What's your favorite memory from the baby boomer era?

My wife and I still go to a drive-in theater about once a month in Blue Ridge, Georgia. Love it!

I was born in 1958. Howdy Doody and poodle skirts were before my time. The folks who wore poodle skirts were either born at the beginning of the boom or before the boom. Duck and Cover drills were more a part of the earlier part of the boom than the later part. My BF, who's five years older than I am, remembers them. We didn't have them by the time I got to school. Instead, they had "ads" for fallout shelters. I do miss soda fountains. They also served regular food, and even when there was pre-made soda, they were a great place to get a bite while shopping. Whenever there was a space launch, all the classrooms would have TVs wheeled in and we'd all sit there and watch.

I was born in 1946 and it was a great time to grow up. I had a drugstore with a soda fountain and we went to drive-ins all the time. Everything was just like this and it was a great childhood!

I watched Ed Sullivan every Sunday after The Wonderful World of Disney. Now they have reruns of Sullivan.I was 5 when I saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan.

My first record was not a 45 rpm but a 78 rpm, Davy Crockett with Fess Parker....

There was Howdy Doody, Pinky Lee, Eddie Fisher, John Cameron Swayze, Mickey Mouse Club, Walter Cronkite, wLS Chicago, WABC New York, Eisenhower and Nixon, Ed Sullivan, The Tonight Show with Steve Allen , Today Show with Dave Garroway, Captain Kangaroo, Huntley and Brinkley, etc etc.

Once again, you are on the mark. Mom told me that she had a Poodle Skirt. I sat there Starry Eyed trying to imagine "Mom" in a Poodle Skirt. I doubt that she went to "sock-hops" she was Mexican in Texas in her time, and wasn't very appreciated. I also remember Drive-ins as a kid. There was one in Big Spring, Texas called "The Jet." I'm ashamed to divulge this information, however, we would sneak in by hiding in the trunk of the car, with the cooler, filled with beer and ice sitting on the backseat of my cousin's "huge" Chevy four door Impala when I was about 12 years old. Yes, what a time. When you could go into a store and buy cigarettes at any age. There is a Drive-in theater in Lubbock, Texas where I live now, and we all try to keep it in business to prevent it from sliding out of existence. Not like the ones from the past where the grainy sounding speaker would hang on the driver's side window. Now, you set your radio, or in-car computer on a radio station to listen to the show.

Drive-in theaters had the speakers hanging on a pole you would park next to it and you would hang it on your door. and that's how it was done until the 1980's that is when the drive in theaters switched to broad casting a signal that your car radio could be used instead of the old speakers that used to be hanging on Pole's and that a good many of them were broken and didn't work. But that was the drive in experience back in the day.

I wasn’t born until ‘59 but at grade school we had polio shots at school but it wasn’t the ordinary injection. It was a gun like injector with several needles at the same time. Howdy Doody wasn’t in my area.

Boomer here. This was a fun blast from the past - thank you for sharing! I have a Slinky in a little toybox at my house for the grandkids, and my 2½ year old granddaughter simply loves it! About duck and cover - my school also did duck-and-cover drills for potential tornadoes, which we were fortunately never hit with.

Duck and cover. I remember those drills. But, as I grew older, I realized something. Those drills were only to consolidate we students bodies to make it easier to collect and identify the bodies in the cleanup afterwards.

Great new channel! I just out about you today have already watched all 3 videos. Keep up the great work.

The slinky was also popular in the 80s, so Gen X enjoyed them as much as boomers.

I remember my grandmas retirement party was 50s theme. I was maybe 10-11 and for a while I was obsessed with that esthetic. I had a poodle skirt and saddle shoes and I remember having my hair curled for the party

Howdy Doody and Clarabell. Tinker Toys. Erector Set. Lincoln Logs. Engineer Bill...''Red Light, Green Light''. Where did the time go?

I remember all but the sock hops and poodle skirts. My older cousins were around to enjoy those.

