A Tribute to Generation X: How the Lawrence Welk Show and Other Childhood Traumas Prepared Us for Living Through a Pandemic
When I was 11 years old, I had an accident involving some serious facial trauma. It left me with a broken jaw and a couple of fractured adult teeth. My mom rushed me to an oral surgeon, who took some X-rays and cleared his schedule for the rest of the day to work on me. I remember him explaining to my mom in a hushed voice outside of the treatment room what he’d need to do. It involved shots. Cutting into soft tissue. Moving bones around. Stitching it all back up. Wiring the affected teeth in place in hopes they could be saved and crowned at a later time. When my mom asked how long it would take, he estimated 3 hours for that first surgery.
All of this would be done with local anesthesia only. Upon hearing that I was going to be awake for all of it, I had a bit of a meltdown. My mom stepped into the room to console me.
“It’s going to take three hours?” I asked in a panic.
“Give or take,” she said. “But you can do it. You’re tough. Think about how many episodes of the Lawrence Welk show you’ve watched with Grandma. If you can endure that kind of suffering, you can survive anything.”
She had a point.
If you’ve never seen The Lawrence Welk show, allow me to explain. It was an hour-long variety show borne of the 1950s with content that never really ventured outside of that era. It aired on Saturday nights through 1982. I’m not saying it was a bad show. My grandmother loved it. LOVED it. Of course she did. They performed music and dances that were popular when she was growing up. They told jokes and stories that only octogenarians could understand. Everyone’s hair was coiffed to the ceiling and the performers wore over-the-top outfits like sailor suits and clown costumes when they weren’t dressed in matching gowns and tuxedos which looked like they were made from the discarded curtains of a roadside Days Inn. And Lawrence, the host, was an accordion player. So if polka was your thing, Saturday nights were fucking lit in the 70s and early 80s.
For most of us GenX kids, it was not our thing. But if it was what our parents or grandparents wanted to watch, we didn’t have a choice. I spent many a Saturday night on the sofa at my grandma’s house as a Lawrence Welk show hostage, hoping and praying she’d fall asleep so I could slide the remote out of her hand and sneak in a few minutes of Happy Days or Charlie’s Angels. It almost never happened, probably because Grandma had the hots for Lawrence Welk. I’m quite sure he was the only man who could keep her up that late at night.
At any rate, the Lawrence Welk show did something valuable for us GenX kids. It taught us that life was full of unpleasant experiences and we had no choice but to endure them until they were over.
Recently, I posted a poll on X (fka Twitter) asking Covid-cautious followers which generational group they belonged to. The majority of the responses were for Generation X (see screenshot of full survey results at bottom of page). I wasn’t surprised. I’m certainly not implying the results represent the generational diversity among Covid-cautious folks in the general population; I’m just happy to see that I’m in good company as a GenXer.
Those of us who remain Covid-cautious have been talking about our common characteristics as a group for a while on the social media platforms where we gather. Among us, we see significantly more folks who are neurodivergent, disabled, chronically ill, LGBTQIA+, racial and ethnic minorities, and marginalized in countless other capacities. I haven’t yet seen much discussion around generational influences, but I think it’s worth pondering.
Namely, how Generation X was built for this. We lived through some wild shit in the formative years of our youths. And while much of it wasn’t fun, it made us independent, resourceful and resilient.
One of the major forces that shaped our childhoods was the rush of Baby Boomer women into the workplace. Divorce peaked in the 1980s, leading to the rise of single parent households and working moms. Even in homes where marriages remained intact, the 80s double-dip recession led more women to employment so they could keep up the standard of living at home. This led to a widespread need for childcare. Daycare centers sprang up around the country for young children. For school-age children, there were after-school camps. My mom enrolled my brother and I in one such camp at our local YWCA. We didn’t last long there.
Their business model had some flaws. All of our camp counselors were high school students. High school let out around 3:30 pm; elementary school let out around 2:30. Those of us elementary school kids who got bused to after-school camp at the Y had to hang out on the playground behind the building unsupervised for at least an hour each day until our counselors arrived. We children had to govern ourselves and that was bad. My 9-year old brother got into fights every day, ended up with a prison-style tattoo, and started smoking. I got the broken jaw and teeth, requiring a series of miserable surgeries over the next couple of years. Fortunately, it dawned on our mom that it would be much safer and cost-efficient for us to go without supervision at home than at Camp Lord of the Flies.
