, and end.

To figure out what's gone wrong, we need to trace this trend back to its origins. It turns out to track the rising or falling trend in the crime rate -- more personal and local during rising-crime times, and over-blown and remote during falling-crime times. When violence and crime are rising in the real world, everyday settings, characters, and events are interesting enough. When the world around us keeps getting safer and safer, we have to overload our senses with the threat of danger in order to shock our sleeping security cameras into operation.

If it's a recent loathsome cultural trend, it must have started in the '90s. Well, the top-grossing movies of 1992 don't have any where the entire race, nation, world, universe, etc. is at stake. In 1993, there was the historical epic Schindler's List where the entire Jewish race is at stake. In '94, the epic and Earth-shattering becomes more popular still -- The Lion King, Forrest Gump, Stargate, Star Trek: Generations all landed in the top 20 at the box office.

Click on the 1992 link above to navigate around other "years in film" entries at Wikipedia, and you'll see how non-existent these kinds of movies were as recently as the late '80s and early '90s.

Even when the stakes were large, the sheer size of the existential threat did not dominate the storytelling -- like, "Yeah, we get it -- after 90 minutes, world still at stake." In Ghostbusters, you don't see the gigantic threat materialize until the end of the movie, when the Gozer babe opens up the portal of evil on top of the apartment building. Most of the movie is about the seemingly mismatched characters forming a team, and tackling smaller threats in order to gradually convince skeptics and gradually become experienced enough for any large threat that may come. And that large threat is only hinted at before the end -- when Dana opens her fridge and sees the other dimension and its hellhounds -- not foretold as a prophecy that stops everything in its tracks and re-directs them toward The Final Battle that's still two hours away.

When the Stay Puft marshmallow man does come striding down crowded streets, his damage is still limited in scope -- it's not like he's wrecking skyscrapers across all of Manhattan. So it doesn't even feel like, at that moment, all of New York City is at stake. Damage to the rest of the borough, city, and nation are off in the future, and we sense that trajectory without having to see it take place. We're familiar with the idea that much broader destruction may follow if the heroes don't win this smaller battle. For audiences in 1984, a crucial battle, not the entire war, was important enough to hold their attention.

Go through the other hit movies of '84 and you see the same thing:

Beverly Hills Cop -- a circumscribed series of crimes are the threat. The main motivation for the protagonist is revenge against one or a few enemies who killed his best friend.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom -- like Ghostbusters, the threat is local, although it could possibly spread if the heroes don't stop it here and now. Ditto for Gremlins.

The Karate Kid -- a single individual is threatened by bullies. He strives to improve himself in order to restore his honor and get the girl.

Police Academy -- urban crime broadly is the threat, but it wasn't over-blown. Crime was higher in the '80s, but it wasn't apocalyptic. And just one group of new officers are the heroes, not the entire police department.

Footloose -- the majority of young people in a single town are the target of repressive laws against music and dancing. Mostly, though, the struggle is between individual representatives of both sides (the newcomer rebel and the fiery preacher), who share much common ground. It's not one of those bratty movies about Youth vs. Fogies. The audience understands that these events could take place "in a town like yours," but only by extension and through inference. The movie doesn't actually show the same events playing out across different towns across the country. The threat to young people in general is tacit, not explicit and over-blown.

Splash -- rom-coms are never epic in scale, but these days they try to push them as far as possible. Splash tells a tale about an unlikely couple who had been down on their luck before they met each other, and who may get broken up by a non-apocalyptic group of antagonists. Today, "down on their luck" would have to be the most pathetic sob story ever, and they wouldn't just have fun and click as a couple -- they would have to be spinning head over heels in love, blocking out the rest of the world. Any threat to their being together would be ruinous to their very well-being.

Etc.

Movies from the '70s are also more personal in scale and sincere in tone. Even in the paranoid political thriller genre, they don't directly show the entire world (or free world) being at stake. Folks understood that if the conspirators can get away with some smaller feat, they can probably do a little better. And if they can get away with it in some local, circumscribed part of the world, they are probably at work elsewhere. We're witnessing the tip of the iceberg -- we don't need to see the whole damn iceberg to appreciate that.

