ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

What events in our national life have shaped your political thinking? How much do you think you have in common with other Americans your age? Well, this week we've heard from some 25- and some 45-year-old voters, and today we hear from some people who grew up in the 1950s. They're all 65 this year. They remember growing up in a country that was idealized in popular TV shows - a safe, neighborly place, peaceful and prosperous.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE ADVENTURES OF OZZIE AND HARRIET")

UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER #1: "The Adventures Of Ozzie And Harriet," starring the entire Nelson family.

SIEGEL: Val Mobley of Orlando watched those shows as a child in the Mississippi Delta.

VAL MOBLEY: It was the "Ozzie And Harriet" era, you know? Mom stayed home. Dad worked. Her job was to raise the kids and take us to school, pick us up from school.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "LEAVE IT TO BEAVER")

UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER #2: "Leave it to Beaver."

SIEGEL: Don Tamaki (ph) watched in California.

DON TAMAKI: Growing up in the '50s - a fairly placid, "Leave It To Beaver" time.

ANGELO FALCON: I remember "Ozzie And Harriet." I remember watching as a Puerto Rican - watching all of these programs on TV - "Leave It To Beaver" and all that. And those pictures are so alien to me.

SIEGEL: But Angelo Falcon watched in Brooklyn.

FALCON: I remember as a kid I used to say, geez, I didn't know there were houses where they had, like, stairs going into, like, a second floor because I always lived in tenement building, you know?

SIEGEL: Television, still a young medium and just three national networks, presented a country of white, nuclear families. JoAnn Jacobs, who's black and from Queens, N.Y., says she made a stronger connection with books than with TV.

JOANN JACOBS: I knew of "Jane Eyre" and "Nancy Drew" and "The Hardy Boys." And you know, I had other worlds open to me, and I knew about the possibilities outside of what I saw on television. I can remember running and calling my mother and telling her, oh, look; there's negroes on television, you know, because they just weren't there.

SIEGEL: When today's 65-year-olds were children, the country was very different. There was stability and order, but sameness was prized, and much of the country was still racially segregated by law. Not everyone was engaged in undoing that. Priscilla Grannis says in Coral Gables, Fla., where she grew up, you wouldn't have known the civil rights movement was even happening.

PRISCILLA GRANNIS: Civil rights - I think I was oblivious, naive, ignorant about it. I didn't go in the circles that were involved in that. I lived in an upper-middle-class home where we just weren't exposed to it.

SIEGEL: But for Charles Brooks, who's black and grew up in the South Bronx, segregation was literally painful to experience. In 1962, he traveled South with his family.

CHARLES BROOKS: I had to go down to a wedding in South Carolina. We're waiting in line for a bag, and some people started to walk past us. And I just stuck out my hand and said, hey, wait; we're in line here. And then I stopped talking because there's a sudden pain in my shoulder. By uncle, who was a stonemason, had just grabbed me, and he said in a sort of singsong voice, no, you all just go ahead; he's from the North; he doesn't understand.

And I was staring up at him, and it was just a frozen moment. It was just sort of, you don't understand where you are. We have to live here.

SIEGEL: When our 65-year-olds were kids, the old Jim Crow South came under sustained protest and pressure to change.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED CROWD #1: (Chanting) We want freedom. We want freedom.

SIEGEL: There were other biases that were coming undone. In 1960, the country elected a Catholic president. Three years later, the world was stunned by his murder.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "CBS EVENING NEWS")

WALTER CRONKITE: From Dallas, Texas, the flash apparently official, President Kennedy died at 1 p.m. Central Standard Time.

SIEGEL: That was CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite, and in talking with 65-year-olds, I heard a lot about Cronkite as if he epitomized the very stability and order of the country. He was a trusted voice Americans turned to from Bismarck, N.D., where Nancy Alfton remembers there was a newspaper in town...

NANCY ALFTON: A very pathetic newspaper. All we got was what Walter Cronkite told us.

SIEGEL: ...To Val Mobley's childhood home in Mississippi.

MOBLEY: We counted on him for his truthfulness and fairness.

SIEGEL: Today's 65-year-olds remember when the country was divided over the war in Vietnam.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED CROWD #2: (Chanting) Hell no, we won't go.

SIEGEL: Cronkite's reporting and commentary on the war were critical.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "CBS EVENING NEWS")

CRONKITE: It seems now more certain than even that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. When he went to Vietnam and saw with his own eyes what was happening there and came back and on his news show gave an editorial which - uncle Walter didn't do that real often; that was left to somebody else - but he said this war is wrong, and that's when things changed in this country.

SIEGEL: Imagine a single journalist having that kind of impact and influence today. That was 1968. Our 65-year-olds were in high school. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated that year. Americans cities erupted into violence, including Angelo Falcon's neighborhood, Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

FALCON: The rioting was occurring in my neighborhood, you know? There were kids running around looting, and it was a time when - for example, in that neighborhood, we also had groups like the Young Lords Party, which is kind of like a Puerto Rican version of the Black Panthers.

