My grandparents aboard their sailboat
On my mother’s side of the family equation, I can trace my roots back to both the Southern gentility and Southern working class, in the form of Alabama stock.
My Papa (grandfather), grew up in a farming community just outside of Sweet Water, AL during the days when they still gave children breaks from school for planting season and helping their parents during harvest. The days of the depression had a pretty significant impact on his father’s family, so the necessity of a good work ethic was instilled in him from an early age. Along with that solid work ethic, he was also instilled with the desire for learning, an influence that came from his mother’s side of the family (Yale graduates). It was this passion for knowledge that goaded him to work hard to raise the capital to make the journey to college.
He worked as a photographer and writer for his school’s newspaper to pay his way through college, where he met my grandmother, his opposite in terms of socioeconomics. My grandmother’s family fared a little better post-depression. Her grandparents had managed to hold on to their family plantation, where she spent her summers immersed in the upbringing afforded to Southern gentility.
Despite their differences in upbringing, as fate would have it, they fell in love. After graduation they moved to Green Cove Springs, where he became a music teacher, and she taught English & math.
They eventually moved to Jacksonville and settled down in the San Marco area, with their two children (my uncle & my mom). Times were tough in those days, and to make extra money, the four of them shared a paper route, two of them waking at 4:00 a.m. alternately each morning to ensure that their friends and neighbors would have the news waiting for them with their morning cup of coffee.
Flash forward to the present:
According to their birth dates, my grandparents both fall into the time period of the “silent generation,” a generation characterized by living through cultural shifts in the forms of the civil rights movement, women’s liberation movement and the subsequent baby boom. They’ve moved from radio to television to computers to Internet with a tenacious thirst for knowledge.
I think a more apt description of their generation might refer to the ease in which they make transitions. With all the technological and cultural advances, they were put in a “sink or swim” society, an attitude of “get with the times or get lost in the shuffle.”
It makes me wonder sometimes how accurate our ideas of generational stereotypes are. Before doing a little research on the subject, the average person might think that the silent generation isn’t good with computers, Gen Yers (like myself) are all intimately involved with social media networks like Twitter, and every baby boomer out there was at Woodstock.
Both of my grandparents are quite cozy with new technology (although somewhat annoyed by the social networking arena), and they’d easily give any baby boomer or Gen Xer out there a run for their money. When they realized that they’d outgrown their roles as teachers, they didn’t allow themselves to stagnate. Instead they both decided to move on—not to another location as some people do when they tire of their job, but to other careers entirely. My grandmother decided to expand her area of expertise and got involved in research and grant writing activities with the Duval County School Board, while Papa decided to teach himself the intricacies of programming. To this day, I’m convinced that Papa will probably end up forgetting more about computers and the Internet than I’ll ever know.
My hope for my generation is that when it’s time for my generation to begin making way for the ideas of my baby sister’s generation, we’re as successful “transitioners” as my grandparents.