Movies from the '60s are emerging from the most recent peak of epic-scale narratives, during the mid-century. As late as 1963, the top three movies were still all epics -- Cleopatra, How the West Was Won, and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Already by '68, movies that could have been overblown epics are more personal and local in scale, with the broader implications left as inferences for the audience to draw -- 2001: A Space Odyssey, Rosemary's Baby, Planet of the Apes, Night of the Living Dead.

Here are the top movies from 1953, many of which are gigantic-scale, epic, "the fate of the world hangs in the balance" kind of movies. The Robe, Salome, Julius Caesar, The War of the Worlds. At least back then, helicopter parents had their children watching kiddie TV shows or listening to corny radio programs, rather than demanding Hollywood provide as many kiddie as grown-up movies to choose from every weekend. That left open a niche for the occasional small-scale rom-com like Roman Holiday or thriller like Rear Window (from '54).

Jazz Age movies were like those of the '80s, more personal in scale, lots of comedies, and a couple of larger-scale epics that were nevertheless told mostly through interpersonal relationships among the characters (like the Star Wars movies). Here are the top 14 from 1927, for example, and only The King of Kings and Metropolis can be considered large-scale. I haven't seen the former, but Metropolis does not have an oppressively large scope at any given moment -- not like the two endless battle lines in the Lord of the Rings movies, all racing toward each other at the same time. The large scope of Metropolis is achieved by a nested series of human-scale relationships that have links between them (again like the Star Wars movies). It shifts from this sub-group of characters in this location to that sub-group in that location, without overwhelming us by focusing on the entire Good Side for a long stretch, then the entire Bad Side, etc., until the epic showdown where both entire sides duke it out.

Horror and monster movies make a good case study, because all of them have a clear villain or threat and a clear group of targeted victims. What changes is the size of the monster and his pool of victims. Starting at the beginning, classic horror movies of the '20s and early '30s are all local and personal in scope -- Dracula, Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and so on. The last great example is King Kong from 1933, where the monster is like the Stay Puft marshmallow man, only threatening the stretch of streets and cars along his path toward a single target building, where his girl is hiding. Perhaps he could wreak havoc across all of New York, but they don't even hint at that, let alone show it.

Mid-century monster movies go so over-the-top that they become desperate and cheesy. Returning to 1953, the #10 movie at the box office was The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms -- I guess "from a Thousand Fathoms" didn't sound epic enough. The next year saw a movie version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea as the #2 movie, and the novel was from the Victorian era (1870). Back to the first 20,000-named movie, Wikipedia summarizes the plot like this: "The film is about an atomic bomb test in the Arctic Circle that unfreezes a hibernating dinosaur, the fictional Rhedosaurus, which begins to wreak havoc in New York City."

By the '70s, '80s, and early '90s, they've returned to human-scale and local threats -- Halloween (and all in the slasher genre), Alien, Predator, The Silence of the Lambs. Either the threat could expand beyond the setting of the movie, or there could be others like it already in other places. We don't need to zoom out in order to appreciate that something big is at stake, beyond what is seen.

Starting in the mid-'90s, the Earth-shattering monster / alien movies were back by popular demand, starting with Stargate and Independence Day and continuing through War of the Worlds and Cloverfield in the 2000s. Most of the genre, however, has been absorbed by the comic book movies, such as the X-Men and Transformers franchises.

Horror / monster / alien movies show the link to the crime rate more clearly than movies in general. When the Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Friday the 13th series dominated the genre, viewers felt like evil was lurking in their own neck of the woods, and that it would only take a single enemy to do them in, not an army of them. The crime rate was rising toward its peak at the time, making audiences more aware of the reality of violence. As crime rates have fallen so dramatically, to where you no longer read about murders, kidnappings, and Satanic cults on the front page of every newspaper, viewers wouldn't buy the "killer next door" premise of the slasher movies. It has to be legions of zombies threatening to wipe out the entire planet, or at any rate a threat that comes so far outside of the audience's own community that they'd only see the threat in a movie: the stalker weirdo from Saw, the Central European torturers preying on tourists in Hostel, and so on.

Is nostalgia narcissistic? Or only for Boomers?

