Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans -- born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage -- and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world. -- From John F. Kennedy's Inaugural Address, Jan. 20, 1961
"Nostalgia isn't what it used to be," mourns a quip widely disseminated on Internet lists of quotes and axioms.Popular culture, however, begs to differ. As Karen Carpenter sang, oh, 25 years ago, "It's yesterday once more."
Consider World War II movie epics such as "Saving Private Ryan" and "The Thin Red Line," Tom Brokaw's best-selling book "The Greatest Generation" and the reincarnation of danceable swing. Somehow the '40s appear to be less remote than they did even a year ago. The late Elvis Presley, too, lives on eternally as "The King," as does the music -- rock, pop and doo-wop -- of his breakthrough era, the 1950s.
But the heydays of the baby boomers really seem to be reverberating with a vengeance.
Hence folks still glory in a Salt Lake stop by those sweaty rock-geezers, the Rolling Stones, or sink into the Stratolounger for a recycled Fox TV sitcom imaginatively titled "The '70s Show." Even "The '60s" -- a sprawling decade if ever there was one -- have been squeezed and rendered as a new TV miniseries named after them, debuting tonight at 8 on NBC (KSL, Ch. 5).
This is because the past -- even the recent past -- is the stuff dreams and legends are made of. We're witnessing, indeed reveling in a nostalgia cycle.
"The whole culture seems to be looking back," said Ted Wilson, the former Salt Lake mayor who is now director of the Hinckley Institute of Politics at the University of Utah. "It does from time to time -- and I think it's healthy."
In the dialogue between generations, "a sort of mythologizing takes place," said Frank W. Fox, a Brigham Young University history professor. "Mom and Dad's generation talks about how great things were when they were kids."
And voila, you have tales of brave Ulysses.
The hippies and activists of the '60s, as well as the teens and twentysomethings they influenced, became the yuppies and parents of the '80s. Their offspring are today's college students, Fox said.
"Their kids are growing up," he said, "and they've heard these great stories. How wonderful it all was, how charming it all was. How great it was to be in rallies. Rock music in the park. Dancing in the streets."
Hence, the boomers AND their children are looking back 20 or 30 years with "a sense of mythic wonder: 'Gee, that must have been quite a world,' " Fox said.
Past and present
Jane Priem, owner of Grunts and Postures, a Salt Lake store that recycles clothing and collectibles, has seen the nostalgia cycle firsthand.
"Most kids, when they're 15 or 16, want to get away from their parents," she said. "I find it's interesting because this generation wants to emulate their parents." The '60s and '70s in particular seem pretty cool to them -- they love bell-bottoms, paisleys and -- who'd believe it? -- horrible plaids and lime-green polyester.
"It's hard to keep in the old, vintage stuff," Priem said. "Frat houses will have a '70s party" -- often disco parties -- "and they come clean us out." But the duds aren't just for boogeying. "They've become part of general wear for high school and college," she said.
Manti resident Ed "Big Daddy" Roth -- a hot-rod icon and creator of the cartoonlike character "Rat Fink" -- remembers the '50s and early '60s as "a grandiose time. I loved it.
"It was a time when high-school-aged kids could go out and get a car and work on it and make it go fast -- and we had our socials around these things," Roth said.
"When I look back to the music, it was cheery, bright, uplifting and understandable," Roth said. He attended a concert recently that featured a bevy of old songs. "When I go to recall nice things, I take my (sunglasses) with me, because I cry like a baby -- and I did. I was lucky to have my shades with me."
He admits to a certain generation-gap confusion, particularly about the allure of some of contemporary music and rap, "why kids are drawn to that sort of stuff. But it's a progression that's unstoppable. Probably the Romans had to put up with the same kinds of things with their kids."
Roth knows the toothy, slavering Rat Fink and other creatures he created were equally confusing to moms and dads a few decades ago. But at least his "monsters," many of them gracing T-shirts he makes and sells at car shows, are more likely to have an ice-cream cone in hand than something gory.
He's had grown men bring their mothers up to him at shows -- "mothers who had been down on Rat Fink -- and they'd say, 'See, Mom, he didn't turn out so bad after all.' "
The music also lives on for Gary "Wooly" Waldron, a Utah radio disc jockey, program director and staion owner since 1960.
"I've got to tell you," he said, "and I think the 1960s in particular -- the music was kind of a driving force of the whole youth movement and the background to it -- there was a tremendous energy in music."
Society was shaping and being shaped by music from Bob Dylan, the Beatles and scores of others.
When he recalls the '60s, Waldron said, "I always think of it as music. Much of the rest of it wasn't that great -- the war and the demonstrations -- but the music was great."
Indeed, Ted Wilson believes some of our fascination with the '60s, in particular, stems from the problems of the '90s.
"President Clinton, for instance, is very quizzical to us," Wilson said. "There's this idea that has emerged that he's a creature of the '60s -- the let's hang out and smoke dope and free-love concepts of the '60s."
In re-examining the '60s, he said, many Americans are trying to understand Clinton -- and their own reactions to his failings and his strengths.
Highs and lows
Al Church, director of curriculum for the Murray School District, remembers both the euphoria and paranoia of the 1960s.
"I think about it every damn day," he said. "I just finished going through a workshop on multiculturalism, and we had to share some things in our 'cultural briefcase,' " Church said. "And the things that have really shaped my world view were because of events in the '60s, in particular, certainly, the civil rights movement and the racial unrest that swept this country."