I’m a baby boomer, but don’t remember any of these, except drive in theaters and the slinky. I never went to school with anyone wearing a poodle skirt, or to a sock hop, never watched howdy doody, and there was no such thing as a soda fountain in my town, or county for that matter. I think this is assuming all baby boomers were born in 1945. I was born 11 years later, and all this was mostly gone by then.

Some Drive Ins had speakers on the poles that you took off and hung on one of your car's windows.

Someone else posted a correction to the speakers and tuning in to hear drive-in movie audio in the 50s and 60s so I won't harp on that lol, but I LOVE drive-in movies and was really hoping that when they started making a comeback during the covid years, they'd be here to stay for a while. Sadly it seems they're on the decline again already.

The timing is off for Baby Boomers. Poodle skirts, etc., were a little before our time. We were born in the late 1940s and early 1950s. We were too young for 1950 teen trends.

Please make more videos! I love them and you're so fascinating!❤

I remember, just barely, the news that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. I was in my second grade classroom, about midday on the west coast, and I did not have a clear idea of what was going on. The school put it on the intercom, and eventually sent us home. I was mad as hell that cartoons were cancelled! So there's your boomer report, 60 years later.

I hate it when people say nucular instead of nuclear.

Thank you for posting 👍👍

am not American, but like this, keep it going

Most of these are early baby boomers. I was born in 1961 and by the time I was old enough to experience most of this, these weee already gone. A few of them were still popular into the 70's as I entered my teen years in the early to mod 70's

I'm GenX, but I remember quite a few on this list.

I'm not a baby boomer and I was at a drive in theatre and a roadhouse as a kid. Some of these things took longer to die out in other countries.

Great!

I learned the original 'duck and cover' drill in grade school. By the time I entered the Air Force SAC (Strategic Air Command, nuclear weapons are our specialty) We modified the procedure. If the klaxon sounds, immediately duck under you desk. Cover your head while bending over with your head between your knees. Kiss your a$$ goodby!

I guess I am lucky to still have a drive in at my town 🤷🏻‍♀️

5:17 Many people think that nuclear weapons take a scoop out of reality and that's that. But many lessons were learned from Hiroshima and Nagasaki... For example, atomic weaponry doesn't work like conventional bombs, and sometimes literally being shaded by a building (assuming you were far enough from ground zero) meant a person might survive while someone a short distance (who wasn't shaded) would not. One of the most devastating films I've ever watched, _Barefoot Gen_ (1983), chronicles the disturbing reality of what it was like... But insofar as duck-and-cover itself is specifically concerned, that would probably be an extremely helpful procedure - especially for individuals at a sufficient distance from the blast - because as was observed during the Halifax explosion (1917) and more recently during the Chelyabinsk meteor event (2013), people flocking to windows to investigate a bright flash could put them in danger of flying glass debris when the shockwave arrives. **gets off soapbox** Cool video, by the way! ✌

Very few baby boomers would have been in high school in the 50’s.

We only had the 33 and a halfs. The big records. But I did get my first 45 of Dark Shadow’s Quentin’s Theme. It hangs in my basement. Mom used to read novels in different languages for the Blind that were 45’s, green and flexible.

At the drive-in you hung the provided speaker on the edge of your window glass. Then you could roll the window up and still listen.. You did NOT tune to an FM frequency. No such tech existed at the time. I wish they would've remembered to mention the good old smallpox vaccination too.

A stable economy? Low taxes? Not being afraid of crime? Job opportunities? Not needing to go into debt for uselss college degrees? A high quality of living based on effort put in? Affordable living? Union jobs being common? (Tbf thays a mixed blessing) Not needing to compete for minimum wage jobs because of the destroyed economy?

Younger Baby Boomers aren't going to remember some of this. We were babies and little children!

Slinky: No matter how hard I tried I could never get that sucker to go down no more than one maybe two steps at a time.🤨

Steveflatbush, pres Bush light was notorious for it

So much in this depicts how the programming of the minds was done…. The trauma/fear based mind manipulation.. So sad!