Here is a WSJ column by Terry Teachout arguing that Baby Boomers' nostalgia is narcissistic. He also argues that they are Peter Pans, and that they value popular rather than high culture, which tie back into their narcissistic nostalgia -- meant to keep them forever young, even if it means focusing on TV shows rather than opera, since you weren't a fan of opera as a child.

I'm just going to explore the question of how nostalgia can take self-centered vs. other-centered forms, and which generations develop which type.

I agree that Boomer nostalgia is self-centered, though only for the early Boomers, exempting those born after the mid-'50s. How did it get that way?

First, folks are only going to feel strong nostalgia about an exciting, outgoing, and fun-filled period. Cocooning periods are too dull and uneventful to evoke much longing once they're over. By "nostalgia," I mean the direct kind -- by the people who actually have vivid, living memories of the period. Not the vicarious kind, where you enjoy a time period that you have few or no such memories of.

Consider how few pop culture examples there are of a longing look back at the mid-century, by actual participants. Whereas folks were already pining for the Roaring Twenties right after they'd ended. See, e.g., Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s, published in 1931, as well as many of the scenes in Sunset Boulevard, later still in 1950, regardless of the black humor that's mixed in with the nostalgia.

Hence, the Silent Generation generally doesn't show much nostalgia for their formative years, by comparative standards -- everyone remembers at least some things fondly about the time when they were growing up. Cocooning began coming undone in the later half of the '50s, so some of the latest Silents show strong nostalgia for the early days of rock 'n' roll, '57 Chevrolets, and so on. As do some of the early Boomers who remember that period, albeit from the vantage point of a child rather than a teenager.

To the extent that some Silents do actually feel strong nostalgia, then, it is primarily self-centered -- focused on the period as lived by themselves, and not so much by younger or older generations. They can remember some details about what life was like for 30 and 40-somethings back then -- skinny black ties on a short-sleeved white dress shirt, browline eyeglasses, etc. -- but they don't spontaneously arise as part of the feeling of "Oh, everything was so much better back then!" Their nostalgia is almost entirely focused on the teenage or youth culture, and they don't seem very aware of what life was like for the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit generations.

The outgoing and fun-loving zeitgeist only picked up steam during the '60s and early '70s, which is the period of early Boomer nostalgia. And again, they themselves are still at the center of "what was so great about the old days," with the older generations either out of sight and out of mind, or perceived with disdain -- representing the old order that needed to be transformed. The greatest example of this is the TV show The Wonder Years, where almost no nostalgia is shown for the way that the parents' generation lived during the late '60s and early '70s. For the most part, the older generations were simply invisible, and what the Boomers saw (or believed that they saw), they didn't like -- gruff, taciturn fathers and self-doubting, domestic mothers.

From what I can tell, though, that's mostly a Boomer fabrication to rationalize their ignorance or dismissal of other generations during the '60s and early '70s. They see it as though everyone over 30 was stodgy, gruff, sexist, racist, bla bla bla -- and that maybe that was understandable given the environment the old order had grown up in, but we Boomers are going to change all of that. In reality, every generation became more outgoing and fun-loving during the '60s and early '70s. Somebody was making and starring in all those movies, composing and performing all that music, hosting or starring in all those hit TV shows. And it wasn't Boomers -- they were too damn young. It was everybody else. And everybody else was not just producing but consuming that culture too.

This brings up an important point that deserves its own post, but I keep working it into other posts or comments. That is that the Boomers were too young to have caused anything that went on in the 1960s, other than determining who was at the top of the Billboard charts as consumers (not makers) of pop music. The earliest cohort of Boomers, born in 1946, were between 14 and 24 years old during the decade of the 1960s -- hence, they did not affect the course of history, however much they like to think so, and however much other generations like to blame them so. Most of the major players and grassroots participants were Silents, and depending on the area of society, the later part of the Greatest Gen. Civil Rights, second wave feminism, electing Johnson -- all had nothing to do with Boomers.

In 1970, a 30 year-old career woman complaining about the pattern of unfair treatment in every office and company she's worked for -- was born in 1940. The idea that Boomers were behind it all in the turbulent period circa 1970 is so deeply ingrained in the received wisdom, that you may have to check the birth years of second wave feminists to convince yourself that they were not high schoolers or college sophomores. Campus protesters against the War in Vietnam or against the college administration? Sure, that was them. But that was it.

