It is easyto accuse us nonagenarians of “living in the past”. Whenever a group of us get together, we invariably end up rehashing memories from years gone by, and agreeing that we grew up in the best of times and that we feel sorry for young people today. A number of unrelated things have combined recently to force me to focus on this subject — the closing of the Bob Evans Restaurant in Kirwan Heights and the potential demise of our High School Brunch Club, the Book Club selection of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s An Unfinished Romance with its focus on the 1960s, frequent nostalgic comments on the two Bridgeville Facebook pages, and slogans from this year’s presidential campaigns.
Last Wednesday was the first time in many years (except for the Covid interval) that our Brunch Club cancelled a meeting. The group was formed in 1994 at the forty-fifth reunion of the BHS Class of 1949. We had so much fun reminiscing at that reunion that Sam Capozzoli suggested that those of us still in the Bridgeville area get together once a month for brunch; this soon became a popular ritual. The initial group included Sam, Ray Fagan, Don Toney, Dick Rothermund, Don (Jake) Schullek, Lou Kwasniewski, Jack McGrogan, and me. Our original venue was a Wendy’s restaurant in Heidelberg; when Bob Evans opened, we moved there. Eventually our ranks began to shrink, as one by one the founders passed away. As time went on we relaxed our standards and added other BHS alumni to fill the voids. Although the cast changed, the script was always the same – how fortunate we were to grow up in Bridgeville in the 1940s.
I make it a point to monitor the two Facebook pages focused on Bridgeville, particularly when someone posts an old photograph or begins a post, “Does anyone remember….?” Many of these events kick off a long series of replies and a discussion very similar to the ones the Brunch Club had, except that the time frame for nostalgia is twenty years more recent than ours. The Facebook followers are primarily Baby Boomers, and the things they remember fondly are different from ours. Nonetheless their memories are treasured as dearly as we treasure ours. I have always assumed that life in Bridgeville went to pot in 1960 when we lost our high school and our “downtown” business district, and have felt sorry for the generation that followed us. I am surprised to read these comments and to realize how wrong I have been. They obviously enjoyed Chartiers Valley High School as much as we did Bridgeville, and hanging out at the Greater Southern Shopping Center as much as we did at our “downtown”. Is it possible that we do not have a monopoly on “the good old days”? Perhaps “the good old days” are merely a manifestation of our selective memory. Perhaps we have subconsciously blocked out all of our bad experiences. Perhaps this subjective nostalgia creates in each of us the opinion that “the good old days” were the years of our adolescence and young adulthood.
My “good old days” include old-fashioned neighborhoods where we were all one extended family, neighborhood schools where first graders could walk home for lunch, a “Main Street” with “mom-and-pop” shops, family doctors who made house calls, a local bus line where we knew all the drivers, local businesses without call centers in foreign countries, service stations with attendants who pumped your gas and cleaned your windshield, and no reason to believe anyone would ever steal your bicycle. Progress (and our greed) has given us consolidated schools and school buses, shopping malls, remote medical centers, public transportation, a breakdown in customer service, and bicycle locks. Are we really better off?
Reading about the turbulent 1960s brought back many traumatic memories. The contrast between the genuine optimism of the Great Society and the violence associated with the assassinations and the anti-war movement is uncomfortable to remember. One of the current presidential campaigns wants us to go back to the days when our country was great; the other urges us to progress on to the future. Both raise questions in my mind. Precisely when did our country cease to be great? Has progress in the past six decades resulted in a general improvement in life for most of us?
I’m not sure what I think. The Great Society certainly benefited a lot of people – African-Americans, women who prefer a career to being a stay-at-home mother, folks who identify themselves as LGBTQ, etc. What about the rest of us? Does “a rising tide lift all boats”? Or is progress a zero-sum concept in which some folks profit at the expense of others? I am inclined to believe that most of the features of our society today that I consider negative – replacement of “Main Street” and its “mom-and-pop” shops by big-box stores in remote malls, the decline of the traditional family, the disappearance of customer service, the impersonal feel of modern neighborhoods, etc. – are primarily the result of our greed, our desire to save a few pennies every chance we get. I can’t blame that solely on the Great Society, but has the welfare state blunted our motivation to pitch in and do our share?
Despite my confusion about this general subject, I can draw a few conclusions. Thanks to selective nostalgia, every generation considers the era of its youth as its own “good old days”. The things that I miss from my youth have disappeared because of the confluence of the population explosion, our desire to reduce costs regardless of the consequences, and our current impersonal environment that is an apparent byproduct of the Great Society/Welfare state. Is there some way we can go back to a “kinder, gentler society” without sacrificing the advances that the previously “oppressed” people have achieved?