A strange interlude

I am a baby boomer. There are those that would argue that point-- I was born in 1966 and some who like to look at dates would say I'm GenX. They would be wrong. My father fought the second world war and then came home and started a family. Although I'm the youngest of my family by far, I am a baby boomer as surely as my older brothers.

Baby boomers share certain common cultural bonds. One of the most defining is a shared experience of television, a device which was essentially new to our generation, despite it's pre-war roots. Those who came after us know it as a different animal from the bulky black and white device which brought three commercial networks and a few odd local and public broadcasting stations to us for 18 to 20 hours a day. With fewer programming choices, baby boomers shared a common pool of pop-culture memories that subsequent viewers will not experience in quite the same way. We ALL watched Lucy. We ALL saw EVERY episode of Andy Griffith, Gilligan's Island and the Beverly Hillbillies. I don't think the most popular programs today have quite the following that programming of our generation developed through pure repetition.

The other morning I started my day listening to some opera music my wife, MarKay, was playing as she drank her morning coffee. As I went about my morning rituals, that music transported me back to my TV roots. As I showered I found myself singing along to the Toreador's Song from Carmen--not the words to the actual opera, but the words to the musical version of Hamlet as produced by the castaways on Gilligan's Island.

"Neither a borrower nor a lender be,
Do not forget
Stay out of debt!
Think twice, and take this good advice from me,
Guard that old solvency.
There’s just one other thing
You ought to do,
To thine own self be true."

Through the miracle of stream of consciousness, my mind moved onto other shows from that time period. I found myself thinking of the episode of Andy Griffith where they introduced the Gomer Pyle show. To help Pyle's transition into the service, Andy let's Sgt. Carter think that Gomer is related to Gen. Lucius Pyle. As I remembered that episode, I was struck by something odd.

I frequently can't recall the name of someone I was introduced to the day before, or a shopping item I neglected to put on a list only an hour before, or why I came into a room seconds earlier, but I was able to recall the name Lucius Pyle-- and the words to that Hamlet song-- after at least thirty years absence from watching the episodes they came from. I know I'm not unique among boomers in my ability to pull the most inane facts out of the air about these programs.

The radio generation before mine and the cable generations after certainly have favorite shows that evoke memories. But I think there is a universal imprint that a small group of syndicated television programs made on every person during the years that I was growing up that will never really be duplicated. It made a mark on our time, like the iridium clay layer that marked the end of the dinosaurs and the rise of the mammals. If civilization ended tomorrow, some future archaeologist could sift through my possessions and, finding my books on Andy Griffith, Gilligan, Star Trek and other TV shows, and declare he had hit the baby boomer strata.

"Here is the point in history when man found his brain completely filled with trivia he didn't even know was there," he'll say, "Subsequently, he wandered aimlessly from room to room, unable to remember what he had misplaced. The end of his civilization came soon after."