That's another way in which Boomer nostalgia is narcissistic -- it's self-aggrandizing, given how minimal their participation and influence was on Civil Rights, putting a man on the moon, and anything except for the consumer side of pop music (and related events like Woodstock). There's nothing wrong with recalling those events with longing, but they keep saying "we did this" and "we accomplished that" -- no you didn't, you were still an adolescent. You know that they aren't giving proper credit to the mostly Silent, partly Greatest Gen members who really did accomplish all those things, from their credo "Don't trust anyone over 30," from their portrayal of their parents' generation on The Wonder Years, Back to the Future, and so on. They truly believe, deep down, that a bunch of starry-eyed teenagers altered the course of history by tuning in to it on TV.

Again, I think the late Silents give themselves too much credit for the shaking-up of the later '50s. The charge was led by the Greatest Gen, who were becoming fed up with how stultifying the Company Man way of life had become. And they were certainly in a greater position of societal influence compared to awkward teenagers. Sloan Wilson and Betty Friedan were both late members of the Greatest Gen.

The cause of narcissistic nostalgia? I blame helicopter parenting, or "smothering mothers" as it was known during its most recent peak before the Millennial era. Especially after Dr. Spock's Baby & Child Care was published in 1946, children became smothered in attention, praise, self-esteem boosters, and so on. Plus there were just so many of them after fertility rates started shooting up. That's more of a compounding factor, though -- just think if the zeitgeist had been one of "children should be seen and not heard." Then they would've really torn into the brats, who they would've seen as a plague of pests. It took a Dr. Spock mindset among the adult population to give the children that feeling of "everyone's looking at me!" and "I did that!" (No you didn't.)

Is there a generation that feels strong nostalgia, but in a more other-centered way? Perhaps you can tell from the title of a post here from 2012, "Going beyond personal nostalgia in admiring the past," that members of Generation X took in a far greater expanse of social-cultural goings-on back in the '80s. Even for superficial stuff like what clothing and hairstyles were popular, nostalgia isn't restricted entirely to youth culture. You definitely see that -- feathered hair, Jordache jeans, mullets, etc. -- but you also see large shoulder pads on career women, station wagons (driven by a father, not a teenager), old ladies with caked-on blue eyeshadow and sky-high perms, Magnum P.I. mustaches, and so on.

I clearly remember what TV shows were a hit with my parents' generation (and often their parents'), even if I never watched them myself -- Dallas, Matlock, nature documentaries, and Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy!

Ditto for pop music. Gen X not only has a soft spot for New Wave that was a hit with young people, but also adult contemporary of the time -- Peter Gabriel, Paul Simon, Sade, Kate Bush, Phil Collins, just to name a few. When the Boomers reminisce about the sound of 1967, are they including Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, and Dean Martin, all of whom had #1 songs on Billboard's adult contemporary / easy listening chart? See here for the hits from '67, almost none of which would show up on a Sixties compilation or playlist.

Compare to the adult contemporary hits of '87, more than half of which could show up on an Eighties compilation. True, they sound a little poppier, but then that's because the average industry-wide had been lifted to a more mature and developed sound -- not the bubblegummy standard to which grown folks music was compared in the '60s. "Didn't We Almost Have It All" and "Little Lies" are for people with plenty of life experience, and if teenagers had grown up faster during the '80s than they had in the '60s, then these songs would be a hit on the pop charts too (and they were: #1 and #4 on the Hot 100).

Some of my sharpest memories from the '80s involve much older folks, whether they were the elderly people who lived at the mall -- the largest group aside from teenagers -- the customers who packed the diner across from my elementary school during lunch hours, or those we interacted with during regular visits to and from the nearby senior center. And of course the Golden Girls on TV.

It's not as though it was an elderly culture -- there were plenty of teen-themed movies and sit-coms, youth-oriented pop music, and hang-out spots for teenagers only. But every age group's lives come into view with '80s nostalgia, from young to old.