Growing up in Detroit, he witnessed bigotry and riots. When Church was attending Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., in 1968 (Bill Clinton was a classmate), Martin Luther King was murdered in Memphis. "They had to impose martial law and smoke was rising. You felt incredible tension and peril -- it was a perilous time.
"I saw people get beat up because they were simply in a peaceful demonstration protesting the war in Vietnam," he said. FBI agents would stand on building tops photographing marchers.
"'50s McCarthyism is not dead in this country," Church said. "As a 52-year-old male, my mistrust of big government and J. Edgar Hoover and the forces brought to bear still give me a chill."
Rod Decker, today an issue-oriented KUTV reporter, wound up in Vietnam, a lieutenant in the U.S. Army.
"In college I was in the ROTC," he said. "It was either that or be drafted -- or so we thought, so they told us. I graduated, got a commission then, like having AIDS, eventually it gets you."
In the Army you're told where to go. In 1968 that was Vietnam; he became a staff officer in Saigon.
"I disliked the Army until I got to Vietnam," Decker said, "and it is, I suppose, another sign of a defect in my character, a rottenness in my soul, but I'm the only person I know who went over a dove and came back a hawk. When I was over there I decided most of the South Vietnamese, while inept, didn't want the North Vietnamese to win. They understood better than some Americans what it would mean if the North Vietnamese won."
The communist North wanted to incorporate the free-wheeling South into a spartan social order, where building up the state would be the first priority, he said. South Vietnam had come to know the pleasures of money and a certain decadence, Decker said. When the United States pulled out, they lost homes, a way of living and sometimes their lives.
"I think it was a bad mistake ever to be in Vietnam," Decker said, "but once we were in and made those promises, we should have kept them."
He was in Vietnam from 1968 to 1970. Although public opinion had already begun to shift against the war before he left, politicians were still saying, " 'OK Decker, go over there and kick their butts!' " he recalled. Many leaders had changed their tune by the time he returned. And one-time drinking buddies now labeled him a murderer.
"I felt like an outcast among other young people," he said, a feeling that remained with him until Saigon fell in 1973, and to a degree for years afterward.
Ideas and idealists
In the 1950s, Stephen Holbrook helped organize young Republican clubs all around Utah. By the mid-'60s and 1970s, he was one of the state's ubiquitous civil rights and anti-war activists -- and eventually a Democratic state legislator.
In the 1960s, Jinnah Kelson was a Salt Lake homemaker. By the 1970s she was attending the University of Utah, seeking a master's degree in business and immersing herself in women's causes, first as a volunteer and then as founder of the Phoenix Institute and network magazine.
Meanwhile, Al Church, feeling the call to service but not the military, joined VISTA -- Volunteers in Service to America. He taught migrant workers in Colorado and adult literacy in Utah, where he's remained as a teacher and administrator.
Looking back, "it seems like forever, a jillion years ago," said Kelson, now a management adviser with the Ralston Consulting Group.
Holbrook is executive director of the Coalition for Utah's Future, which is shepherding the growth project called Envision Utah. He grew up in Bountiful.
"My next-door neighbor was treasurer of the United States under (President) Eisenhower," he said. "I met Eisenhower and (President) Nixon several times and I had a good grounding in the political system and had a very good experience learning how it operated and feeling empowered by it."
While working for then-Rep. Sherman P. Lloyd, R-Utah, in 1963, a group of Utahns of many races came to Washington, D.C., for the Martin Luther King-led march, "where he gave the 'I have a dream' speech."
"I'd never met any African-Americans in Utah," Holbrook confessed. He was assigned to show them around.
Later he was with Lloyd when they saw a group of people near the White House protesting the shooting of Medgar Evers, the NAACP field secretary in Mississippi. "I turned to Congressman Lloyd and said 'I feel like I belong in the march, not watching it.' I asked if it was OK, and he said it would be."
Holbrook was transforming into a skeptic and an activist. During the '60s he helped register black voters in the South -- and was jailed in the process. He returned to Utah to help organize civil rights and war protests, leading sit-ins at the induction center and the University of Utah.
"The '60s for a lot of people was just a style and not a cause. But the cause goes on, and the cause of improving the human condition -- that never really ends," Holbrook said.
"They were exciting times -- and times to become more mouthy. I became a big mouth in my community for awhile," Kelson said with a chuckle.
"Part of it was pushing against a culture and tradition and people's concept of what was right and what was wrong, so we raised the hackles on a few people's necks."
Kelson founded the community-based, nonprofit Phoenix Institute to help women "in the transition from being homemakers into the wonderful world of work." She badgered legislators on behalf of the Displaced Homemaker Act, working to help women becoming self-sustaining and to get off welfare, and labored to help them get into any and all fields of work. Network was founded "because we felt like we needed some way to communicate with women and men who were of like minds, as the title/name suggests -- 'network,' a vehicle for dialogue."
By the end of the '80s, the Phoenix Institute was closed down and network sold off. But her voice -- and other voices -- had been heard, she said.
"It's always hard to be out there on the edge, the first ones making that noise and taking a stand," Kelson said. "But thank goodness we have people to do that periodically. There's always somebody out there who will take those stands, and they do gradually turn the tide toward what is important and necessary."
Many of the issues of the '60s have been addressed, or at least tempered. "And we wouldn't really want to go back to those problems, such as the war and the conditions of African Americans," Holbrook said.
"There's no question the '60s for me was an extremely energetic and interesting time," he said. "But I'm very much a 'now person.' "
Editor's note: "Rat Fink" and "'Big Daddy" Roth" are trademarks of Ed "Big Daddy" Roth.