SIEGEL: The sense of stability and safety was gone. So was the pressure to conform. Americans began embracing their racial and ethnic identities. Don Tamaki's Japanese-American parents had been interned during World War II.

TAMAKI: This cultural revolution, I'll call it, in which the black civil rights movement began, to which we owe a great debt as far as I'm concerned - and speaking as an Asian American - which began to open up opportunities - I would not have become a lawyer but for I think that movement.

SIEGEL: If you're 65 today, you came of age at time of activism for multiple causes. JoAnn Jacobs tried the women's movement.

JACOBS: So walk into this big auditorium, you know, brimming with, you know, I am woman; hear me roar. And there's a sea of white women. And it was lightbulb moment for me that I realized, wow, my identification isn't really as woman. It's as black.

SIEGEL: She went on to become one of the first female firefighters in New York City, a role that would never have made it into an "Ozzie and Harriet" script.

JACOBS: You know, there are two Americas - the one that they want us to believe exists and the one that actually exists. We're not all united in one goal - you know, freedom and democracy.

SIEGEL: We're different. When today's 65-year-olds were in their mid-20s, the country was riveted by the Watergate scandals. Again, Val Mobley...

MOBLEY: Nixon resigning - that was a national disaster. The office of the presidency lost esteem and has never recovered it to this day.

SIEGEL: Val counts herself a Democrat, but the sense that America no longer embodies virtues that it used to cuts across political lines. John Charleston, of Greenbluff, Wash, is sympathetic to the Tea Party.

JOHN CHARLESTON: I don't know how in the world we're ever going to be able to get that moral character back that we've lost.

SIEGEL: Priscilla Grannis is a conservative Republican.

GRANNIS: We are concerned the direction that the country is taking. I think that it's losing its foundation. I feel like it is turning its back on one of its founding principles, which was the Judeo-Christian value system.

SIEGEL: JoAnn Jacobs doesn't talk about the need to go back. She says we haven't moved as far forward as we might think. The challenges facing young people today...

JACOBS: A lot of doors are open, but a lot of the same doors that were closed for me are still closed for them. Yeah, I - you know, I can't paint you a rosy picture. I can't say that the world is better.

SIEGEL: But for all the work left undone, other 65-year-olds told me we've come a long way thanks to activist movements. Again, Don Tamaki...

TAMAKI: I have a memento that I keep for my family. It's my father's diploma from the University of California, Berkeley. He never participated in that graduation. Instead, that diploma was sent to him in a mailing tube addressed to an interment camp in a desert in Utah. And I keep it as a memento of just how far we've come as a people, not just Americans of Japanese ancestry but I think everybody else.

SIEGEL: They were born into a country that enjoyed unprecedented wealth and strength in the world but where racism was still part of the law and, for many, part of everyday experience. In recalling formative moments, these 65-year-olds struck me as proud of the country's progress but also nostalgic for a place that was more orderly, better mannered and at least imagined itself to be as placid as "Ozzie and Harriet's" house.

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

We've just heard from that group of 65-year-olds, and earlier this week, Robert, of course, we heard from 45- and 25-year-olds who you spoke to. How many people in all did you interview for this?

SIEGEL: Oh, we heard 22 people. I actually did interviews of groups of two or three in most cases. They were hour-long sessions. I did this with 26 people. Apologies to Alma Samudio (ph), Sam Waters-Krisley (ph) and Ben McKitten (ph). They certainly informed my reporting (laughter), but they didn't make it through the cut.

Jess Chung, our colleague on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED - Jessica spoke to about a hundred people...

SHAPIRO: Wow.

SIEGEL: In winnowing down the field. She, by the way, is 22.

SHAPIRO: So having spoken with dozens of people...

SIEGEL: Yeah.

SHAPIRO: ...About the national experiences that formed their sense of identity, what was your big takeaway?

SIEGEL: Well, I think that there are some things about how old you are that really make a big difference. We learn about the world through media, for example, and people talked a good deal about media. We just heard the 65-year-olds remembering the days of big, consolidated, national networks.

And we heard from the 45-year-olds about the sense of the era of cable news in the '90s when this sensationalism of tabloid TV seemed to them to blur together through the O. J. Simpson trial and the Bill Clinton impeachment to some.

SHAPIRO: And the 25-year-olds...

SIEGEL: Yeah.

SHAPIRO: ...Were really striking in their bleak experience.

SIEGEL: I was really struck by it. They're really little kids when 9/11 hits. Then come, you know, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And then comes the recession. They're just coming out of high school at that time. And it really struck me that unlike me at age 68, where there's this time of great stability and what felt like great prosperity and safety, I don't think they experienced that.

SHAPIRO: If you had to say the balance overall was tipped more towards positivity or disillusionment, is there one or the other?

SIEGEL: I didn't hear a lot of disillusioned people. I heard people who were optimistic about things but not wetted in the same way to what our experiences of the past have been because those experiences are very different depending on how old you are.

SHAPIRO: Well, I've enjoyed listening to the stories. Thanks, Robert.

SIEGEL: You bet.

 

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