What accounts for the more other-centered nostalgia of Gen X? Well, it was the reverse of the Dr. Spock cause of narcissistic Boomer nostalgia. Starting in the '60s, but particularly during the '70s and '80s, all that feel-good bullcrap went up in a puff of smoke. Parents, neighbors, grown-ups, and the public came first -- not children. We didn't get that feeling of being so special, the center of constant attention, or having our egos inflated with undeserved praise. If you just saw Anchorman 2, it does a good job of exaggerating the basic parenting style of circa 1980, with the father leaning on the side of harsh, hands-off, and teaching his kid to sink or swim.

That orients the child toward the larger community that he is being prepared to join, causing him to survey a greater expanse of the social-cultural landscape to see what's going on and how he'll need to adapt in order to fit in. If he's already awesome the way he is, he doesn't need to change, and doesn't need to survey the landscape. The grown-up world will need to change itself to adapt to his own awesomeness.

The late Boomers underwent a similar upbringing as the X-ers, though it wasn't quite so pronounced in the '60s. And they too lie more toward the other-centered end of the nostalgia spectrum. I don't get the impression that they really liked any of what the older generations were into during the '70s -- Barry Manilow, Barbra Streisand -- but they were at least more aware of them, and they spring immediately to mind when they get nostalgic for the '70s. Sleazy older men, playboys, swingers, disco queens, Archie Bunker, working stiffs stuck in long lines at the gas station, grown-ups being fed up with Carter, talking heads soberly discussing the way out of stagflation...

I don't see the Millennials getting nostalgic about their formative years, one way or another. An earlier post looked at how the only thing they feel nostalgia for is not having a life as kids. If things start shaking up again by the later part of this decade, as I predict they will based on the timing of the last period of cocooning, then there will be another version of the early Boomers. These kids will have been raised during the height of helicopter parenting, but they'll go through adolescence in a more wild and unsupervised time, which because of their upbringing, they will attribute entirely to their own awesomeness.

These kids are already born, but are only in elementary school or younger right now. They will probably prove to be different from Millennials, only they're not old enough to give us that impression yet. If generations tend to last around 20 years, then Millennials we be around 1985 to 2004 births. Kids born in 2005 or after we can call the neo-Boomers for now, until something more distinctive suggests itself.

Another case of subversive children's culture disappearing

Kids these days don't sing subversive schoolyard songs anymore, something that is bizarre to the generations who grew up learning "Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts" and "Joy to the World, the Teacher's Dead." This is part of a broader pattern of the disappearance of folk culture in an age of cocooning. Folk culture requires face-to-face transmission, whether through language (songs) or gesture and body movement (games).

My mother and I just got done talking on video chat with my brother and his nearly 6 year-old son. Like most kindergarteners, he finds potty humor funny -- very funny. Yet his repertoire of fart noise techniques was surprisingly lacking. I thought that's just one of those things that everybody learns in grade school, but then I remembered the face-to-face nature of its transmission ("learning"). He knows the most basic one, blowing a raspberry with your tongue and lips, but that was it.

Let me emphasize how much he enjoys fart humor, so it's not for lack of appeal. This also shows how little the other boys at school know -- it would have spread like wildfire by now.

He didn't use the one where you bite your lower lip and push air up and out of one side of your mouth. Or cupping both palms over your mouth, with your fingertips near your earlobes, and blowing really hard. I showed him a hands-only one, where you have your two palms pressed together, with one row of inner knuckles in the palm of the other, and that row of fingertips under the other. It's like the praying gesture, only with one hand sliding down somewhat. You press really hard and pull away hard, and there you go. My brother showed him the more common one where your palms are perpendicular to each other, and your fingers are wrapped around the other hand, like shaking your own hand, and you push toward and apart.

Do you remember the one where you cup your palm under your armpit and begin flapping that arm? Or the variant on the "palms over mouth" one, where you use the inner elbow instead of your palms? These are only the handful that I can think of off the top of my head.

He had trouble with the hands-only ones, which might be a little hard to pull off at that age. But the striking thing from a folk culture perspective is that he wasn't even familiar with it, as though he were just biding time until his dexterity or grip strength or whatever would allow him to finally start doing it. Like most Millennials, he nearly went into a nuclear meltdown when he couldn't immediately master something that had been demonstrated for him to learn.