Like millions of other GenX youth, we became latchkey kids. Many of us were way too immature to assume independence that early in our lives and worried about what might happen if we faced some kind of emergency. Up until that point, all of the crisis communications directed at children boiled down to “go find an adult if anything bad happens.” The idea of being home without an adult was scary at first, but after a few weeks of adapting to the latchkey lifestyle, my brother and I felt more confident in our ability to look out for ourselves. Each day we would take the bus home, lock the doors, keep the blinds closed, and watch TV all afternoon while we were supposed to be doing our homework. If anyone knocked on the door, we’d turn off the TV and crawl toward the living room window to peek out. If it was a stranger, we’d do our best not to shit our pants when they knocked again. But we never opened the door, never broke that cardinal rule.
If the phone rang, we could handle that. “Sorry, my mom can’t come to the phone,” I would say with confidence. “But there’s definitely an adult here in the house with us kids right now. I’m not lying. I promise.”
We Generation X kids had a healthy fear of strangers. Everywhere we turned, we were hearing all about the tragic abduction and murder of Adam Walsh. Police officers would visit our schools to teach us what to do if strangers approached us. ‘Stranger Danger’ PSAs took the commercial spots between cartoons on Saturday mornings. Our parents gave us code words and phrases to demand from any stranger who might try to tell us our mom or dad had been in an accident or some other such bullshit. We never heard the end of it, because Adam Walsh’s dad got his own TV show – America’s Most Wanted – to remind us every week that the world was full of perverts with candy and white cargo vans.
Strangers aside, we had a healthy fear of a lot of things. I remember our first sex education class in junior high. Upon hearing the news that we’d be headed to the library to watch a video, several of the boys in my class started high-fiving each other with excitement. Fifteen minutes of our lesson was about changes that occur in puberty; the rest of the time was spent on an educational video about AIDS. The mood was heavy during our walk back to class. When we got back to our seats, one of the high-fiver boys laid his head on his desk and started crying. “Man,” he wept, “I’m never having sex as long as I live.”
Many of us bore witness to the Space Shuttle Challenger launch, and subsequent explosion, on live TV. I remember how much excitement there had been in the weeks leading up to that catastrophic day. At school, we’d read about the astronauts in our Weekly Readers and had watched televised interviews of the crew talking about their training and preparations for going into space. They were everyday Americans, just like us. They even had a teacher on board! When our little eyeballs saw seven lives come to an abrupt halt in real time, it left our impressionable young minds reeling with the awareness of how fragile our own lives were.
We knew there were a million different ways we could die. We valued any advice or measures we could take to keep ourselves safe. We carried that risk aversion into our adulthood. It’s firmly seated in many of us still.
Perhaps the most badass thing about Generation X is that we appreciate the importance of clean air. This realization didn’t come to us easily, seeing how we all grew up as smokers. Second-hand smokers, mind you, but smokers nonetheless. In the 70s and early 80s, people smoked in restaurants, airports, airplanes, grocery stores, shopping malls, and workplaces. Even hospitals had smoking lounges. So did schools. Our teachers would light up on the playground during recess and in the classrooms after school was dismissed for the day. People smoked like chimneys at home. There was no escaping it. We GenX kids grew up in spaces with the indoor air quality of a Las Vegas casino.
As a child who was chronically ill with asthma and allergies, I see striking parallels between the denial my family held over the impact of their smoking on my health, and the denial most people are entrenched in over the harm that SARS-Cov-2 is causing to themselves and everyone around them. For the first five years of my life, I spent most of my time at home, where I wheezed nonstop. The wheezing seemed to stop when I went outdoors (but I wasn’t supposed to be outside for very long, since that’s where all of the allergens were that supposedly caused the wheezing). I even wheezed less at the doctor’s offices I frequented. There was just something about our house that sent my asthma into overdrive.
It would frustrate my mom to no end. She called her mother in tears one day. “I’ve gotten rid of all the stuffed animals, removed the curtains, vacuumed the carpets, I dust every day… I don’t know what else to do,” said Mom, in between puffs of her lit cigarette. After much discussion, she and my grandmother finally figured it out. We had a set of railroad tracks behind our house. Trains would pass through at all hours of the night and day. It had to be the diesel exhaust getting into the house, they agreed.
To give my lungs a break, I went to stay with my grandma for a little while. There were no trains nearby, so it was a mystery when the wheezing didn’t cease. “I just don’t understand what’s wrong with you,” Grandma would say, as she’d turn on the Lawrence Welk show and ask me to fetch her ash tray before I joined her on the sofa.
