Published: November 29, 2008 11:14 pm      

ANDY LASKY | Shared experiences bridge generations

My mom used to say, “What this country needs is another depression.” I never understood that sentiment and therein lies the irony. She didn’t say it to be mean or vindictive or to wish anyone pain or harm, only that we should have our eyes opened.

My mom was born in 1922 and thus would have been 10 years old in ’32. Just old enough to appreciate what was going on in the world around her in the family home in Hollsopple.

By 1942, she was 20 and had spent those incredibly formative 10 years witnessing history that we all have recalled throughout the ensuing years as very significant.

Depression and war were the things that would form my mother’s view at an age where lifelong lessons are first learned.

Frugality, sacrifice, patriotism. These were the lessons of the day.

She enlisted in the Navy, becoming one of the first “Waves.” Her work at a naval base outside Chicago involved refueling planes and tearing their engines apart for repair.

A favorite photo is of her looking out the window from behind the wheel of a big fuel truck wearing a bubba’s babushka and her Wave work uniform.

I, on the other hand, her third of five children, was born at the peak year of the baby boom, 1957. I turned 10 in 1967, when for my birthday I received a new Schwinn “Ram Horn” bicycle, the one with the 360-degree twisted handlebars and a peeler seat in shiny black and silver.

My friends, Jeff Platt, Jeff Weissberg and Ron Moskat, had lemon, lime and orange peelers, as I recall.

I was growing up in good economic times compared with my mother.

The Vietnam War was on, but only on my television.

Don’t get me wrong: I was aware of – and as I remember very shocked by – what I saw. I remember actually being more frightened by the footage of the race riots and Detroit burning.

The decade between 1967 through 1977 would be the history of my formative years.

The war would end and peace activists would declare a hollow victory against a government they couldn’t trust. Civil rights would make some progress, but also with distrust as its legacy.

The Cold War and threat of nuclear annihilation would hang over our young lives in a way that discouraged long-term thinking. “Live for today” would become my generation’s mantra. All by the time I was 20.

My daughter, Emily, turned 20 this year. Her worldview over the last 10 years has been formed through media influence focused on a celebrity worship culture that celebrates excess. Even by my live-for-today generation’s standard, her world has looked like Sodom and Gomorra to me. But how is that possible when we’ve come through Sept. 11 and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq?

Somehow, the reality of war seems ever more remote. The television that was to have made our world smaller has somehow desensitized us in the process.

It strikes me as very odd that my mother grew up in wartime, as did I and my daughter, Emily, and yet we’ve come away from the experience differently.

Well, Emily and I are about to have another common “life experience” with my mother.

The difficult economy will adjust our reality and shape our worldview in a way that war on our television sets could not.

Emily is home for Thanksgiving. She drove 400 miles in her Volkswagen Passat. She proudly told me upon her safe arrival that she found gasoline for $1.69 a gallon on her way home. The economic news has her thinking about the virtues of frugality. I know my daughter has grown up patriotic, heavily influenced by Sept. 11. She and her peers took a keen and active interest in this year’s presidential election. Now, we both have more in common with my mom’s life experience with frugality and patriotism.

But there still remains that lesson of sacrifice that neither my nor my daughter’s generation has had to learn the way her grandmother’s did.

Perhaps that will be the silver lining in these difficult economic times. Perhaps we’ll have a cultural readjustment about what’s truly important in life. Perhaps we’ll stop seeking happiness through excess consumption and instead find it in our love with one another.

Perhaps we’ll be able to do these things without my mother’s words of another depression becoming prophetic.



Andy Lasky and his wife, Katie, own and operate City View Bar & Grill – “Atop Johnstown's Famous Inclined Plane” – and Westwood Plaza Theatre, both in Westmont.