He had a little easier time with the hands-over-mouth one -- that pissed off my brother a little bit. I'd gotten around his over-parenting shield, and once you learn something like that, you don't forget it. That's why parents these days prevent any peer socialization while their kids are developing -- all those years of precision sculpting, ruined. Once their minds are more solidified and Bad Influences aren't so influential, then they can play together unsupervised in college.

Is my nephew going to keep using that technique to make fart noises for the rest of his life? Nope. That started to get old during middle school, when boys become more sensitive to how girls perceive them. This natural negative feedback, or damping mechanism, makes parental programming superfluous. In fact, I can't remember the last time I used any of those fart noise techniques spontaneously before demonstrating them today. And it wasn't because my parents began punishing me, because the schools initiated a Zero Tolerance policy on fart noises, or whatever. It just got old, and embarrassing when there were girls around.

But, in the minds of helicopter parents, children are blank slates and will just keep on doing something bad forever once they're exposed, as though they would have no internal changes that would correct it when it's time to, and as though there were no social dampening effects either. This example shows both forces at work: negative social feedback from girls, though only once boys' internal nature changes to value approval from girls.

Simple examples like this, no matter how mundane and profane, disprove the hysterical worldviews that most parents operate on these days. But worldviews come more from the zeitgeist than from reasoning or observation, and a cocooning period has a thing-oriented rather than people-oriented zeitgeist, as folks have less and less experience interacting with others. People-as-things leads to parenting-as-programming, which in turn leads to the isolation of children from anyone outside the nuclear family, who might un-program or re-program all the tireless labor of the parents. Social isolation then unravels the folk culture of children, which must be learned face-to-face.

And all of this just to assuage parental paranoia (which never gets assuaged, but would be even worse if their kids got to develop as autonomously as they did when they were growing up). Who cares if you've stunted the social lobe of your kid's brain, and wiped out a thriving folk culture that used to belong to children themselves? Once more we see how thoroughly hostile helicopter parenting is to communal cohesion and cultural continuity, as everyone and everything beyond the private nuclear household becomes an Outside Threat To Our Parenting.

The class of '63: History through yearbook impressions

Tonight we had a lot of fun looking over my aunt's yearbook from the year she graduated, 1963. This was an interesting time because it was after the cocooning trend of the mid-century had begun to reverse, and people were loosening up and shaking things up. And the violent crime rate was beginning its upward climb of the following decades.

But it wasn't yet The Sixties. It was post-Elvis but pre-Beatles, and post-Cuban Missile Crisis but pre-Vietnam (in the popular mind). Kennedy had been elected but not assassinated. And the graduating seniors were born in 1945, at the very end of the Silent Generation. Suddenly they weren't so silent.

If you remember the '70s, '80s, or early '90s, the signs of people coming out of their shells will look fairly familiar, such as girls kicking off the rise of Big Hair and shorter skirts.

However, other aspects of the climate look far more foreign to us because the turning point came much earlier than 1992 -- the cycle of status-striving and inequality. Most folks were still self-effacing, and income inequality was nearing a low point, through the middle of the 1970s. After that, things began to slowly creep toward the other end of the spectrum. It seemed dampened in the '80s because rising-crime and an outgoing disposition both push you toward getting along with and looking after others, rather than striving to advance yourself by screwing others. Only the yuppie fringe were thinking and behaving the way that everyone is in today's dog-eat-dog world.

Still, there were other very clear signs of the rise of status striving during the late '70s and '80s: the higher education bubble took off, income inequality began rising, children become more and more likely to grow up in broken homes, and so on.

Back in 1963, though, none of those things were on the rise. Nor were people at the turning-around point where they've started to take hard-won progress for granted. There was still a very conscious credo of egalitarianism, not complacency.

With those overview points in mind, here are some impressions drawn from concrete examples:

- As I said, girls were starting to wear Big Hair. They wanted boys to notice them. Flatter hair means don't look at me. Also, the hair started to be pulled away from the face, again saying "look at me," rather than the hair curtains hiding the face that had been more popular in the '40s and part of the '50s.

