I'm a "BB"

...and what's a "BB?" A genuine Baby Boomer! It seems like yesterday when I was told never to trust anyone over thirty, and now we're approaching sixty. According to that "Newsweek" article, it officially lasted a couple of decades, but the truth is that the real BB'ers were born within a ten year period.

We're the post war generation, WWII, that is. Ten years after the soldiers came home, most were finished making babies. They married within five years of their return and then had their 1-3 kids by their fortieth birthdays. After 1956, the veterans' generation, whether they had served or not, had very few children. Children at that time born to much younger parents were raised differently.

Part of being a "boomer" for me was the over-crowded classes. They just didn't build us enough schools, and by the time they did, the schools were empty. My sister, just six years my junior had a totally different world, though she's just within that ten year span.

My elementary school, P.S. 46, was double session when I was in Kindergarten and first and second grades. First grade from 8-12 and then second grade from 12-4. The high school was finished in the early 1960's, Francis Lewis, and was full the first year it opened, though only the tenth grade attended. Then double session for the 10th and 11th and triple session when it had all three grades. I don't know how long that lasted, since by then we had moved to Great Neck.

One thing very true in that article is that my fellow BB'ers and I do like to "reinvent ourselves" periodically or you could say that we still don't know what we want to do "when we grow up."