The drills went on till my elementary years in the early 80s , we had to hide under our desk , well my dad was a geologist and I knew about nuclear bombs and I wouldn’t get under my desk and the teacher asked why and I said what good is it going to do ? Anyways, we never did that drill again . My dad was a baby boomer , love you dad ❤️

My older brother was born in 1960 and developed polio when he was 3.

I had a Slinky that got tangled.

These students are way too old to be baby boomers

Who the hell is a boomers? Born between 1945 and 1964? Most of us weren’t dancing in the 50s!

Duck and cover was not there to help you survive at all it was there alongside assigned seating so that in the event it happened the survivors could go in and know who you were by the seat you were found at.

Now I just want to play Fallout all the time for some reason

After the soda fountains faded away, the jerks moved on to pervade society in general. I know some total jerks...

I have no idea what a poodle skirt is. I can just barely remember mini skirts. Pant suits and jeans have been a fact of life for as long as I can recall being interested in the contents. And yet I fall almost in the very middle of the boom, slightly late.

I miss the drive in theaters. Though I didn't care about the mosquitoes.

Just a historical note, the boomer birth era began in 1946, with the return of vets from WW II, and ended with about 1964, due to the falling off of the birth rate because of the introduction of the birth control pill. So some of the things I'm seeing here have nothing to do with boomers at all -- they have to do with depression kids and war babies growing up, like my parents. The Beatles and such like were not Boomers, they just collected our money. Boomers hit adolescence in the 60s and 70s. I think this is something that later generations are confused about.

People will buy any garbage they are shown, and believe anything they are told. If you lie to people often enough and for long enough they will believe you.

Moon walk 1969

Oh, you didn't just say "nucular" did you...

A good friend of mine collects wired speakers from drive-ins. One would hang them inside the car on the window. The window would be rolled down just enough to have the speaker hooks over the top of the window. Later, the theater would have a low power AM transmitter allowing the viewers to hear the sound over their radios. The poles for the wired speakers were not antennae.

Time to play Fallout again.

im y2k and had a slinky

What about the Mickey mouse club?

You forgot Mitch Miller's sing along. My mother forced us to all watch it together and I hated that show.

Is this the era certain people think about when they say Make America Great Again or MAGA??

The photos are great!! But the narrative is really, really, really bad!!! It’s a robot voice, of course. Droning away. . . Like we were alive back then! We laughed we cried, we got bored, we went to the movies. At the movies there were always news reels And real cartoons from Warner Bros. usually - like Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck. . . Kids could afford to go to the movies AND have popcorn and a soda. Families went together. Guys could afford to take their dates and snacks - and not be broke. We played at each other’s houses. No specific dates, we just visited and played! Even in New York in all kinds of neighborhoods , kids played in the playgrounds by their buildings. There were always moms or grandmas to watch from the windows. We were safer back then. We lived in America even with all its problems. Now we live in amurica. It’s soo different. Some things are definitely way better, but we’re not safe, and we have nut cases in Congress, no matter what party. Let’s make it better you guys! Have a great day :) 🌷🌱

It's seriously ignorant to claim that someone born in the mid-forties is the same generation as someone born in the late fifties or especially people born in the sixties. You want to talk about remembering those years...those of us born in the late fifties and the sixties generally have no real similarity. Much of this stuff will be memories for people born in the thirties and forties, but had stopped being common by the beginning of the sixties. My older brother-in-law is from the generation that would remember this stuff--he was born more than ten years before I was. He's what people think of when they say "boomer". When I was a kid, and read about the baby boom, no one was including people born in the sixties at all. I've run across people who have started claiming people born before WW II started are boomers, too. The whole BS thing of naming "generations" is seriously unhelpful. For one thing, you lump some together that don't go together, and at the same time, divide them arbitrarily. What do I mean? To whoever wrote this script, someone born Dec 31, 1945 is a different generation than someone born Jan 1, 1946. Complete and utter nonsense. It's only gotten worse from that point. Just a bunch of meaningless distinctions.

I love the last item -- the Space Race! The USA had lost, but somehow it showed "American supremacy"...