When Was the Best Time To Be Alive?

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When was, or is, the best time to be alive?
In this episode, we explore the nostalgia surrounding the generations that came before and after the Baby Boomer generation. I reflect on how music, technology, and historical events shaped our lives and perspectives. By comparing past and present experiences, we foster a deeper understanding of what makes today’s generation unique while honoring memories that connect us all. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Bill Monty's Guide for Gettin' Older.
I've been seeing lately a lotof memes talking about how the
music and the times were betterwhen we were growing up we
meaning baby boomers, becausethat's my generation.
So that's what I think aboutwhen I see these things and it

(00:23):
talks about you know howeverything was just slightly or
much better than it was today,and I think that's something
that every generation faces.
Certainly my parents, I think,believed that their generation
was better in some ways.
They would have argued thatFrank Sinatra or the Glenn

(00:45):
Miller Orchestra or ElvisPresley was much better than my
music of the Beatles and JimmyBuffett, the Rolling Stones and
people like that.
And I think certainly today themusic of Taylor Swift would be
compared to the Beatles, andthose who are Swifties wouldn't

(01:05):
know what we're talking aboutwhen we say how much better we
believe John, paul, george andRingo were than Taylor Swift.
I'm not saying anything againstTaylor Swift.
The music is actually very good.
I actually like it very muchbut I think when we start
comparing generations what wasbest, who had it best we start
getting into thinking that insome way a different time was

(01:30):
better than the time we live inI've talked about on this
podcast before and on my otherpodcast, tales from South
Florida, which you can find attalesfromsouthfloridacom, that
the music certainly influencedme in my life, growing up.
I don't know if that's true ofother generations, but I grew up

(01:51):
, I was a young boy and wentinto being a teenager in the 60s
and the 70s and I, the musiccertainly shaped who I was and,
I feel, who the generation was.
Yeah, I really don't think youcan argue that the music of the
Beatles or the trend of theBeatles.

(02:11):
So when the Beatles came on,they were made fun of by the
older generation because theyhad longer hair and it was kind
of like a mop top look, you know, kind of a bowl cut, look,
almost.
The teenagers at the timestarted growing their hair
longer.
My father was having none of it, by the way.
We had crew cuts until I wasabout 12 years old.
But when the Beatles changed,when they started growing their

(02:34):
hair longer, when they startedgoing to a more psychedelic look
in the 19, around 1966,certainly 67, 68, the entire
world followed.
67, 68, the entire worldfollowed.
I don't know if you can saythat's true.
I don't know if there's anymusician or artist since that
time that has influenced theclothing style and the look of a

(02:56):
generation across the globe.
But it got me thinking about thetimes that I grew up in.
I remember thinking, when I wascertainly much younger, that I

(03:18):
was awed at how much mygrandmothers had seen from the
time they were born and at thetime they hadn't passed.
When I was thinking about thisthey both passed in the late 80s
, early 90s.
When my grandmother, myfather's mother, was born around
1912, she used to tell me aboutgrowing up on the farm.
She lived in rural Arkansas andshe used to think it very funny

(03:41):
when my brother and I would belooking at the Sears catalog for
Christmas presents.
When Christmas was coming we'dbe looking at Sears catalog.
I talked about that also inprevious episodes and she would
say you know, when I was growingup the Sears catalog had a much
different use.
We were excited for it for amuch different use.
Well, of course, there wasn'treally toilet paper back in that
time.
Thinking about how she grew upon a farm where there was an

(04:05):
outhouse, there was not indoorplumbing and then she was there
at the advent.
She was a young girl when theplane first happened, when
automobiles really became asensation when electricity began
to come into everyone's home,coming to everyone's home.
International flights began,radio became huge Movies and

(04:28):
then talking movies became a bigthing.
She was there for World War I.
She was there for the GreatDepression, she experienced
World War II, the communistthreat of the 1950s, television
becoming part of the family lifeAll of those things in a very

(04:49):
short span of time.
And for myself and those otherbaby boomers like myself, I
think about what has changed andhow much has changed since I
first stepped onto the planetback in the late 50s.
In my lifetime I've seenremarkable things.
Things that were just sciencefiction or fantasy or a dream

(05:11):
are now reality.
So I think back to that memethat I saw on social media
talking about our music and thetimes we grew up in.
But in my lifetime, when I was ayoung boy, what we did was we
went outside, we played with ourbicycles, we went on picnics,
we drank water from the hose onthe side of the house.

(05:33):
We didn't go inside to get adrink.
We certainly didn't carry wateraround with us all the time.
If we did, we put it into acanteen, probably because we
were playing army, maybe cowboysand Indians.
We went to bed early and wewoke up early Saturday morning.
Cartoons were what we lived foron the weekends Sitting in

(05:54):
front of the TV eating a bowl ofcereal and watching the
Flintstones and Bugs Bunny andPopeye.
Then in the afternoon or themorning we'd go out and play.
We had like a circle in frontof our house in Houston when I
was a boy where two streetsconverged together and there was

(06:15):
like a huge circle in themiddle.
Our house was right in part ofthat circle so we would play
kickball.
It was a perfect kickball orsoftball field but we played
kickball all the time.
The family across the street,the mother, worked for NASA and
so was always bringing home tous information about the new
space program.
You'd go around Houston.