At one point, I dared to suggest the cigarette smoking might be behind it. I mentioned that it burned my throat when I breathed it in. Maybe it was burning my lungs too. Grandma got very defensive. “Well, my lungs are just fine and I’ve been smoking all my life.” She proceeded to tell me how, when she was born in the 1930s, the doctors wouldn’t slap the babies to make them cry. They’d just put a lit cigarette in the newborn’s hand and once baby took its first puff, everyone knew he or she was healthy. They didn’t even cut the cord back then, said Grandma. Babies would just burn it apart with the lit end of their cigarettes.
It was hard to argue against that logic.
Up until the 50s, the tobacco industry’s marketing campaigns dismissed any health threats and depicted smoking as a way to manage stress. By the mid-1950s, research was piling up that linked smoking to cancer, cardiovascular disease, and a host of other health problems. They had to start dropping some warnings, but like good little capitalists, they did all they could to minimize the dangers of smoking. They put the warning inside the packaging, in small print, and used language broad enough to negate any concern a person might feel after reading it. They said the evidence of health threats from smoking wasn’t conclusive and more research was needed. Sound familiar?
In 1970, the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act required stronger warnings on labels and called for an advertising ban on radio and TV. Anti-smoking campaigns did more to inform Americans of the harms of smoking. Unfortunately, smoking habits remained relatively unchanged.
Until 1988. The Surgeon General issued a report that further stigmatized tobacco use, validating the harms to health and for the first time, stating that cigarette smoking could lead to dependency and addiction. It was the impetus for big changes which eventually led to increases on tobacco prices and taxes, restrictions of tobacco sales to minors, insurance-covered smoking cessation treatments, and smoke-free policies for indoor public settings.
It wasn’t the report alone that did the work. Americans had to support the policies that would make it all happen. Coincidentally, much of Generation X had reached voting age by the late 80s/early 90s. Having witnessed many of the adult smokers in our lives grappling with lung cancer, emphysema, COPD, and heart disease after decades of smoking, many of us considered that maybe all those warnings on the cigarette labels weren’t bullshit after all, and that we as a society should do something about it to protect us all from harm. After all, the ‘Hands Across America’ event was still fresh in our minds and the ‘We Are the World’ song was still in rotation on every radio station in the country, so we were still riding a high of goodwill to all our fellow humans. It was totally fucking rad to care about other people back then.
According to a Gallup Poll, cigarette smoking in adults in the U.S. just hit an 80-year low. When Gallup first asked about cigarette smoking in 1944, 41% of U.S. adults said they smoked. The rate didn’t drop below 30% until the late 80s, but once it did, it continued on a downward slide.
Generation X had a lot to do with that. You’re welcome, America.
It takes time for people to accept new information and reconcile it with their own observations and life experiences. It takes time for individuals to change health behaviors.
It also takes public health and policy changes to shield everyone from harm in the meantime.
Unfortunately, when it comes to Covid, we don’t have 80 years to wait. We also don’t have public health anymore, and the Covid policy changes that have occurred following vaccine rollouts have pushed back on evidence rather than align with it. It’s like the grown-ups aren’t in charge anymore. We’re worse for the wear than we were at the start of the pandemic.
Fortunately, this is familiar territory.
And as a GenXer, I’m thankful for the formative experiences of my childhood. I’m convinced that growing up in the 70s and 80s prepared us better than any other generation alive to persist with following science, maintaining precautions, and practicing community care throughout this pandemic. We still recognize threats to our safety and maintain a healthy sense of fear toward them. We understand the impact of individual health behaviors on the greater population. We value the wellbeing and safety of others and we use whatever power and privilege we have to fight for it.
And we’re patient. If you’re feeling discouraged over not being able to see the light at the end of the tunnel, just remember we’ve survived a lot. Our parents’ divorces. Acid-washed jeans and those horrible fucking 80s haircuts. The letdown that high school detention was nothing at all like they portrayed it ‘The Breakfast Club.’ And countless episodes of the Lawrence Welk show. We can endure all kinds of uncomfortable shit that life throws at us and keep going, pandemics included.
We’ve learned how to take care ourselves when no one else was there to do so. Those moments when you’re overwhelmed and wondering where the adults are who are supposed to be in charge, look in the mirror, GenXer.
You’re the grown-up in charge now.
I’m not lying.
I promise.
You can support my work by signing up for a membership to The Guiness Pig Diaries, by sending me a tip, or buying me a coffee.