- Guys still look pretty geeky, in my aunt's own words, after I was thinking it but not saying it out loud. The flat tops, the thick-rimmed glasses, and just the general vacant and unassertive expressions on their faces. When the "birds and the bees" climate changes direction, girls change first, and then guys. After living through the emotionally disconnected and physically restrained mid-century, it's the less-willing side that has to make the first sign of interest in turning things around. As that mindset spreads, guys start to notice and begin high-fiving each other about how interested the girls suddenly appear to be. I think Beatlemania and girls shrieking out loud in polite company was another major part of this pattern of "girls change first."

- About 2 out of 40 guys in each high school class (or 5%) had severely receding hairlines, where the center was pretty high on the forehead, and the sides had made deep V-lines across the temples and top of the head. Where they did have hair, it was pretty thin in density. It was so strange because they had high school faces and middle-aged hair!

Have you noticed a similar pattern among youngish guys these days? I've seen guys in their early 20s who are more or less bald. And I haven't seen that in all the '80s yearbooks I've flipped through. This would support my theory that baldness signals current and future monogamous behavior because bald guys tend to be low down on the pyramid of desirability. Hence, whether they wanted to cheat or not, they wouldn't find many takers. During periods of cocooning and greater monogamy, men will be balder, while during periods of outgoing-ness and greater promiscuity, they'll have fuller hair. I think these balding high school guys were a window into the "good dad" pattern of the '50s, while guys' hair in the '80s was part of the "bad boy" pattern of the time. Now that we're back toward the "good dad" ideal, guys are balding more.

- The senior class was about one-half the size of the freshman class -- not because some of them had gotten bumped off by sabotaging striver students, but because they realized that extra years of high school weren't going to do anything for them, so they started working. Imagine that: earning money rather than going into debt.

- Pictures show guys having a blast in the Industrial Arts class (AKA shop), which used to include mechanical drawing. Learning how to do something in school -- such an exotic notion these days. It would be the "soft bigotry of low expectations" in today's higher ed bubble.

- No girls sports. That is pure status striving by girls looking to pad their college application -- and by their parents. Only a handful of cheerleaders and majorettes, not squads of several dozen cheerleaders, poms, color guard, etc., which again is just status striving -- way more securing a spot than there needs to be.

- Kids were given nicknames like Fats and Bucky because they were fat or had buck teeth. Part of hunter-gatherer egalitarianism is giving people nicknames that remind them of their all-too-human status, the opposite of the bombastic dictator who heaps one honorific after another onto his official title. I don't remember this being common with schoolchildren in the '80s, an early sign of the weakening of cultural pressures that kept relations more egalitarian. At least it was not yet the hostile climate of political correctness that exploded during the '90s.

- Perhaps 50 to 75% of the school was of recent Southern and Eastern European immigration. Their parents or grandparents were the last wave to come over when immigration was at its peak before being cut off during the '20s. It was in the same neck of the woods where Dean Martin grew up in eastern Ohio, the closest big city being Pittsburgh. My mother's family lived up in the hills with the other Scotch-Irish, while the European ethnics were concentrated in the little towns nearby, where the hillbillies trekked in during the school day.

She said, "You'll notice that there isn't a single Mexican or Latino face in the yearbook," but all of the Italians and Polaks were the original huddled masses who drove down wages for the "jobs Americans won't do," or however the original Robber Barons described it. My aunt's generation seemed to get along fine with them, and my grandparents' generation (Greatest Gen) seemed iffy on whether they were a blessing a curse. I couldn't get too much of a feel for it, but my impression was that my great-grandparents' generation was more hostile toward newly arrived groups -- they were the ones competing with immigrants for jobs at the height of immigration, inequality, strikebreaking, and labor violence.

- High school kids were not yet trusted to eat lunch outside the school building or off campus, or they didn't have the inclination. My mother said that was normal when she was a senior at the same school 10 years later, in '72-'73. In the early '60s, students ate in the cafeteria or classrooms. I remember high schoolers having more freedom during the '80s and early '90s ("open lunch"), but that got rolled back pretty quickly during the '90s, and today schools are in lockdown mode once again.

- The class motto: "Build for character and not for fame." How did society ever function before our governing mindset became "If you got it, flaunt it" and "I love haters"?

Probably more stuff that I can't think of right now. Ask in the comments, and I'll try to remember.