(06:36):
You would see the astronauts.
They were our heroes.
You knew them like you knewbaseball heroes on baseball
cards.
I still remember meeting AlanShepard, as my father dropped
off something at the post officeone night after work and we
walked in and Alan Shepard wasin there checking his PO box.
He got his autograph.
I don't know where that is, it'ssomewhere and that was both

(06:57):
really cool and kind ofcommonplace and everyday when
you lived in Houston at the timewhen I was growing up, there
was no Disney World.
There was Disneyland and wewatched on Sunday night the
wonderful world of Disney.
I remember watching when theBeatles first appeared on the Ed
Sullivan Show and that startedthat entire craze.

(07:17):
I remember the assassination ofJohn Kennedy and then, a few
years later, martin Luther KingJr, robert Kennedy, the
assassination of Medgar Evers Ididn't know who that was at the
time, or Malcolm X, but now Iknow.
Now I know the significance ofit all and how horrible it all
was, how the world was changingriots in the streets,

(07:39):
demonstrations In the classroomswe were learning about the
wonder of history and of Americawhile not being taught some of
the darker aspects of it.
While we talked about the CivilWar, we did not really talk
about the treatment of AfricanAmericans before the Civil War,

(08:01):
nor after the Civil War.
My mother was political, whichI've mentioned before, and so
she made sure we understood howimportant the Civil Rights Act
was.
She made sure we understood howimportant it was that young men
were dying in Vietnam.
We were the first generationthat had a war coming to our
living rooms on TV with theVietnam War and as my brother

(08:21):
came of age three years beforeme and got closer to the draft,
my mother vowing we would moveto Canada before she would ever
allow either of her sons tofight an immoral war.
The Beatles broke up, theRolling Stones went on.
The 70s came Richard Nixon inthe White House, then Watergate
and the first president to everresign.
Came Richard Nixon in the WhiteHouse, then Watergate and the

(08:42):
first president to ever resign,richard Nixon.
The 70s disco, the drug culturecontinuing.
In the 1980s there was the talkof something miraculous.
It was called a VCR.
We were able to now go to astore and rent a movie and bring
it home and watch it.
You didn't have to wait for itto show up on TV and there were
no commercials.
Something called Blockbusterappeared Rent a movie, two

(09:04):
movies, three movies, and bringthem home and have parties.
The microwave came along,revolutionizing how you cook.
Suddenly, a meal that was goingto take a very long time could
be done in just a few moments.
Color TV came to my family inthe late 60s.
Flat screen TVs came along inthe 2000s.
Man walked on the moon.
July of 1969, just 11 daysbefore my 12th birthday.

(09:30):
Computers I remember in highschool taking something called
computer math, where they taughtus about computers because they
said it was going to change ourlives, and they certainly were
right.
On Star Trek they used to flipopen a communicator and in my
lifetime I saw landlines go awayand mobile phones that you
flipped open to talk to peoplethe miracle of beepers.

(09:52):
Someone could just type in anumber on their phone and they
could call you and then you'dget the message on this little
device on your belt or in yourpurse or in your pocket and then
you'd call them back.
The beeper disappeared oncecell phones really came into
being.
And then, of course, theInternet.
What bigger than the Internet,something that has changed us so

(10:13):
quickly?
I remember when the firstcomputer we got in the mid-'90s
or late-'90s and just being ableto type emails emails, that was
modems.
You'd have to plug it in, thephone would ring, it would cut
off your connection.
Computers cost a lot of money,but they opened up an entire
world AOL, being able to seepeople and places in other
worlds still not live, thoughnot in real time.

(10:35):
And all of that changed withFacebook, social media and now
we have computers that we carryaround in our hands.
So much has changed in mylifetime, so is my life, and the
times of the baby boomers thebest of times?
Well, it is for me, becauseit's the time I live in and it's
the time I lived in, culturally, socially, politically.

(10:59):
Has anything ever been as bigor important as the age of the
baby boomers?
I'd love your thoughts on that.
Be sure you scroll down andleave me a message.
It says leave me a messageright in the show notes there.
You click on that, I'll take itand speak pipe.
You can leave me a 90 secondmessage.
I would love to hear yourthoughts about growing up, about
the memories that you have, theinventions that changed your

(11:20):
life and that indeed changed theworld.
So much has changed andcontinues to every single day.
Be sure that the one thing thatdoesn't change, though, is your
commitment to making the worlda better place, because as long
as we do that, then the timethat we live in right now will
always be the best time to bealive.

(11:42):
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(12:06):
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(12:29):
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(12:49):
Welcome to Bill Monty's Guidefor Getting Older.